Bulk Editing Comes To AdWords Web Interface

Anyone who works in interactive advertising can testify to the tedium that often accompanies even the seemingly-simplest of campaign changes. That’s the problem Google is trying to address in its latest AdWords feature — bulk editing.

The feature is being rolled out in a few accounts for final testing, before Google eventually rolls it out to everyone in the next few weeks.

Bulk editing will allow advertisers to make global changes in text, URLs, bids and other elements at the keyword, ad, ad group and campaign level.

In many cases, the features work similarly to a “search and replace” function in a word processing program, allowing users to make thousands of changes at once. The image below shows an example provided by Google.

Google says users can preview changes before accepting them, and then do other things in the account while the changes are processing in the background. As it introduces this new feature, Google will be making minor changes to other parts of the interface that did similar things.

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords


About The Author: is a contributing editor for Search Engine Land and Executive Features Editor at Marketing Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998, including a stint as managing editor of ClickZ. She’s also worked to help monetize independent publishers’ sites at Federated Media Publishing. She blogs about media and marketing at The River and about cooking, gardening and parenthood at Free Range. She can be found on Twitter as @pamelaparker.

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  • http://www.kinseystreet.com Robert Coats

    Since you can essentially make these bulk edits in AdWords Desktop editor I wonder if they will soon be dropping the editor all together.

  • http://www.seoworks.com/ Christopher West

    I used the editor myself to make changes most of the time, even small ones. Interesting to see the move but I think you are on the right track – they may drop support for the editor in the future.

  • http://twitter.com/SarahTheodorou Sarah Theodorou

    I don’t think I like the idea of losing Editor at all.

  • http://twitter.com/CompoundEyeLtd Compound Eye Ltd

    Can’t wait! I do actually prefer the web interface to Adwords editor (except when it’s reeeeealy slow), so if the same functionality can eventually be incorporated online I’ll be so happy to have everything in one place :)

  • http://www.esocialmedia.com Jerry Nordstrom

    As others suggest I use Adwords editor for bulk editing. The editor is always needed as it can be used offline and I’m not connected 100% of the time. One point that is imporant to note with bulk changes. When you make changes to any elements within an ad you lose all the performance data related to that ad. You *Might* find it more beneficial to use the bulk editor to replicate ads first then changing the copies in order to leave the originals with their related data in tact. You can hide inactive ads from being displayed within the online interface keeping your campaigns clean and easy to read.

  • Justin Sous

    Exactly my thoughts, Jerry. It didn’t really make sense why they would build this into the interface. After thinking more about it, I realized these changes will probably be added to the Adwords API, giving more functionality to agencies who are building their own tools.

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