Tips to be more productive in Google Ads, Bing Ads interfaces

Ted Ives and Julie Friedman Bacchini speaking at SMX East 2018 in New York City.

NEW YORK — Tips and tricks for working more efficiently in the Google Ads and Bing Ads web interfaces and desktop editors was the topic of conversation at a session during SMX East this week. Speakers Julie Friedman Bacchini, President of Neptune Moon LLC and Ted Ives, CEO of SEMCopilot highlighted new and hard-to-find features and suggested ways to make the most of the tools.

Julie Friedman Bacchini

Friedman Bacchini said she has not been a fan of the new Google Ads interface, but has worked to find the positives to be more productive in the UI.

The Overviews pages, Friedman Bacchini said, are very useful and a big improvement over the old interface. The recent ability to take action right from some of the cards, such as being able to add or negative search queries and edit or duplicate ads, in the Overviews are particularly helpful for being able to implement optimizations quickly.

Friedman Bacchini also had tips for using Keyword Planner. “Want to know what Google thinks your click-through rate should be? Look to the Keyword Planner,” she said. Google shows a CTR estimate for keywords in the “Get search volume and forecasts” report in Keyword Planner. Friedman Bacchini said the numbers should be taken with “a grain of salt,” but can provide a directional benchmark of where to aim.

Another tip is to create at-a-glance KPI dashboards in Reports Editor. Using the scorecards option, Friedman Bacchini showed, you can make dashboards that make it easy to compare performance by time period. The notes option is a handy way to highlight certain changes.

Friedman Bacchini also provided a useful cheat sheet for Google Display Network campaign objectives.

Ted Ives

In his presentation, Ives pointed out several tips for navigating Bing Ads. Among them is the recommendation to use Bing Ads Editor when porting campaigns over from Google Ads. Using Bing Ads Editor, Ives said, enables you to address all the various settings in bulk during the campaign import.

Another unique benefit Bing Ads offers is a negative keyword conflict report. You can apply the report’s findings to Google Ads campaigns as well, Ives pointed out.

Ives had several tips for Google Display Network (GDN) settings and optimization and highlighted an HTML5 validator. If you’re uploading rich media creatives for the GDN, using the validator (link provided in the presentation) can save you from having to wait 24-48 hours to find out from Google that your ads have issues.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.