I reckon the best thing about the internet in general is that it’s always one step ahead of you. Need to quickly edit an image, but nowhere near a copy of Photoshop? Quick bit of Googling takes you to pixlr.com and a browser based version of it that does the job lovely. Suddenly find yourself thinking about songs from the playgrounds of your childhood? Some guy has already uploaded the lyrics to “My friend Billy…” to odps.org. Trying to edit a thousand PPC creatives at once? Well up until a few years ago you’d have been shafted. Anything you wanted to do to your account had to be done via the engines themselves or through cumbersome Excel sheets. Everything took ages.
Then in 2006, Google released the first version of AdWords editor, and suicidal PPC account managers everywhere did rejoice.
AdWords Editor is an desktop tool that allows you to import your campaigns and then manipulate them as you see fit, and it knows what you want better than you do. Find yourself thinking it would be awesome to isolate keywords with a CTR and average position with in a certain range, then bid them up by a set percentage? AE can do it. Realise you could massively reduce the time it takes to build an account by using highly advanced find / replace options? AE has it covered. Want to build a unicycle out of melons and ride it to Cardiff? AE is there for you. OK that’s not true. But what is true is that AdWords Editor is brilliant and we’re all very thankful for it.
Oh and Microsoft and Yahoo eventually released their own versions too, but they’re rubbish.
This article is taken from the September edition of the Interaction newsletter. In one of the articles, Chris Johnson wrote a piece on Google AdWords.
