New Features: Easily Filter, Create, and Manage Ads in Bulk

We’ve just launched some powerful new features that should make it easy for you to pause, create, and manage ads in bulk. As these new features work with the filter commands that we launched a short while ago, we’re going to quickly review the filters and then get into the new features so you can see how these functions work together.

Filtering Ad Groups

When you go to the ad groups tab, you can filter ad groups by a large number of criteria, such as there are more than X ads in an ad group or ad group doesn’t have an ad with Y in it, and many other management scenarios.

Once you filter your ad groups; you can easily select one, multiples, or all the ad groups that match that criteria. From here you can then easily pause or create ads.

Bulk Pausing Ads

There are often times when you have too many ads in an ad group. This can occur from a client who just creates lots of ads and never pauses them (and you as the agency wants to clean this up and start with only 2-4 ads per ad group) to the AdWords Editor going a little crazy and adding too many ads to an ad group. No matter why too many ads appeared in an ad group; it is easy to pause the ads you don’t want running.

You can pause all ads that match a criteria, you can pause a certain number of ads based upon criteria, or you can pause down to a certain number.

Some quick scenarios:

• You take over an account that has too many ads in it and you just want to start with 3 ads per ad group.
  • Filter by ad groups with more than 3 ads.
  • Pause all ads over 3 and use ‘lowest CTR’ as the criteria for pausing ads
• A promotional period is over and you want to ensure that all ads running that promotion are now paused
  • Filter by ‘description line 1 contains promotion’ so that only ads with that promotion are displayed.
  • Select all ad groups, and use the ‘All’ to pause all ads with that promotion.

There are times that you want to bulk create ads as well; and we’ve launched a very intuitive bulk creation tool.

Bulk Ad Creation

You’ve spent a lot of time creating ads; and often certain aspects of ads, such as promotions, headlines, and final URLs rarely change for new ads. Therefore, we wanted to build a tool where you can easily create all aspects of your ads from scratch or leverage the ads you’ve already spent time creating.

With the new creation tool, you once again start by filtering the ad groups where you want to create new ads. In this example, we’re going to assume that you have two lines that the branding team insists that you use among all of your ad groups. Therefore, you want to filter by ad groups that don’t contain your branded lines so that you can select them all and then create your branded line in all of those ad groups. Therefore, the first step is the filter:

Next, select all the ad groups that match that filter and then go to manage ads and create new ads and you’ll see this screen:

You can write any ad type you want, create any lines you want, use an ad template and so forth. The power here is from the two check boxes near the bottom of that screenshot “Get any missing Ad Text from…” What his will do is allow you to write only a description line 2 for your new brand line and then you can check that box leaving all the other ad lines blank. We will then inherit all the other data for the ads from the existing ads. This means it is easy to create 100 or 100,000 new ads with your branded line across all your ad groups and just use your current final URLs, headlines, and so forth.

 

New Features Are Being Announced

We have several new features that we’ll be talking about next week, such as ad rules, support for call only ads, and multi-ad group testing improvements. So stayed tuned to the new feature announcements coming next week.