We recently launched a powerful find and replace option to easily find ads based upon a lot of criteria and then mass pause, delete, or modify those ads.
When you go to the ads tab, you can use the ‘filter by’ and filter by:
From here you can select a single ad or all the ads (to select all ads, click the checkbox in the header).
If you use the ‘manage ads’ option, you can then pause, enable, remove, or edit all the ads you selected:
Where this is great is that if you search using wildcards (like in the first screen when the headline searched for was: Best * Tutor) – the * is a wildcard, then you can change the message on both sides of the wildcard, but leave the wildcard as is.
For instance, if you have headlines such as:
You might want to edit the ‘call’ portion of the ad, the ‘plumbers’ portion of the ad, or both; but not change the actual geography. If you use a wildcard then when you see the find and replace options, you will see two text boxes – one that’s before the wildcard and one that’s after it so that you can change the message around the wildcard.
If you had done a search for Call *; then you would only see one text box as the ‘Call’ part of the ad is the only part you are changing as the rest matches to the wildcard. This is a fast way to find matching lines within your ads to change them to be more consistent.
We suggest that before you make bulk changes you use the ‘preview changes’ to ensure that your ad lines fit within character limits and the changes are exactly what you’re looking for before you save the changes.
If you click the ‘edit’ button – then your changes will be saved to the ads that match your criteria.
In many cases, users have a set of ads and they want to start up a multi-ad group test by duplicating the current ads but just changing parts of the ad (like a different call to action in description line 2). If you click the ‘copy and edit’ button – then we’ll copy all the ads you had selected, change them to include your edits, and save a new ad. This will leave your current ads intact so that you easily make bulk changes to ads without adjusting your current ads.
More than half of all searches take place on a mobile device, and it is imperative that users test mobile ads differently from desktops. To easily accomplish this, we launched a ‘clone for other device’ option a long time ago. This option makes it so that if you select ads, we’ll clone the ad but flip the ‘mobile preferred’ flag so that you are now running your ads on each device and that you’ll see desktop and mobile ads as separate tests so that you can make the correct decision by device type.
This option still exists, but it is now more powerful with the new filters as you can search for exactly which ads you want to enable for the other device type and switching everything in bulk from a single screen.
We hope you enjoy the changes. They should make bulk changes for your ads much easier and much more powerful (especially since wildcards are supported). If you have any additional questions or comments, just let us know.
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