By Helen Brown
As part of the recent AdWords changes webinar, I have already posted about “Shared Budgets (Beta)” , “Shared Campaign Negative Keywords and Shared Campaign Placement exclusions” ,“Better Reporting and Insights – Labels” and Auction Insights and Google Analytics Data Imports. Today’s final installment of the webinar is “Automated Tools – AdWords Scripts and the Keyword Tool”.
First things first, AdWords Scripts! – A new tool (it’s been out of Beta testing for around two months now) available in your AdWords account that enables you to customize reporting, bidding strategy, create custom rules, integrate your AdWords and external data and also many other aspects of account management. This is made possible via the creation of little java script programs that can be created within the AdWords interface. Users of this new tool will need a basic understanding of JavaScript or a similar programming language before they use the system, and Google recommended in the webinar that new users can familiarize themselves with JavaScript by learning on sites such as codecademy.com in order to start using the tool.
To Get Started-
- Sign into your account and click Automation on the left navigation pane of your account.
- Click Create and manage scripts. You can create new scripts or manage existing scripts from this page.
- Next, click +Create script
From here you can preview some script examples, you can also name and write your own script. You must authorise the scripts access on your account before you can click preview, which gives a simulated test run of your script running for 30 seconds. This function will present you with a results table so that you can make sure your script is working as you want it to before saving and using it.
More information, examples and tutorials on this can be found at http://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/docs/getting-started
Next, the Keyword Tool!
As you all know, you can currently access the keyword tool from either the keywords tab after clicking add keywords, or click the reporting and tools drop down > Keyword Tool. You can fill in the appropriate fields to use the tool as normal to find new keyword ideas based on words and phrases, a website URL and categories, you can see a list of results presented under the Keyword ideas tab.
Now and as shown above, you will also see a new tab “Ad Group ideas” within the keyword tool designed to save time on ad group building. Upon entering your words or phrases, URL etc into the keyword tool, the new tab will take the results in the keyword ideas tab and split them into themed ad groups. You can click “more like these” to see additional ad group ideas similar to the ones you already like. You can review and add any of these ad group ideas that you like to your account by clicking the “save all” button next to each of the ad group names, the saved ad groups will appear in the Saved ideas list on the bottom left of the screen.
If you wish to apply any of the saved ideas to your AdWords account, you can click “Add to account” and choose the appropriate campaign to which the ad groups should be allocated. Any new ad groups that go into your campaigns from this tab will enter as paused, you will need to go into the specific campaigns in order to create ads, include bid amounts etc and enable the ad groups to run. For more information about the features within this new tab, please see “Using the Keyword Tool to get Keyword and Ad Group Ideas”
Good luck in implementing the new tools and features mentioned in the “recent updates” series of posts 