Part of keeping your campaigns running smoothly involves monitoring your adCenter reports for signals that something needs your attention. One of the most obvious red flags is when you see your position slipping lower than you would like it to be. In order to keep your positioning competitive, you should be updating your bids to keep pace with other advertisers who are bidding on the same keywords you are.

Determining which keywords could benefit from bid updates is a fairly simple process of pulling a report and sorting the data in Excel. If you’re an Excel-savvy search marketer, then you’re most likely already following the best practices below, but I wanted to provide a brief walk-through for those who could use some pointers.

Step 1: Pull a Keyword Performance Report in adCenter

After you sign in to adCenter, click on the “Reports” tab. The default setting is for a Keyword Performance report set to a summary view. Feel free to modify the View and Date Range values to suit your needs:

Step Two: Export the Report

After you run the report, below the graph that appears you’ll see a link to “Download CSV” in the top right hand corner of the data grid. Click on it to export the data into Excel:

Step Three: Apply Filters to Sort Your Data

Once you have your report in Excel, click on the column title for “Avg. Position” to highlight that cell:

With this cell highlighted, on your keyboard, hit Ctrl+Shift+L and you’ll see that your column headers now all have a button with a down arrow in it:

Clicking on that button in the “Avg. Position” column will give you a list of options for sorting that data. Select “Sort Largest to Smallest”:

If after completing this step there are items in the top half of the sheet showing in a position lower than you would like them to be, these are the terms that could use a bid boost.