Optimizing for Editorial Before Uploading

With the New Year, we’re constantly looking for ways to improve – whether it’s taking Fido for a walk every day, eating more leafy greens, or improving the performance of your adCenter campaigns. A quick and easy way to set yourself up for success is to optimize your new campaigns prior to upload for a seamless editorial experience. Take a look at these two easy Excel formulas that will quickly minimize uploading errors in adCenter while simultaneously creating a clean look for your ads.

Ad Copy Length Checks: This is one of the quickest ways to create a seamless editorial experience, and soften the blow of upload errors. Within Excel, you can perform a simple length check formula that allows you to determine the characters in your ads prior to uploading into adCenter to ensure that your ads adhere to the character limits:

• Ad Title – 25 characters
• Ad Description – 70 characters
• Display URL – 35 characters

In Excel, input the title/description/display URL into the appropriate cell. In the adjoining cell, type “=len(“

You will be referenced to highlight the appropriate box; you can either click on the cell for which you’d like to see the number of characters, or you can type in the location of the cell within the parentheses as shown above.  In this case, it's column A, row 2, so your completed formula would read "=len(A2)".

Press ENTER and voila! You have length-checked your ad title.

If you click on your newly formulated box, you can grab the small black box that appears in the lower right- hand corner of the cell and can drag this formula down and apply to other cells.

Clean Up Dynamic Text – If you use dynamic keyword insertion, we recommend uploading your keywords as capitalized so that when they are inserted into the ad, your ad will look clean, professional and could possibly help you achieve a higher CTR. 

At this time, adCenter does not support the use of {KeyWord} to automatically capitalize your keywords upon insertion into your ad copy; you will need to put your keywords into proper case prior to upload.  If you started using dynamic insertion after your initial keyword upload took place, you may have noticed that your dynamic ads are pulling lower-case keywords.  To get them to start appearing as capitalized, reference this previous post, Tips to Make Sure Your Dynamic Ads Appear as Capitalized in adCenter and follow the steps to utilize the Param2 column for your keyword insertions.

To capitalize your ads prior to the initial upload, follow the steps below:

Import or type your keywords into Excel. In the adjoining cell, type “=proper(“

As in the length check example above, you will be referenced to highlight or manually type in the box of the cell you’d like to apply the proper case formula to:

Press ENTER and voila! You have now easily proper-cased your keywords.

If you click on your new formulated box in the bottom-right hand corner, you can drag this formula down and apply to other cells.

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  • NOTE: Keep this in mind when using acronyms or trademarked terms. If your company’s name is capitalized, you want to maintain that through capitalizing the keywords. This is a quick way to create seamless branding of your company.
  • ANOTHER NOTE: Use this formula for param insertions! Having clean, crisp keyword insertions can improve how our users interact with your ad.

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