I hope you are enjoying Microsoft adCenter Desktop (ACD)beta. This tool has a lot of great functionality with some impressive udates coming in the future - we’ll tell you about those as soon as we can!

In the meantime, this post kicks off a two part series focused on importing campaigns from other search engines using Microsoft adCenter Desktop beta. Today we will focus on preparing these 3rd party import sheets in Excel, tomorrow we'll address importing them into the tool.

Depending on how complex your campaigns are, you may need to make a few modifications to your import sheet before you load it into Microsoft adCenter Desktopbeta:

Tips Recommended For All Skill Levels of Paid Search Professionals

  • If anything on your bulk sheet is set to “Pause” or “Deleted” and you want those live with Microsoft adCenter, you’ll need to update the status to “Active”.
  • For ad description separated on two lines (say, 35 characters each), ACD will combine the two with a space. Depending on how your ads are structured, you may need to add a period to the end of ad description line 1.
  • If your import sheet contains search and content campaigns, separate these into two unique sheets. You may want to append “_Content” to either the campaign or ad group name to make content management easier.
  • For content campaigns, copy the data in “Max Content CPC” column to “Max CPC” column.

Tips Recommended For Intermediate and Advanced Search Engine Marketers

  • If your keywords are lowercase and you are using dynamic keyword insertion, make sure you give your keywords proper capitalization.
  • Does your file contain negative keywords that are labeled as “Negative Broad”, “Negative Exact”, “Negative Phrase”? Change these to “Campaign Negative Broad”, “Campaign Negative Exact”, etc. or remove this “Keyword Type”. Otherwise, these will be loaded as keywords. (Don’t worry, we’ll be fixing this in the future!)
  • Are you using tracking URLs with search-engine specific codes? If so, make sure you’ve updated those destination URLs with codes for adCenter.
  • Using keyword level tracking URLs? Set the ad destination URL to {param1}.

Now that your import sheet is ready, save it as a Comma Sepaated Values ".csv" file and close the file.  Tomorrow we'll go through the steps to import and upload using ACD.

In the meantime, I hope these tips are helpful.  Be sure to leave a comment or visit our adCenter Desktop forum if you have any questions, tips or tricks of your own.

Happy Optimizing!