One of the big weaknesses of Yahoo and MSN’s PPC interfaces is their lack of offline editors to build a campaign. Fortunately you can build all your campaigns with the Google Adwords editor, then export those results. From all the tools I have tried, the Adwords editor is the fastest way to build up a campaign, so I start every campaign there, regardless of where it will end up. It’s pretty simple to do, but there are a few things to watch out for.
Google:
Once you build your campaign the first step is to export it as a CSV file. Once you have the CSV file, you are ready to import it.
Yahoo:
To get a Google Adwords CSV file into Yahoo you first have to convert it. I believe you need a Gold account to use this tool, but it’s not hard to get one. Simply point it to your file and click “convert”
Once you have the converted file, there may be some formatting issues. First check to make sure the program joined the 2 line Google ad text into the 1 line Yahoo format correctly. Then search/replace the content matching column from on to off. Once everything looks good you can upload the converted file.
Once imported, set your GEO targeting and other options and you are ready to go.
MSN:
For MSN, no conversion is required. Just point to your Google CSV file and choose import.
MSN magically converts your file and uploads the new campaign. But now you have a big problem. MSN imports the new campaign with all the adgroups inactive. You then have to manually go and active each adgroup. If you have a large number of adgroups (like you should) this is a huge task. I have talked with the MSN people and they say they are working on a solution, but for now it’s a manual process. This makes the MSN import process the hardest by far. But it is still much faster to build the campaign with the Adwords editor and import, than it would be to build the campaign in MSN itself.
I assume this only works with the major 3 and not with the other minor search engines?
I agree that the AdWods editor is great, this is quite an effective approach, I’m sure readers who also use AdCenter and YSM will find it useful.
Alan Johnson
Steven-As far as direct importing yes. But its still helpful to get it into the CSV with the adwords editor, then you can re-work it to whatever format the PPC service wants.
Nice writeup. I agree MSN needs to get their act together with their import feature.
UPDATE: You can turn on all your inactive adgroups in MSN. Just select all the checkboxes, go to action, then choose “submit ad groups”. This should turn them on. Unfortunately you still would have to go in and set the geo-targeting manually for each adgroup, if its different from the standard. Also adgroup max bids prices have not been importing correctly lately. As of today they are still “researching” the issue.
Thanks for the tips! I’ve been wanting to try my Adwords PPC campaigns in Yahoo & MSN but haven’t taken the time to investigate. Sounds like it shouldn’t be too bad, thanks for the write-up.
Either MSN is bork’d or I am doing something wrong. Everytime I try to import the exact file the Adwords editor generated it tells me it cannot import that type of file.
Maybe its because I’m on a Mac. I’ll go try my PC. AdCenter is such a piece of shit. It doesn’t even work with Safari or Opera on the Mac :\
Ok, I am here to report back my findings.
AdCenter isn’t even functional in Opera or Safari on the Mac so don’t even bother. It works with Firefox except you can’t import campaigns… it just errors out.
Jumped on my PC and imported the exact same file in IE6.. went through just fine.
Strange. :\
Ran into the same thing w/ Firefox. However, keep FF open because you’ll want to back to it and use the imacro extension to automate the process of changing all those geo-extensions. So much faster
I’m back as well – doesn’t seem to be importing my destination urls on a keyword basis, but they are definitely there on the export.
yeah the MSN import is a real PITA. I had to go through all the adgroups and set the max bid (for some reason it didn’t import it) and my geotargeting settings.
Next time I am definitely going to try and use the imacro plugin as CharlestonSEO suggested.
Agreed, the max bid issue sucks. I got into with MSN a couple days ago and basically told them, “look, your tool is broken” They claim the engineers are working on it and their “test” accounts are importing max bids correctly. But everyone out there is having the same problem.
Charleston SEO’s suggestion is great until they actually get it working again.
Anyone else having problems with negative keywords?
An adwords rep told me there was no way to import negative keywords at this time.
In Yahoo, my imports break – I read that it could be because of negative keywords, but when I remove them I get an error.
Nice feature… only downside: Yahoo will not allow you to use this feature unless you spend at least $500 a month with them… stupid enough, especially when this process is supposed to get you started with Yahoo…
You can actually email Yahoo and demand that they import the campaigns for you if it’s your first time through, so that may help a bit. I’m actually having problems importing from Adwords Editor into both Yahoo AND MSN. Yahoo gives me errors and MSN tells me i can’t do it over 1000 lines or something. Grr. back to the drawing board for me.
Great post, I was completely unaware you could do this for free I know someone has one you can pay for, but I did have no knowledge that it could be done for free. Thanks have linked our users to this page.
Thanks
-Wes
Bless you for this post cos its gona be very useful to me
Thank you for a great post!
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Well, with the AdCenter tool, it now appears that Yahoo is lagging. The Adcenter tool, while not perfect, certainly has a nice interface and makes bulk uploads much easier than the dreaded online import interface.
This is a greate info and certainly helped me on getting things done. Thank you!
Hi,
This is amazing I never knew that I can export my Adword campaign to Yahoo and MSN, this can be extremely helpful for my PPC campaign and I would like to have it
Thanks for introducing it.
I agree MSN needs to get their act together with their import feature.
[...] How to import Google Adwords campaigns into Yahoo and MSN [...]
Thanks for the information, seems pretty easy to follow.
Cheers