How To Import Your Google Campaigns Into Bing Hassle Free

As PPC managers and I think I can speak the majority of them when I say this, regardless if you work for a big agency or a small business, we normally spend the great majority of our time and resources on our Google campaigns and have the tendency to overlook Bing and Yahoo.

In a way I guess we can blame that on the fact that Google holds almost a 70% share of the search market, leaving Bing and Yahoo to split a much smaller 30% share.

Even though the majority of your revenue and conversions are generated through Google search, and let’s be honest, we all know that’s not about to change anytime soon, you always want to make your Bing accounts are getting the attention they deserve and being optimized to its full potential.

I have seen a lot of clients running amazingly well structured campaigns on Google, with high click thru rates and excellent quality score and yet for some reason they decided to run a much smaller and not near as good of a campaign on Bing, with fewer keywords and fewer ad copies.

On this post I’m going to show you how to import your campaigns straight from AdWords Editor into AdCenter Desktop in a few easy steps and also give you some tips on how to manage your Bing account using custom AdCenter reports and Custom Analytics reports.

Well, let’s get to it then. The first thing you want to do before even thinking about exporting your entire account from AdWords Editor is making sure you have done all major the updates and optimizations to the account and by that I mean, adding any new campaigns, ad groups, keywords or ad copies that you may have been contemplating about, or even Geo-targeting specific campaigns. If you think you may want to do that anytime soon, now is the time to get it done, the last thing you need to do right now is double work.

Now that you have your Google account setup exactly the way you wanted, it’s time to export. Go to File, Export Spreadsheet (CSV), Export Whole Account. That should export all of your accounts and settings, including campaign budgets, bids, keyword match type and even Geo-targeting. This should take a few seconds depending on the size of your account. Once exporting is done just save the CSV file on a folder of your choosing.

The next step is going to be importing that file into AdCenter Desktop. For that, just click on the import button at the top and select “Import from Google”. Note that even though you are importing a spreadsheet, DO NOT select the last option.

The next screen is going to ask whether you want to import using your Google credentials straight from AdWords or import from a file. You are going to select “Import from a File”.

Once you hit next, you are going to go through another couple of screens, don’t change anything, just hit next and you should be prompted an import button. The importing process should take a few minutes depending on the size of your account.

Now that you have all of your campaigns in AdCenter desktop, all you have to do is hit Sync and it will upload everything to the server. That will also take a few minutes, sometimes even close to an hour depending again on the size of the account.

Once you have finished syncing your account and AdCenter has returned no error messages, congratulations, you have just imported your Google campaigns into Bing. Now, if didn’t get as lucky and once syncing is completed, AdCenter has decided to gift you with a few error messages, you still have a few steps to go. These are a few common error messages and what to look for:

Duplicate Keywords: You may see this duplicate keyword message on your AdCenter Desktop but when you look at keywords over and over again you won’t be able to find a duplicate keyword. This is what Bing calls “normalizing keywords”. Normalization is a process for finding “unnecessary” variations of a keyword.

Let’s take a look at some examples of normalized keywords.

If you are presented with this duplicated keyword error messages, just take a good look at your keywords, delete the variation forms and try uploading it again. It should work.

URL Format Error: This is another very common error when syncing your campaigns. If you are tracking your campaigns, ad groups and keywords on Google Analytics you probably added some tracking code to the destination URL before uploading your spreadsheet. Sometimes when you name your Ad Groups or Campaigns you may leave a blank space in between the words (e.g. Mens Shoes) which means that somewhere on your tracking code is gone be the word Mens Shoes. What you want to at this point is select all of your ad copies on AdCenter Desktop, or at least the ones with errors and click on the replace button at the bottom. You will simple replace blank space for “-” so that your tracking code will look like this “Mens-Shoes”.

This should solve your URL Format Error issue.

Hopefully by now you have no error messages and your campaigns are up and running smoothly on Bing. So now what? Well, now you want to make sure they are reaching your goals,  and for that you need to track, pull reports and dig in into the data.

On Microsoft AdCenter’s web interface you can go to the Reports tab and click on “Create new Report”. There you can choose between many different reports, from campaign, ad group, keywords, ad performance reports and many more. By choosing the “Ad group performance”, (I normally pull this one on a regular basis) you will be able to see metrics such as impressions, clicks, spend, avg. position and even conversion data if you select it from the “change columns and layout” section. Note: I strongly recommend using conversion data from Google Analytics, it’s usually more accurate.

That’s great, now we have a report in hands with all this metrics so we can dig around through our data and optimize our account right? Wrong! Impressions, clicks, spend, CTR and conversions if you choose to, are great, but how are you going to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns without revenue data?

That’s when you turn to Google Analytics Custom Reports. Go into Google Analytics Custom Reporting tab and click on “New Custom Report”. By choosing Flat Table type you will be able to add Campaigns and Ad Groups to your dimensions and Transactions and Revenue to your metrics. Now all you have to do is add a filter that says Source/Medium -> Exact -> adcenter / cpc. Save it.

Now all you have to do is use a basic vlookup on excel and you will have all this data, including transactions and revenue data down to the ad group level so you can analyze it and make more informed decisions when optimizing your Bing account.