‘Dear Inside AdWords…’ – Quickies

Some of the emails that we receive from Inside AdWords readers contain straightforward questions that have short and sweet answers. I’ve gone through some of these to pull out the “quickies” that may of interest to the rest of our readers.

“Is there an API that I can use to somehow add and delete my ads dynamically as I need to rather than continually having to do it manually?” – Clint W.

Absolutely. The AdWords API is available for all of our advertisers who want to manage their campaigns programmatically. You can read more about it in our earlier post, or go straight to the AdWords API home page to sign up.

“Is there an easy way to change all the URL's in my ads at once for any given campaign? I have 1-5 ads running for any given campaign and find that I have to update each ad URL individually. How can I do this more quickly?” – Paula B.

Yes, ma’am. The Find/Edit Ad Text tool on the Tools page will allow you to make bulk changes to any portion of your ad texts, including the display or destination URLs. You can read more about the details here.

“It would be nice to search for campaigns by URL. For example, I want to see all ads that have tracking code 'x', or all ads that don't have tracking code 'x' in the URL.” – Brandon H.

Well, we can help you do one of the two things that you mentioned. The handy dandy search box in the upper right corner of your AdWords account allows you to search within your campaigns. For example, if your tracking code is “X834s-11”, simply type that into the search box and it will locate all the relevant campaigns, Ad Groups, keywords, and ads that contain that term. As for searching for ads that don’t contain a certain term, that’s a good suggestion that I’ll pass on to the product team. :-)

Whether you have a quick question or a lengthy problem, send them to us and we’ll try our best to share the answers with all of our readers.

Posted by Vivian, Inside AdWords crew