expertSEM

When my coffee wasn’t helping this morning I wondered if anything was going to kick my senses into high gear, then I got an email from our ever helpful Account rep at Yahoo with a link to the newly released Yahoo Desktop Editor.

Yahoo Desktop Editor

Having uploaded enormous campaigns into Yahoo recently through their new Import feature I was at a loss with how to now effectively edit and manage these campaigns. My brain was screaming for a desktop editor and I had been frustrated with previously trying to get a hookup to the beta version of this release.

The editor is build on Adobe Air and only takes moments to install. The interface is modern and clean, very slick, and finally I can add more than 500 keywords at a time (now able to add up to 10,000) through the Add/Update Multiple Keywords interface which even allows for you to copy and paste straight from Google AdWords.

I can also add individual keyword URLs for my clients who track them in a database withought going through the web interface. I know that you were probably able to do this previously, offline, in a spreadsheet but exporting and importing for changes was archaic in my view and I am stubborn.

I have already run into a couple of things that I do not like.

1. When selecting an account to download the accounts are not listed alphabetically. I am not sure how many account we have under our one agency login but there are a lot and it took me a minute or two scrolling through all accounts to locate the one I wanted to download.
2. I have not yet found a way to alter the column view so that I can just look at what I deem necessary when reviewing campaigns, ad groups or keywords (I accidently deleted a keyword instead of removing a column from my view).
3. I played around with keyword bids to see how to either mass edit or and noticed that you can set the bids through the Keyword Details dialogue screen. If you want to set bids in the SS column you have to double click on it to change it. You have a choice of an Ad Group Default Bid and a Custom Bid. Click on the Custom Bid radio button, clicking in the bid box and try clicking back to default bid and you’re met with an error message telling you to enter a Custom Bid.Change the bid and then try to find the “Revert Selected Changes” button that many of us reach for at least once a day on AdWords Editor. I’m still looking.
4. I also made changes to the account through a back end API product we use in house, I then looked for a “Get Recent Changes” type of function and found none so I tried to download the account again. It didn’t seem to pull through the changes I had made.

When checking out what the Ad tab looked like in an Ad Group I actually found out that Yahoo does not support upper case in the display URL. I guess I’ll be spending some time revisiting the display URLs for all of my ads.

Yahoo Display URL Error

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You will not be able to upload any campaign changed until you have corrected issues with the display URLs.

Overall I am happy with the fact I now have an offline editor for all of my Yahoo campaigns but it is slow (especially when performing bulk edits – like updating all of my display URLS) and not as user friendly as the simple text type of editing that you get out of AdWords Editor. It is, however, faster than the adCenter Desktop when it comes to posting changes and allows you to select which account and campaign to post (instead of trying to sync them all). I am sure my list of likes and dislikes will grow as I start to seriously optimize all of the new campaigns I have recently imported so I will keep you posted.