Follow these easy steps to remove your winter holiday copy, keywords, and more.
The 2013 winter holiday season was a record-setter. Online sales in the U.S. grew 18% year-over-year, and the fourth quarter was the biggest in paid search history, with marketers spending 19% more on search ads than 2012.
The holidays may be in the rearview now, but there’s one more important task to complete. Now’s the time to start checking your account for old holiday ad copy or keywords, and swapping them out for any upcoming promotions.
Luckily, our Bing Ads Editor tool can help make this job easy. This desktop application lets you make bulk changes to your account while offline; then simply upload these changes into your active campaigns when you’re ready. Read on to learn about the tasks you should complete to start the new year off right.
Out with the old!
First, review your ad copy to make sure it is displaying the most up-to-date messages. Do that by following these step-by-step instructions. The screenshot below shows the buttons on the task bar that you’ll use to easily make your changes:
- After you’ve downloaded your campaigns into the tool, select “Export” from the task bar to copy all of your campaign components (ads, keywords, etc.) into an Excel spreadsheet.
- Using Excel’s filter tool (which can be found on the “Data” tab), you can identify any out-of-date price points, dates, or holiday messaging by filtering for ad copy mentioning “Christmas gift” or with expired “Free Shipping” offers.
- Once you’ve identified all out-of-date components, change the information in the “Status” column from “Active” to “Paused.”
- Save the updated Excel file as a .csv file.
- In the tool, select “Import” from the task bar and follow the prompts to import your saved file. After your changes have been imported successfully, your updated items will be flagged with an icon of a pencil and paper.
- The last and most important step is to sync these changes with your live account. To do this, select “Post Changes” from the task bar. A progress bar will track the progress of this sync. Once the changes have been made successfully to the account, you’ll see a “Sync Complete” message.
In with the new!
Now that you’ve packed away all the holiday-related ad components in your campaigns, it’s time to optimize your current campaigns. Here’s a checklist of the steps you’ll need to take:
- Double-check that all of your ad groups have an active ad by reviewing the Text Ads tab (see screenshot below). If you don’t have an ad running, create a new one.
- Do you have Valentine’s Day or President’s Day promotions coming up? If so, the time is right to start building them using the “Create a Campaign” tool on the Campaigns tab (see screenshot below). Use the tool to build out your new campaigns, ad groups, text ads with new promotional ad copy, and holiday keywords. Your Yahoo Account Team has thousands of keywords tied to specific holidays that can be pulled and tailored to your account.
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To ensure that your ads appear for all relevant searches, we recommend having keywords target Exact, Phrase, and Broad match types. Confirm that you’re serving on all three match types by reviewing your entire keyword set from the Keywords tab (see screenshot below). You can also leverage the advanced search feature to look up the number of keywords on specific match types.
