A couple of free tools for making AdWords campaign management easier

As we run Google AdWords campaigns for companies like yours for a living, we use all sorts of tools designed to make life easier, for researching, creating and monitoring the campaigns. Some of them are quite expensive, but make managing AdWords so much easier that we can justify buying them where a small company spending, say, £1000 a month on AdWords, can’t do so. The resulting economies of scale and improved efficiency explains why it makes so much sense to outsource AdWords, as long as the company concerned understands your technology and market sector. As one of our clients said in one of those lovely unsolicited testimonials you get occasionally: “You’re getting better quality visitors to my website for the same money as I was spending doing AdWords myself, and the time I spend on it has gone down from about six hours a month to zero!” However, I’m quite aware that for many of you, management of the Google AdWords campaign has to be in-house, so here are a couple of tools you should be using. Firstly, Google AdWords Editor. This free application from Google is the only serious way for most companies to create, upload and edit campaigns. Use it in conjunction with a spreadsheet. If we had to do everything Google AdWords Editor does through the AdWords web interface we’d need double the staff. Secondly, take a look at the Jumbo Keyword tool, an online resource for sorting out and tidying up lists of keywords. If you do have to use the AdWords web interface, it’ll save you hours.