So here I am, frantically PPC’ing my little affiliate heart out to catch up on my Christmas preparations. As I mentioned in a previous post I have 90,000 Adwords listings to upload.
So yesterday morning I proudly present my 90,000 listings lovingly created with affiliate blood, sweat, and tears. What does Google tell me?
WTF?
So I duly try again later. And again. And again. And again. In fact, I was still trying at 10pm last night. This morning I decided to delete everything and start again with smaller chunks of upload. The first chunk of around 10,000 listings went up no problems.
“Oh well” I thought. “Perhaps I just needed to cut things down a little.”
This afternoon, I duly pulled another chunk of 7,500 from my beautifully crafted PPC spreadsheet. What does Google say to me about my relatively modest request?
AAARRRGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
Modesty forbids me from actually detailing the rest of what I said when this happened again. Needless to say if there was a swear jar in this room there would be enough money in there for a trip to 2 to Barbados. Now, don’t get me wrong.. when it’s bloody well working Adwords Editor is enormously powerful and saves a huge amount of time by giving you the ability to set ads, adgroups, and keywords within a spreadsheet before popping it into the Editor for upload to your Google account. I regularly upload thousands of listings with a graceful ease.
But oh great PPC gods. Why today? Why now when I have so much to do?
October 2nd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Hi
90,000 gosh!!! What is the software you are using to upload them? I am guessing you are not doing it through the google interface…
October 2nd, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Lol, yeah… we don’t do Christmas by half here at Affiliate Stuff towers, lol.
It’s actually Google’s own Adwords upload software which it provides to help advertisers perform bulk uploads, so there’s no excuse whatsoever for this kind of issue. We’re running the most current version so we’re at a bit of a loss regarding this one!
I’ve done something of this size by hand back in the good old days… and that’s what it took. Days!!
October 2nd, 2007 at 9:28 pm
Hi Kirsty.
Out of curiosity, when you say 90,000 Adwords listings, do you actually mean 90,000 individual PPC Google Adwords Ads?!
How long did it take to compose that many?!?!?!
Cheers.
S.
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:57 pm
I tried the Google Editor for the first time a few weeks back-I cannot believ it has taken me three years to start using and find out about this editing tool. I have some great content in CSV form that I tried uploading but had problems. Is it possible to get new ad groups created from a csv file?
P.S - Congrats on the nomination, I hope you win.
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Hi there- I work for an adwords agency and I had this problem on Monday with a £10k per day campaign I was setting up. Luckily at work we have the honour of a named Google rep on the end of the phone- the answer was simple; keep each adgroup under 2000 keywords and the whole account under 50,000. Any more than that and you put strain on their servers and they don’t like it. The rep asked me if i’d been using a software permutation system to generate the keywords (to which the answer was yes, and with good reason, the campaign was for a national housebuilders and they wanted all the towns and villages.
I split the adgroup that had 3000 keywords in it into 2 groups, and it posted first time.
Hope that helps, and I too would love to know how on earth you ended up with 90,000 keywords.
October 3rd, 2007 at 12:41 am
I have run into the same problem uploading large keyword lists. I still haven’t found a good solution to it. I wish the google would step up and fix the software.
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:43 am
I’m a liitle confused on your wording as well. You always say listings, but I’m not sure if you mean keywords or individual ads or what exactly. Maybe you like to keep things like this a little obscure I guess.
October 3rd, 2007 at 9:42 am
OK, just to be clear… when I talk about listings I mean search terms. This isn’t deliberate, I was hand reared in an online marketing agency and that’s the way I was taught to talk about PPC campaigns. I have all sorts of other jargonish habits also, lol.
Ed - Yes, you can also create and upload your adgroups from a CSV file. I must do a post about the formatting for the Google upload spreadsheet!
As for how I ended up with 90,000 keywords Tom (and others). Well, pretty much the same way as you did for your location based PPC. I’m promoting a product that can be described in say 20 different ways i.e. “Product Name” + “Product Size”. I’ve found that during Xmas season people do search heavily for these specifics. I concatenated them all up using php… et voila!! One huge keyword list.
Steve - despite all this automation, it still takes a couple of days to prepare a list like this and another day or so to actually get it up (in the current environment created by Google!!)
Pretty poor on Google’s part. It’s not as if I can reduce the list much…. there’s genuinely about 80 to 90% of them with a decent search volume during silly season!!
Kirsty plods off to upload one adgroup at a time…. hardly saving any time by using Adwords Editor!