I’ve exported complete campaigns from Adwords before, but I don’t do it often because (until recently), there wasn’t an easy way to get a campaign into AdCenter without it hiccuping and upchucking your data to shreds. (the template file they give you is complete crap by the way, but thank God for the AdCenter Desktop Tool. Microsoft finally did something right!)

I’m not going to cover all the steps of exporting a complete Adwords campaign to MSN in this post, because I think I want to save that for a video post. There are multiple way to do it. But what I do want to cover are exporting negative keywords, which isn’t as easy as you’d expect.

As the more seasoned PPC veterans will tell you, a solid list of negative keywords can make or break your campaign. I often spend as much time coming up with a good list of negatives, as I do for normal keywords that I want to bid on.

When I’m using the Adwords Keyword Tool, I’ll search for my primary keyword, for example: “cucusoft” (a pretty cool video conversion software)

Good negatives that I’ll see are words like “keygen, sn, serial, crack, warez, etc”. So I’ll go down the list, adding these to my list of negative keywords. If I’m thorough, by the time I’m done, I might have a list of 50-100 negative keywords. This is especially true in the case of online software, as the freebie seekers are searching for cracks, torrents, etc.

Google makes it easy. Once I have my list of negative keywords, I simply paste them from notepad or Excel, into my Adwords interface. Like most people, when I make a list of keywords, I tab separate them out in notepad (or on separate rows in Excel).

But for some crazy reason, AdCenter wants your list of negative keywords on a non word-wrapped line, all separated by commas. So if you have a 100 keywords in your negative list, you need to have them in this format:

serial,sn,crack,keygen,warez,etc

But since you’re negative keyword list was generated using the Adwords Keyword Tool, you’re current list is either in text or .csv in this format:

serial
sn
crack
keygen….

Notice: No commas present and we’re using word wrapped lines (completely the opposite of what MSN wants).

Now try adding commas to the end of each word, and backspacing the keyword to the previous line. Easy for a few keywords. But the list I made last night had 188 negative keywords. There was no way I was gonna spend all night adding commas to this list. So I went hunting for a better way…

Luckily Excel came to the rescue after almost giving up on AdCenter for the night. Here’s what you need to do:

1) Create a new Excel file (csv or xls, doesn’t matter)

2) In cell A1, paste your list of negative keywords that you came up with.

3) In cell B1, type a single comma: ” , ”

4) Copy the comma from cell B1 to the rest of the cells in column B that correspond to cells in column A that contain data. Do this quickly by selecting cell B1,  hovering your mouse cursor over the lower right corner of the cell until you see the cross hairs. Click and drag the rectangular selector all the way to the end of your keyword list. The B column should now contain commas all the way to the last keyword in your list.

5) Now we’re gonna make use of the CONCATENATE feature in Excel. This simply combines data from two or more cell into one. Select cell C1, in the formula field, type “=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)” <—without quotes.

6) If your keyword in cell A1 was “keygen”, then cell C1, should now read “keygen,”

7) Repeat step 4 for cell C1 by clicking and dragging the selector to the end of your keyword list. If done correctly, you’re entire negative keyword list should now have commas after each keyword. We still need to get it all into non wrapped format.

For the next step, you’ll need a more advanced text editor than simple notepad or wordpad. I recommend UltraEdit <–direct free trial download.

9) Select and copy all of the contents of cell C1, and paste this back into a new text file (in UltraEdit or Notepad++).

10) In UltraEdit, click “Format, Paragraph Formatting, Left Align”. That’s it! You should now have your same negative keyword list, in a comma separated list without word wraps, just as AdCenter orders!

All that is left for you to do is to paste this list of negative keywords into your campaign via the AdCenter interface. Or, you can use the MSN AdCenter Desktop tool, which I’ll talk about in a future post.

In the mean time, this is the ghetto way to do it, but it works and is certainly easier and less time consuming that trying to do it by hand. If anyone knows of a better way than this, do tell! I’m all ears!

Way of the Warrior – Tip of the Day: Learn a few advanced Excel tricks to simplify your keyword sorting and make PPC life easier! A good free resource is the Mr. Excel Podcast in iTunes.

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