This is actually quite a straightforward operation these days (although one that has caused me plenty of headaches in the past) but can always be made a little smoother with a few tweaks to the basic process…

1)    Get the latest version of adCenter desktop (v8.2 or later). Previous versions had a character limit of 70 which caused problems when attempting to import AdWords ads with two thirty-five characters, as adCenter inserts an extra space between the two, causing errors. The latest version helpfully allows you to have 71 character ads.

2)    Export (as a CSV file) the campaigns required from AdWords Editor. Open up the file in Excel as it’s much easier to make any required changes at this stage rather than after importing into adCenter.

3)    Keyword match types should automatically map to the correct types in adCenter, except it won’t recognise modified-broad matches, so if you have any in AdWords either remove the plus-signs, or scrap these keywords altogether if you don’t want to go ‘fully’ broad.

4)    Delete any paused adgroups / keywords / ad texts etc – not a strictly necessary step but there’s no point uploading content that isn’t needed and will just slow down the upload.

5)    I also delete the rows relating to AdWords sitelinks – this step shouldn’t necessarily be required either, but I’ve run into problems here in the past so now I err on the cautious side and scrap them just in case.

6)    If required, add any URL tagging that is necessary for tracking purposes – for me this will usually be Google Analytics tracking parameters. Without adding these manually, your adCenter traffic will just show up in Analytics as organic traffic from Bing.

As a minimum I’d use the utm_medium and utm_source parameters but there are also a few useful adCenter query string parameters available to choose from, the most useful ones being {OrderItemId}, which outputs the keyword that was triggered, and {QueryString}, which gives the actual typed search phrase.

So a tagged-up example URL will look something like this:

http://myurl.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={QueryString}&utm_campaign=campaign1

Google’s URL builder can help with this.

7)    Save as a comma-delimited CSV file and import into adCenter using the ‘Import from Google’ option:

8)    Double-check adgroup and campaign settings and targeting to ensure everything has been imported correctly.

9)    Upload!

Have I missed anything? Does anybody else have any tips for importing campaigns without errors? Let me know below.