The Advanced Search function is one of the most powerful features of Adwords Editor. In fact, I believe “Advanced Search” to be a slightly misleading name because not only is it a search function to look up specific keywords, it also works on a larger scale as a filter.
Filter by Name
Let’s look at an example. Imagine you have an account running campaigns in German, French, Italian and English. You only want to change the bids for the French campaigns, but don’t want to go through each French campaign separately. You can use the advanced search feature and filter for all campaigns containing “French” in the name. Now when you go back to the keywords tab, only the keywords from your French campaigns will appear, and you can make the appropriate bidding changes in one go.
Filter by keyword/ad content
Let’s take it a step further. You’re running a special offer on one of the products you’re promoting and want to push the bids up for keywords pertaining to this product. Due to the way your account is structured, the keywords containing this product name are littered throughout your account, and can’t easily be narrowed down by campaign or adgroup. You can just do a search for all “keywords containing product name”, and when you go to the keyword tab they’ll all be listed for you.
Similarly, you might wish to amend all of the creatives for a certain product; perhaps you want to add a special offer, or perhaps you’ve stopped selling that product and wish either to remove those ads, or amend them to feature a different product. With the Advanced Search you can locate all ads mentioning that particular product quickly.
Filter by Match Type and Status
The Advanced Search also allows you to filter keywords by match type and status, both great time savers. I especially like the ability to search for all disapproved keywords and ads so quickly and easily, as opposed to going through the online interface adgroup by adgroup. This allows you to do a quick “health-check” to ensure all of your keywords and ads are online in seconds.
Filter by Statistics
Last but by no means least we come to what is in my opinion the most exciting way to filter. Adwords Editor allows you the ability to download the account statistics (you can choose whatever time period you wish to use) and use these in the advanced search parameters to filter out the areas that need improvement. For example, you could search for keywords with a spend above a certain threshold but with no conversions (if you are using Google Analytics along with your Adwords campaign), or ads with a low CTR, or zero impression keywords that might need their bids to be raised, or keywords with a CPC above a certain figure, or keywords with a low average rank… I could go on all day but I’m sure you see my point! It’s a powerful tool to help you paint a picture of the strengths and weaknesses of your account.
It’s also worth noting that you can save any search parameters as a “custom” search for use in the future.
Experiment with New Views!
The above are all rather simplified examples, but my hope is that you’ll think about the way you look at your account, and perhaps get some ideas and start to experiment with different methods. Once you do, you’ll see how powerful the advanced search can be!
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