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Now that Bing is “taking the world by storm,” a lot of people want to try it out. Businesses want to know if their Google Adwords account will perform as well on Bing.com. So all they have to do is a lot of cutting and pasting, right? Well, maybe not.

I’ve read a few articles that say it’s as easy as downloading and uploading, but truth be told there are some bumps in that road. Yes, it’s not rocket surgery, but it’s not as easy as tree science either. Let me walk you through it.

1) If you know how to use the Google Adwords Editor, the first part is easy. Just select “File” on the menu bar and download the campaign you want to a CSV file. That’s the easy part. If you don’t use Adwords Editor, now’s the perfect time to start. It will make life so much easier for you.

2) Before you even attempt to upload the file to Adcenter, I need to make a suggestion. Open the CSV file and copy and paste the negative keywords to separate file or spreadsheet. Save it and put it aside for later. Now delete the negative keywords from your CSV file and re-save. (Don’t worry, we will add the negatives back in down the road)

3) Nope, we’re not ready for Adcenter just yet. More precautions. Don’t use Firefox to do this. I love Firefox, but it won’t work in this case. It bugs out. Also, I heard Safari and Chrome are no better for this exercise, but don’t take my word for it. I use IE 7, however I don’t know if it works with IE 8. You’ve been warned.

4) If you haven’t already, you need to create an MSN Adcenter account. Just create a temporary campaign that you can delete once you complete the upload.

5) Once all of that is done, only now can you upload the Google campaign to Bing. So how do you do that? Click on the “Campaigns” tab in Adcenter. Then Click on the “More” tab on the menu above the list of your campaigns (your temp campaign should be listed here) for a drop down menu. That is where you will see “Import Campaign” tab. That should take you where you need to go.

6) When prompted, enter your time zone and language. Then “browse” for the CSV file and upload. If you haven’t hit any snags, this should work.

So now that the campaign is loaded it’s ready to run, right? Nope. More work to do. Your adgroups have not been submitted and you should adjust your settings.

1) This is when you add your negative keywords. Open that negative keyword file and paste your negative keywords in the campaign settings (unless you want them at the adgroup level if they vary for adgroups). Yes, I know you only get 1,000 characters for negative keywords. It drives me crazy, too. So, make sure you prioritize.

2) Alter your other settings as well. Do you want to be on the content match network? Do you want to set specific times or days for your ads to run? Do you have specific geographic regions to target for your ads? This is when you set that up. Here is more about Google Adwords settings.

3) Next you have to go to each adgroup and submit them. Adcenter actually takes you through the same process as when you create a new adgroup, but at least this time your ads and keywords are loaded.

4) Before you approve your ads, make sure your tracking and source codes in the destination URL’s are correct. For example, if you have source=google, you may want to switch it to source=bing and so forth. And make sure you re-save the ad and not “create a new ad”. This way you don’t have two of he same ads with the only difference being the source code.

5) For some reason, all of your bids come in at a nickel so you have to reset your bids during this process. You can do it at the adgroup level or at the keyword level, but either way, you have to do it.

6) Once you go through this process for an adgroup, save it and jump back out to the list of adgroups. Now, go back in to that very same adgroup you just saved and check your bids. Sometimes, the bids you set don’t take. I’ve run into this a few times, so make sure you check your bids for each adgroup or any keywords where you set individual bids.

NOW you are done!

Despite these little obstacles, the process is pretty painless and I think it will be worth it for you. If you have large campaigns and lots of adgroups, it can get a little mind-numbing, but you’ll get through it, I promise.

I like Bing so far and really hope their market share increases. It could be a good thing for a lot of people.

Categories: PPC
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