Do It in Bulk

Why and how to use our bulksheet tool for your search marketing campaigns

bulkbins1 There’s a faster way to do everything.

Well, unless you’re stuck in traffic at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon, or waiting in the security line at the airport for a Monday morning flight.

But if you’re working on your Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaign—fine-tuning, making changes or just trying to optimize stuff —chances are, using our bulksheet tool will speed things up a bit for you, no matter how many keywords or creatives you have in your campaign.

A bulksheet isn’t the fanciest of tools—it’s basically just a spreadsheet with specialized fields that allow you to modify campaign, ad group, keyword, and ad information. But it can make a lot of tasks faster and simpler than they would be in the Sponsored Search user interface, because you can make a whole bunch of changes and then upload them to your account at once.

Say, for example, you want to add a destination url for all your keywords. The bulksheet lets you make the change just once, and then apply it to all instances within your campaign. Similarly, if you’re running a “free shipping” promotion for just a weekend, you can use the bulksheet to add this component to your creatives all at once.

Another cool aspect—and one that many of our advertisers take advantage of—is the ability to translate campaigns from other engines into Yahoo! Sponsored Search. So, this means you can import another campaign and then use the bulksheet to figure out what keywords are missing and upload those en masse.

See? This is saving you time already.

How to use the bulksheet tool

You can download the tool from the “Import” link under the Campaign tab. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a few essential tips:

Pay attention to the Update Header Row. This nifty little section of the bulksheet allows you to dictate which columns you want the system to ignore when you upload.
Ignore the IDs. When you download your account information using the bulksheet, you’ll immediately notice that each campaign component has an associated ID. It’s crucial that you don’t make any changes to this field—if you do, the upload will not work appropriately.
Don’t worry about the Display Status. As you can imagine, once you download all data within your campaign, you’ll notice there’s a lot of information. The system automatically assigns a value to this field, so this is a column you can just skip over.
Select a valid campaign start date. In short, you can’t go back in time. This field must either match the date of the upload, or be a later date. You can’t input an earlier date. It sounds self-explanatory, but it can cause some confusion as you’re uploading your information.

A final checklist
Ready to get started? Before you speed off, take a moment to review a few of the most common user errors associated with the bulksheet:

Remember to make sure that everything has an associated bid.
Uploaded files have to be in the correct format. To do this, save as ‘unicode text’ and a .csv extension.
Don’t duplicate ad group names.
And, you guessed it, use unique campaign names.
Adhere to the 35-character limit for display URLs.

For more tips and tricks, check out this section of the help center.

—Malin Kennedy, Senior Manager, Advertiser Experience

Photo courtesty of Flickr user Alisha Vargas.

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17 Comments Add your own

1. Don't Sell The Yahoo Bulk&hellip | August 20th, 2009 at 3:03 am

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8. Yahoo Gives Search Market&hellip | August 24th, 2009 at 3:02 am

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9. Jason Dorn | September 23rd, 2009 at 12:20 pm

I love how Google provides the advertisers with an amazing tool – the AdWords editor & Yahoo provides a spreadsheet. Welcome to 1998, yahoo. “chances are, using our bulksheet tool will speed things up a bit for you”, gosh, thanks for the specific information.
10. Keith | September 30th, 2009 at 10:01 am

This is a joke. I’d love to have a 1:1 chat with the product manager that thinks #3 “To do this, save as ‘unicode text’ and a .csv extension.” is user friendly.
11. Adam Parikh | September 30th, 2009 at 10:47 am

I hate to pile on, but I’ve submitted many a bulk sheet over the years and there is rarely an error free upload.

Two words: offline editor. Microsoft listened why won’t Yahoo? AdWords Editor was released in early 2006. Just sayin’.
12. Curt Roth | September 30th, 2009 at 11:18 am

I will gladly pile it on. Yahoo interface is about 7 years behind the times. They don’t tell you the bulk upload is only for those spending at least $200 a month. And no off-line editor is ridiculous. Even Microsoft has that feature. Yahoo has so many Stupid Company Rules, I am surprised they are still around. The new CEO of Yahoo should try and do an ad campaign using Yahoo Search Marketing. She would fire the whole lot of the designers!
13. Hendra | September 30th, 2009 at 3:56 pm

Yeah, you guys should look to your fellow competitors. I bet hundreds if not thousands of Google advertisers would love to port their campaign to Yahoo.

But the way you guys making it so difficult to do that is a big turn of for many payperclick marketer.

Btw, to avoid misintepretation you should mention that this bulk campaign import only available to people who spend at least $200 a month.
14. richard | October 10th, 2009 at 7:25 pm

godaddy dose a nice job for you. yahoo and google is alright to just cost to much
15. unlimited | October 19th, 2009 at 6:16 am

Well this looks nice at first sight, but we’ll see on the long run how does it work for our needs. Yahoo is good but still has to improve some things out to reach the quality attained by Google. I agree that somebody forgot to mention that this import feature is only available for those who spend $200 or more every month… I would prefer it to be available for everybody.
16. assisted living in los angeles | November 6th, 2009 at 1:34 am

faster is not always better
17. dave | February 15th, 2010 at 12:44 am

Not a big fan of bulksheets. I can’t wait for the Yahoo-version of the editor!

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