AdCenter Desktop Favourites

Another of AdCenter Desktop’s “simple but useful“ features is the ability to set ad groups as “favourites” and then access them quickly from the Dashboard.

This is useful when you have large accounts with hundreds or even thousands of ad groups. With Google AdWords Editor we tend to setup “Primary Focus” campaigns and manually move good performing ad groups into this campaign so we can focus more of our attention and effort on these groups. Whilst this method has some advantages, the Favourites feature is much easier to manage as the ad groups remain in their existing (and hopefully well themed) campaigns.

Setting an ad group as a favourite is simply a matter of right clicking the ad group in the Browser window and selecting the “add to AdCenter favourites” option. All favourites are then listed in the Dashboard.

AdCenter Desktop Alerts

The AdCenter Alerts functionality within the AdCenter Desktop is a really neat idea particularly if you are managing a number of accounts.

AdCenter alerts allow you set thresholds for CTR and CPC. Let’s say that you want to monitor any ad group where the average click through rate is below 5%. The AdCenter Desktop allows you to set 5% as the threshold for Ad Group Average CTR and Desktop will list all ad groups that fall below that threshold in the Desktop Dashboard.

Setting the alerts is pretty simple; just select the Alerts icon form the Ribbon at the top of AdCenter Desktop and a dialogue box will appear allowing you to set the thresholds.



















Any Adgroups that fall below that threshold are then listed in the Manager screen.













The alerts dialogue box states that you can set alerts to notify you when values drops below or rises above the set threshold but I couldn't see how to implement this. It would be useful to trigger an alert when the CPC is above a set amount but that didnt seem to be an option.

It would also be useful if AdGroups which triggered an alert were highlighted in the main Manager screen rather than tucking them away in the Dashboard.

Adcenter Desktop Beta

At last we have our hands on the new AdCenter Desktop Beta!

At first glance the interface looks surprisingly (and refreshingly) different to AdWords Editor. The navigational elements are very similar to those found in Office 2007. At the top of the application you'll find the "ribbon" which is grouped into three main tabs called Home, Manage and Research.

The home tab features panels for uploading and downloading data plus a handy "preview" tab that totals the number of changes you made since downloading your data. This feature also allows you to quickly check your ads for potential editorial issues before uploading.

The export function allows you to export your account in AdCenter format, a 3^rd Party format, as HTML or as an adCenter archive (acea). What would have been fab would be a direct export to Ms Word (if you want to spell check an entire account export as a HTML file, open in IE and then choose the File > Edit with Word option).

I guess the most eagerly awaited feature would be the import function. It's not unfair to say that most ad agencies would want to manage their accounts in Google and then port across to adCenter. Maybe the adcenter desktop is good enough to switch that around but for now a seamless import from AdWords Editor would be a boon. I'll confess that this is the first thing I tried when I got the desktop and importing direct from an AdWords Editor export didn't work for me but I've not had much time to play yet.

Next along the ribbon are the stats options allowing you to view stats for a series of preset time ranges and although changing the setting does prompt another download it worked pretty quickly.