When Google released version 2.5 of their tool AdWords Editor last December I felt tempted to play around with it a little. Furthermore just shortly after I had installed the program Google offered me to take part in a Webinar. I did take part and I did learn that it really is quite useful eventually.
It took about one hour to show the participants most of the latest features but it was well worth the time.

What is AdWords Editor?

I let Google speak:

AdWords Editor is a free, downloadable application for managing your AdWords account. AdWords Editor offers a wide array of features, but the basic process is simple: download your account, make your changes offline, then upload your revised campaigns when the changes are finalized.

So why using an offline tool when we’re on line constantly?

Because it can do so much more than the online interface and it’s quite comfortable to make some changes and still being able to reverse everything if neccessary before uploading it to our active account.

To me the major advantages are:

- You don’t need to wait for a ’several thousands keywords campaign’ to load everytime you want to access it. Everything works much faster.
- You can switch between several accounts in no time (especially useful when not using the Client Center)
- You can copy existing ad groups, text ads and keywords in 1-2 seconds (depends on how fast your fingers can move from CTRL+C to CTRL+V). This comes in really handy for us as we’re running A/B tests quite often which requires heavy ad group copying.
- There’s no need for bulk sheets anymore. You can copy loads of keywords into an ad group in very little time.
- It’s really easy to make little adjustments such as deciding whether you wanna go for exact match, broad match or phrase
- It let’s you know when you’re about to use a keyword more than once
- You can download and save your campaigns and import them on another computer
- I can still use the online interface when I like to and just download the latest changes to the Editor tool in a second

I think the only problem would be that when you work on a campaign on line and forget to download these changes to the Editor tool but upload changes that you’ve made on the Editor. In this case your on line changes will be overwritten. That’s what just might happen when you’re working on two different interfaces. That’s why the first thing I do when working with the Editor is downloading the latest status of the account. Be careful with that.
There are a few more rather small disadvantaged like using the stats. You can’t choose a date range other than yesterday, last 7 days and last 30 days which is pretty useless. However word is that this will be improved with the next update.

So far I can only recommend it as it really saves a lot of time. I appreciate that Google seeks to improve their advertiser’s usage experiences.