Re-enabling Mass Amounts of AdWords

[jdancing]

AdWordsAdvisor states: “keywords which are currently disabled may now be deleted and re-entered, so long as ones's Max CPC is greater than the min CPC required to run.”

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This is great, but I have some AdWord groups with 800 keywords of which 200 are disabled. I can not find an easy way to filter on the disabled AdWords so that I can copy them as text, delete them, them paste them back into the same AdWords group as new keywords.

It seems I can only copy a text file of all AdWords in a group which would require hours of hunt and pecking to weed out my active keywords in the list before I can paste the formerly disabled keywords back in as new.

There has got to be an easier way to re-enable my AdWords…

[eWhisper]

I just found one other way to do this quickly for an entire account.

Get bulk oupost enabled on the account (need a rep). Download the file, remove the keyword status colum - send the file back to the rep.

Due to such a large change, I'd also recommend replacing the campaign column and uploading it into a new campaign in case something odd happens with the upload.

[slappyjack]

Just copy all of your keywords. Then sort by diabled and delete them by page. Then copy all of your keywords back. It will just affect the disabled ones.

[jdancing]

Slappyjack,

So re-adding AdWords that are already active in a group will just be ignored and the system will just pick up the disabled keywords and re-add them as new (assuming I delete the disabled ones first)? If I understand you correctly, this would be the perfect solution… Question – have you actually tried it? I’d hate to screw up a whole AdWords group that I have spent over a year grooming.

[eWhisper]

Keyword history is kept in an adgroup.

If you copy all the keywords in a group, delete them all, save the group, then readd all of them - the history for every keyword is still there, just now none of the keywords are disabled.

[jdancing]

Thanks all... worked like a charm.

[justshelley]

I can tell how NOT to do this...Don't try to run a report for disabled terms through Google's reporting system. We tried this with several clients and we would either get a blank report or a report showing only a handful of disabled terms when in reality there were quite a few disabled terms spread throughout the account.

[luckychucky]

Adwords has lame and/or non-existent functionality for playing with every keyword in a campaign, all from one place, regardless of the individual adgroups each is contained within. It's frustrating. Wouldn't it be cool if you could sort ALL your keywords campaign-wide by max CPC or CTR or whatever, then edit them all from one page, just as you can now do only inside each solo adgroup?

[Eurydice]

Oh, c'mon guys! Read your emails from Adwords. Look at those notices at the top of your GAW acct. There's a tool that lets you do this.

1) In the "Campaign Management" tab, click Tools.
2) Select the Find and Edit Max CPC.
3) In the section "Select Match Type and Status", deselect Active. This sets the tool to find any match type that is Inactive.
4) At the bottom, select "Increase each keyword's Max CPC to the recommended minimum bid".
5) Click on Continue.
6) This displays all of the Inactive KWs with their new bids. You can deselect the ones that ask for $250 minimum bids.

There's plenty of other tools there. Spend a few hours and study those. Extremely useful. And pay attention to the notices from GAW at the top of your screen. They've been telling you about these tools for months.

[eWhisper]

That tool completely fails in all my accounts of over 10k keywords. Most of Google's automated tools fail when the account breaks 100k keywords.

We've had to custom write tools for managing accounts like this.

Not even the ad editor tool works all the time, on https sites, it rewrites the urls with adwords in front of it causing all the ads to break.

While I like that Google is trying to write tools, most of them are pretty inconsistent in their implementation.

[justshelley]

Read and re-read Google "instructions". Tried to do deal with "inactive" terms the way they suggested and on one account, it came up with 8,450 changes. Similar results with others. No, doesn't work.

[luckychucky]

Thanks, Eurydice.

The function you describe works well for "Inactive" keywords. Apparently an inactive keyword is one for which Google has now decided the minimum bid was too low, under its new quality-ranking (translation: minimum-bid-increasing) algorithm.

What about accessing and editing a campaign-wide list of "Disabled" keywords - how's that done?