This morning I popped over to the Campaign Settings tab on the “all settings” sub-tab to make a few campaign language updates and…be still my heart…discovered a sorely-needed UI update to real bulk editing tools for Campaign Settings! If you’ve ever had to clone irregular geographic footprints across Adwords campaigns (for example), you understand my level of excitement at seeing a filter button and an edit dropdown.

There’s A Filter!

My delight began with the  filter drop-down. It allows you to filter a group of campaigns with all the filtering capabilities that are found in other tabs within the UI. Previously, the Campaign Settings tab had no filter, instead it only had sorting capabilities. Now, it’s easy to select all the campaigns you would like to update by filtering on the settings themselves, campaign names or campaign types.

This filtering ability is a massive efficiency gain for accounts that have dozens or hundreds of campaigns that need an update to the settings.

The New Editing Features

Previously, campaigns had very limiting bulk editing features. You could select campaigns via the check box and after hitting the edit button you could “copy down” some of the settings (not all of them) to the other selected campaigns. You were limited to updates only on the page you were currently viewing, so for very large accounts, some updates meant paging through multiple pages and repeating your change. Now, when you “check all” you are given the choice to update only the rows show on the page or all rows across all pages that match your filter. For an account with thousands of campaigns, this update is hugely helpful.

After selecting your campaigns, the edit button allows to to select the setting you are updating and add whole new settings or update the current settings – the choices are dependent on the setting you are trying to update.

And this is where my excitement stopped. In releasing this update, there are some major and common scenarios that were not fully addressed and the key features I was most excited about (better bulk location and scheduling support) have actually taken a step back,

Where My Delight Turns to Sadness

All this new functionality would be particularly exciting for editing locations and scheduling in bulk. That said, both have some really major shortcomings.

• Within this location editing panel, there is not support for advanced locations such as household income tiers.
• The “copy down” functionality appears to have been removed in this update, so if you have a complex geo footprint applied to an existent campaign (like a list of 100 cities) the only way to copy that to other campaigns is in Adwords Editor.
• Combining those first 2 points is where the biggest problem emerges. The only way to create complex geographic footprints inclusive of any advance geographic settings is one by one on each individual campaigns’ settings page because advanced geographic targets are not supported in Adwords Editor.
• Scheduling is not one of the items that can be edited from the new “all settings” edit drop down menu. However, it used to be copied across campaigns on that page. The “copy down” function removal creates essentially the same problem here. Previously you could create complex schedules in one campaign and just copy them to other campaigns in one click. Now, without this ability, nor a similar function to replace it, nor day parting support in Adwords Editor, complex schedules need to be created or edited on a campaign by campaign basis.

This update has so much potential to improve efficiency in managing campaign settings. However, in order to be a true step forward and not back, Adwords needs to make a quick patch to re-include “copy-down” functionality for scheduling and locations. Beyond that, hopefully there will be more sophisticated ways to address these in bulk.

In the mean time, be very careful about removing or changing your complex schedules or location targets because until an update is made, you may find yourself having to rebuild them on each single impacted campaign one at a time.