How to Convert & Import a Google Pay Per Click Campaign into Yahoo
Last week I saw a post on Search Engine Roundtable about users being frustrated over moving their Google accounts into Yahoo. I can totally understand their frustrations and I’ve had this happen as well. I’m going to to a quick walk-through below to show you how to successfully import your Google PPC campaign into Yahoo Search Marketing.
- If you don’t already have the Google Adwords editor you need to download that under the tools section of Google adwords.
- Next you need to open the Google Adwords editor and if this is your first time using it you need to import your accounts. Once this is done select which campaign you would like to move into Yahoo.
- Once you’ve done this you need to do some editing to the excel file. The most important thing is to make sure you remove your negative keywords. Yahoo cannot accept negative keywords. You also want to look at your naming conventions and your tracking codes. I for example use GAW for Google and YSM for Yahoo. Hit save and hit ok after the warning about the unicode text format.
- Once this is done go to Yahoo and then to import campaign. At this time you don’t want to import but you need to convert first. When it’s done converting download the file and open to inspect what changes you need to make. (Take a look at advanced match, standard match etc.) Then once you’ve made these changes make sure you save as a csv unicode txt. Your file must end in .csv
- Now go to the import campaign option. Give it a name and upload.
- Once the file is uploaded in Yahoo take a look at it. Make sure you set your negatives again The maximum amount of negatives is only 50 unlike Google so you need to set your negatives at the ad level as well if you have a large amount of negatives.
- Now take a look at your daily budgets and take a look at your Geo-targeting and look at your content-match status too.
This is it. If I’ve left anything out please let me know. I am writing this kinda late 
new for me.. thanks
This is good info.
I would also add that Yahoo has different limits than Google. For example:
- 25 campaigns max in Google vs. 20 in YSM
- 2000 keywords max in Google vs 1000 in YSM)
Our SEM suite has a tool that converts from Google to Yahoo and handles most of the special cases. It wasn’t easy to get right.
Read your article and thanks for that! I am still wondering as I embark on this journey: What about bid levels etc. I am trying to line these up more exactly. Any suggestions?
Your explanation is so simple – I look at the headers of the respective Excel files and want help making sure I paste the data over in the right column.
Thx.