After falling painfully behind Google in Pay Per Click tool innovation, Microsoft has done one thing right. Recognizing that most people start with AdWords accounts and then move extra budget to the adCenter side, MSN finally built a quick and easy method for importing existing campaigns from AdWords to adCenter. Assuming you use a PC and you’ve downloaded Microsoft adCenter’s Desktop Editor,

you can now use a special import feature on MS adCenter to import directly from your AdWords account. This means no inbetween csv or excel spreadsheets. Simply select which campaigns and ad groups and click “Import”.

I’ve tested the functionality and it works great, so long as you import entire campaigns. But there are two caveats worth calling attention to.

Updating Partial Campaigns Not So Much

The one snag I noticed came when I tried to import a campaign, but I opted to not update existing information on two ad groups that already existed on the Bing/Yahoo side. adCenter generated an error message which sent me back to the drawing board.

My quick response was to import the entire campaign and ignore the option to leave existing ad groups as is. The import worked flawlessly. It is the easiest and fastest way to keep both tools current.

You’ll Have to ALWAYS Update AdWords First

Since AdWords doesn’t have similar functionality at this point, your best bet is to make all campaign changes on the Google side and then quick-import them over to the adCenter side.

Exact Match or Nothing

This presents an obvious problem. Assuming your ad groups yield different results on Bing vs Google, you may want certain ad groups to remain unedited in order to maintain their superior results on MSN. That would require you to only update the ad groups you don’t wish to change within a campaign.

Granted, this is supposed to be a basic functionality and option, but this functionality didn’t work for me out of the box. I’ll try it again in the weeks ahead. Just keep in mind, user behavior is different on each search engine, and you don’t necessarily want identical campaigns on both ends after the initial setup.

If you have any experiences with the new import feature you’d like to share, please leave a comment below.

And for the record, I’m going to once again voice my displeasure that Microsoft hasn’t provided a Desktop Editor for Mac.