Building out a pay-per-click advertising campaign can be a tedious and, dare I say it, slightly boring process. The strategy that takes place leading up to the build-out, and the optimization that takes place post build-out, is challenging and enjoyable. However, the build-out itself is just good old fashioned grunt work.

Well, Trace recently discovered a program called Efficient PPC that has changed our PPC build-out lives forever.

We used Efficient PPC in the past to build-out a massive campaign; but until recently we hadn’t tapped into the full potential of this angelic app. Yesterday, when building out a large PPC campaign, I dug in a bit and discovered the power of Efficient PPC. Basically, creates multiple campaigns, ad-groups, keyword lists and text-ads in one fell swoop.

Here’s how it works (For the sake of this example, I’ll ignore the campaign level and geo-targeting and pretend all these ad-groups are part of one big, messy campaign--which would be incorrect; but I don’t want to write all day):

Let’s say I’m advertising a chain snowboarding shop in the DC Metro Area and I only want to target people in the specific cities in which these shops reside. With Efficient PPC, I simply create a list containing the specific cities (Arlington, Washington, Bethesda etc.) and call it “City-words.” I create another list containing all the keywords in the snowboardingvertical (gnar gnar, radical, sick, etc.) and call it “Snowboarding-words.” These lists have now become tokens and are implemented by using braces ( {city-words} ). Here’s where the genius of Efficient PPC kicks in. Rather than manually creating multiple ad-groups with separate keyword lists and text-ads; Efficient PPC automatically populates my ad-groups, keyword lists, and text-ads based on the lists I’ve created. That’s probably still a bit confusing, so check this out:

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