h3>If you’ve never used AdWords Editor before, you should give it a go. It’s a free Google application that allows you to manage and update your Google AdWords campaigns offline, and then upload your changes to the online AdWords interface. Believe us when we say it saves you an awful lot of time and energy.

Here, we’ve put together the top 5 things we love about AdWords Editor…

1. You can copy and paste details between ad groups, campaigns and even accounts
How handy is that? The Google interface is pretty user-friendly, but I for one find it really annoying that I can’t quickly and easily cut and paste to multiple ad groups or campaigns.

With AdWords Editor, you can copy or cut and paste keywords and ads, and move entire ad groups or campaigns. You can even copy and paste to another account. This is a brilliant timesaver if you need to make changes to multiple campaigns, or want to duplicate ads and just tweak them.

You can also drag and drop keywords, ad groups, or ads into different parts of the account. This works like copy and paste, but be careful – it will delete each keyword from its original destination.

2. You can make bulk changes
Another favourite feature of mine. How many times have you wanted to add quite a few negative keywords to all campaigns? Or update your bids without having to review every single keyword in the AdWords interface?

Once you’ve downloaded your campaigns, you can add or edit multiple items at once, including keywords, ads, bids, and URLs.

For example, you may have noticed a spelling mistake in your ads (yes, I’ve been there!). Select the ads, and simply change them in the ‘edit selected text ads’ box. Another example might be that you want to amend all your max cpc bids. Again, select the keywords you want to change, select ‘advanced bid changes’ and raise your bids.

You can also add/update multiple keywords and negative keywords – so much easier than doing it through the AdWords interface.

3. You can find and replace, and append to your ads and keywords
The find and replace function is invaluable and we use it a lot. Often we’re running campaigns with special offers in them. Say for example, you’re offering a 50% discount. The offer ends and you’ve got 500 ads to amend. By using ‘replace text in selected items’ option under the Edit tab, you can find all instances of 50% and change them back to your standard 20% off.

It also has an extra, often unknown function – you can “duplicate matching items and replace text in duplicates”. This is a nice little timesaver when it comes to creating new ad variations or keywords with a slight variation. It’s also useful when it comes to A/B landing page testing as it also works on destination URLs. You can simply choose your ads and use this function to duplicate them and change the destination URL in one easy step.

The ‘Append Text’ function allows you to add text either before or after the existing text. This could be used to create expansions of a keyword list. For example, you could add ‘buy’ in front of a list of products, and then cut and paste them into their own ad group.

4. You can group keywords using the keyword grouper
I know I sometimes struggle to group my keywords into logical ad groups, but it is one of the easiest ways to boost CTR and profitability. Doing this manually is painstaking work, especially if you’ve got thousands of keywords.

Within AdWords Editor there is something called the Keyword Grouper. The Keyword Grouper organizes your keywords into ad groups based on common themes.

You might have already set your campaign up and you have one ad group with hundreds of keywords in it. So the goal is to group your keywords into smaller, more tightly themed ad groups.

In AdWords Editor, go to ‘Tools’, then ‘Keyword Grouper’. Once you click ‘generate common terms’, AdWords Editor does its thing and splits your keywords into smaller ad groups. Make sure you select ‘Yes, copy text ads into each new ad group’ and you’re done.

5. Ad scheduling
The other thing we love about AdWords Editor is that you can copy and paste the ad scheduling between campaigns. In the AdWords online interface it takes a lot of time to go through every campaign and set the days and times you want your ads to run.

I recently did some work for a mortgage client, and ended up splitting the account into 35 campaigns. I wanted them all to run at the same time, on the same days. Manually, that would’ve been a nightmare. But with AdWords Editor, it was a piece of cake.

So there you have it – some of things we love about AdWords Editor. And apart from anything else, it’s free. Download it here http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/ – it’s a must!