Julie Friedman Bacchini and Ted Ives shared their tips at SMX East.

NEW YORK — Tips and tricks for working more efficiently in the Google Ads and Bing Ads web interfaces and desktop editors was the topic of conversation at a session during SMX East this week. Speakers Julie Friedman Bacchini, President of Neptune Moon LLC and Ted Ives, CEO of SEMCopilot highlighted new and hard-to-find features and suggested ways to make the most of the tools.

Julie Friedman Bacchini

Friedman Bacchini said she has not been a fan of the new Google Ads interface, but has worked to find the positives to be more productive in the UI.

The Overviews pages, Friedman Bacchini said, are very uselful and a big improvement over the old interface. The recent ability to take action right from some of the cards, such as being able to add or negative search queries and edit or duplicate ads, in the Overviews are particularly helpful for being able to implement optimizations quickly.

Friedman Bacchini also had tips for using Keyword Planner. “Want to know what Google thinks your click-through rate should be? Look to the Keyword Planner,” she said. Google shows a CTR estimate for keywords in the “Get search volume and forecasts” report in Keyword Planner. Friedman Bacchini said the numbers should be taken with “a grain of salt,” but can provide a directional benchmark of where to aim.

Another tip is to create at-a-glance KPI dashboards in Reports Editor. Using the scorecards option, Friedman Bacchini showed, you can make dashboards that make it easy to compare performance by time period. The notes option is a handy way to highlight certain changes.

Friedman Bacchini also provided a useful cheat sheet for Google Display Network campaign objectives. Her full presentation is available below.

Ted Ives

In his presentation, Ives pointed out several tips for navigating Bing Ads. Among them is the recommendation to use Bing Ads Editor when porting campaigns over from Google Ads. Using Bing Ads Editor, Ives said, enables you to address all the various settings in bulk during the campaign import.

Another unique benefit Bing Ads offers is a negative keyword conflict report. You can apply the report’s findings to Google Ads campaigns as well, Ives pointed out.

Ives had several tips for Google Display Network (GDN) settings and optimization and highlighted an HTML5 validator. If you’re uploading rich media creatives for the the GDN, using the validator (link provided in the presentation) can save you from having to wait 24-48 hours to find out from Google that your ads have issues.

Ives’ full presentation with many more tips is below