Create/Modify Campaigns
All of the CampaignBuilder functionality is presented through an intuitive one-page interface which we refer to as your Projects Page. (Of course, you must be logged in to see your Projects Page). From here, you have access to all of your project lists, as well as the project lists that have been shared with you.
A project is one campaign and adgroup combination. Project lists are sets of projects owned by one user (and potentially shared with other users). Each project list is shown in the pull-down menu in the upper left of the screen (Examples is the default list selected when you first sign up). You can see the owner of any project list displayed below the name.
CampaignBuilder uses the concept of a project to store and manage your campaign information. That's because you can do things with projects (within CampaignBuilder) that you can't do with campaigns or adgroups by themselves. Let's go over a few of these features of projects so you have a good idea of how they work.
- Each project is a single campaign/adgroup combination. The only exception to that, is when you create a project that clones campaigns for a set of cities or zipcodes. In that case, separate campaigns for each city or zipcode are stored as one set in the project.
- Projects are organized into Project Lists. All projects must belong to a project list. This can be one of the two lists that are permanently associated with your account (MyProjects and Examples), or a project list that you created and named, or a project list owned by another user that is shared with you.
- Nothing changes in a project without first hitting an Edit button, making changes, then hitting the Save button. This is true of Settings, Locations, Keywords, and Ads/Extns. It is also true of Sync Options. This is different from most of the interface controls you would use in Google Ads/Editor. Most of those controls are "live" in that any typing you do is actually changing your campaign.
Campaigns and adgroups within Ads/Editor are identified by their campaign name and their adgroup name respectively. Those names might be around in your production account for a very long time - even though they go through a lot of changes. At any point in time, it can be quite challenging to identify which version of a particular campaign is in production and running. When you make changes to your campaign, it can be quite difficult to know that the changes have been applied.
Projects give you the tools to do version control effectively.
Projects help you to stay organized with two features: a unique six digit project number that is system assigned when you create a project, and a set of fields you can use to describe a particular campaign version. You can use these to precisely identify which version (project) is currently loaded into your production account.
There are two ways to create a project: Create a blank one with the new project button, or, copy one by using the copy button for that project. New projects are completely empty except for their six digit project id and a project list/owner they belong to. Copied projects are identical to their original, except they have a new project id and can be placed in any project list (except Examples).
You can use multiple projects to handle one campaign that has multiple adgroups. Each project will handle a different adgroup, but they will all belong to the same campaign when they are loaded into Editor. This gives you the abilty to update and manage each adgroup separately with the visibility to ensure their consistency.
