Following a tip from Gary at Topside Media, I finally got a handle on Yahoo Search Marketing’s import function. Yahoo Search Marketing (Yahoo’s sponsored ad offering) is a necessary evil in competitive markets; but their Web web-based interface is both slow and unwieldy.

I was looking for a way to import some finely tuned AdWords campaigns into Yahoo directly. They have recently upgraded their import functionality, and now AdWords campaigns–complete with ad groups, bids, ad copy, and keywords can all be imported in one operation.

How to Import Into Yahoo Search Marketing

1. First of all, you need a file to import. If you are a user of the Google AdWords Editor software ( if you aren’t, you should be), you simply go to the file menu, and find “export as CSV”. You may select  all campaigns, orally particular campaigns; you can also select whether you want active campaigns, paused campaigns, or both. From the web-based AdWords interface, you do it a little differently: you generate a keyword report as a CSV file. Since I am an AdWords Editor user, I opted for that route–just another benefit of using this powerful tool.

2. Next, log into your Yahoo Search Marketing account. From the dashboard, in the upper right you will see a blue button titled “import campaigns.” Click on that button, and you will see a button to select your CSV file, add a button to import your file. That’s about it–the Wizard does the rest. You will be asked what you want to do about conflicting campaign names–I chose to simply add the new campaigns in addition to my old campaign names.

After the Import

Warning: your geo-targeting will not import–you will need to do that manually, or you’ll be advertising in far-off cities. Also, as with any import, you want to do a thorough review to make sure everything is working properly. Overall, a real timesaver.