My tip to fellow search marketers, step your Excel game up. It is not enough to know your vendors administrative interfaces (Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN AdCenter), or keyword research tools. You need to fast, efficient and effective in working with the data those tools spit out at you. Maybe I'm late to the party and should have paid more attention in college but there are some super handy Excel tools that have been allowing to get down to business much faster:
- Auto-Filter - great for isolating campaigns and ad groups, then sorting by metrics. The 'custom' feature is a life saver.
- Conditional Formatting - If you have some pre-defined thresholds for metrics (cost per conversion, etc). Use this feature to quickly identify what is either going well or not.
- Macros - I find this exceptionally usefull for removing special characters from typed keyword lists.
- Sort by format (Excel 2007) - Once you have used conditional formatting you can use a sort by format to group cells together.
I just came across The Excel Magician: 70+ Excel Tips and Shortcuts to help you make Excel Magic which is a usefull set of links to brush up on or learn some time savers.
