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Google Adwords Deep Linking VDPs In-House

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Hey everyone! Anyone out there doing Adwords direct to VDPs in-house? I am looking to start doing select vehicles form our used inventory. Just want to know if there is any advice on proceeding.

Thanks!
Hi Nick, actually a really good idea and (contrary to a couple of previous comments) fairly easy to do. Give me a call at your convenience and I'll tell you in detail how we can help you to do it. You can reach me at (408) 218-6407
 
Before I automated most of the heavy lifting, I just used this tool, alongside excel.

https://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/

When I export my inventory I export it with the vehicle ID so I can re-create the URLs in excel with a simple cell combination.

Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 | etc
http://.com | VEHID | MAKE | etc

Then replace all CSV commas with '/' and it converts it to one column with proper vehicle URLs in it.
Always going to depend on the website system of course. It's much easier with a simple ID based URL system.
I would not be able to achieve the same thing with URLs like /used/Chevrolet/2012-Chevrolet-Equinox-61f279710a0a00bf5bfc742d3023aa90.htm because I can't export that inventory with that ID in it.

Once you have the excel spreadsheet, it's much easier to update it with automation and then simply import the list into AdWords Editor.
After that, I built a simple reporting dashboard that showed the performance in Cyfe and used that to track performance and changes that should be made. Always had historical spreadsheets to compare with as well, so we could look at the best performing weeks or months and look at what we did then.
 
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@Nick Spolec You should try WebHarvy. That will give you all the data you need from your websites. All the VDP urls, image urls, pricing data, vehicle data and pretty much anything else you tell it to grab and store. It also has a built in scheduler as well. It's has a simple UI. Basically just highlight the item you want to capture off the page. It can save the data in multiple formats for you. If you set it up correctly you can even build out keyword list as well. Once it runs it course, you'll need to upload the file. There's a couple diff ways you can do this. An FTP program with a scheduler built in or a simpler and free way would be to use Google Drive. I like that route a little better for you. Use google drive on your PC to sync / upload the spreadsheet to your Drive account. Remember, to set WebHarvy to overwrite the file each day or if your running multiple times a day after each run. That way you will have one file being synced and uploaded to the Drive account. Your next step is to connect the dots between Adwords and your Drive account. You can do this by using Adwords Scripts. If you look in your Adwords account, under "Bulk Operations", you'll find some links and where to get started. There is a learning curve but once you learn it, it pretty freaking powerful and you can automate alot of things. Here is a example CSV file for the structuring you will need WebHarvey to build for you. Also, Once you build out the script for WebHarvy to run, to edit that script, just open the program and load that script. Make your changes and do a test run. If you like the results, just save it and keep going. Here's a link to Adwords Scripts with a little bit better explanation and a example script

HTH

 
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