Common Bulk sheet Errors and How to Avoid Them

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Before talking about the errors we find in a bulk sheet, let’s first understand the meaning of the term itself. “A bulk sheet is a spreadsheet that contains data for creating or editing campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and other items. For each type of item, you need to create or edit, its bulk sheet must contain a specific group of columns, and the columns must be labeled with specific, pre-defined names.”

After the meaning, next important concept to understand is the Bulksheet Upload Process. It is a continuous process with primarily four steps.

• Step 1: Create a New or Download an Existing Bulksheet.
• Step 2: Make Changes (Additions/Edits)
• Step 3: Upload bulksheet in preview format (w/o posting)

Step 3 is usually called as Upload validation; here all uploaded errors will come up in the bulk sheet view. We can refer these to verify against all the requirements specific to Ad Cloud and/or Search Engine.

• Step 4: If no upload errors, post bulksheet into SE

Step 4 is basically a Post validation step; chances are that SE errors may still come up at this stage because a validation process is initiated by API as well, upon posting.

Next thing in the Bulksheet upload is the data you need to upload. Well, as we have discussed earlier, the data uploaded in the sheet should be labelled and structured properly.

Now let’s discuss about the common types of EF errors we may encounter in the process:

• Missing rows for parent entities or child entity creation failure, due to an error with parent entity
• Missing information in mandatory columns
• Unsupported values in columns
• Invalid referencing
• Overwriting deleted entities

In Case of parent entities

Example situation: Campaign Name Missing/ Ad Group Name Missing

Possible causes for the error along with the solutions:

• You are creating new ad groups in a new campaign, whose Campaign row hasn’t been included. Due to the workflows of bulksheet, a separate row containing the name and settings of campaign, as a parent entity, is required.

Solution: Please include a separate row for campaign and its settings

• You have misspelled the existing campaign name or you have included your existing campaigns under the wrong account. Meaning, a campaign name you provided may not exist in the specified account, AMO is recognizing it as new entry not the old one.

  Solution: Please check if campaign ID column is empty and if so, please check you have spelled your campaign name correctly and included it under the correct account

• You have misspelled the column header for Campaign Name (e.g. provided “Campaign” in the header rather than “Campaign Name”). The contents of the header row must exactly match the ones defined in the system.
  

Solution: Please check the header row against what in the system by downloading a bulk sheet of any account structure

• While entering location targeting settings in new campaigns, you may have entered information into another column than Location and Location Type columns. Locations have a separate row in the bulk sheet and should be provided in their relevant columns.

  Solution: Please include a separate row for locations, with Campaign Name, Location and its type, Bid Adjustment and Location Status filled in.

Similarly, in every category there can be multiple opportunities to make mistakes. As you may have noticed, causes of these mistakes are common. One only has to look closely while working, to avoid these simple mistakes in the bulk sheet.

Common Categories of SE errors

• Keyword or ad text exceeding limits dictated by SE
• Invalid characters in keyword text
• Keywords requiring review