About migrating off of inventory rules

Beginning February 18th 2019, inventory rules will be deprecated. Search Ads 360 offers a number of new tools that offer more functionality and control than inventory rules.

If you’ve been using inventory rules to:

• Generate ads, then you should migrate to ad builder or upgraded inventory management.
• Pause and unpause keywords based on business data or set ad parameters based on inventory data, then you should migrate to automated rules.

No matter what you’ve been using inventory rules for, the prerequisite steps will be the same. Each use-case, along with prerequisite and follow-up steps are outlined below.

Before you start

You’ll need to transfer data from your inventory feed into feed driven business tables in order to use ad builder. Feed driven tables convert your inventory feed data into business data. Business data is used in all of the examples below, so it is important that you use feed driven business tables to migrate your data as a prerequisite.

Generating and updating ads

If you’ve been using inventory rules to generate and update ads, you can migrate to ad builder or Upgraded inventory management, or use both. 

Ad builder allows you to generate and manage ad copy throughout multiple engine accounts using business data. Upgraded inventory management uses an inventory feed to generate campaigns, ad groups, text ads, keywords, and sitelinks.

Example

This example will introduce you to using business data and ad builder to create ads.

1. Set up a business data table for your ad group.
2. Create a business data table, and populate it with data relevant to your business. You can either use feed driven tables to transfer data from your inventory feed into your new business data table, or you can replicate your inventory feed as business data manually.
3. Apply your business data to an ad group.
4. Replicate your inventory management template as an ad builder. You'll need to change the syntax to use business data attributes instead of inventory feed data.
   For example, if you recreated hotel data in a business data table called "hotels" the headline Luxury hotels in [region] would become Luxury hotels in [c:"hotels.region"].

Pausing keywords, generating landing pages, setting keyword parameters

If you’ve been using inventory rules to pause and unpause keywords, generate landing page URLs, or set keyword parameters, you should migrate to automated rules. Automated rules give you more available actions, and the ability to set a custom schedule.

Example

 

Here's an example of using a scheduled edit to add parameter values to keywords:

1. Add a business data column to contain the parameter values. Then add data to the column and apply business data to campaigns or other items (if you haven't already done so).
   When you're finished, you should see something like this if you view the business data that's applied to your campaigns:
   
   Since business data is inherited, if you apply business data at the campaign level, your keywords will inherit the data.
2. Create a formula column that contains the value from the business data column you added.
   Continuing the example from the previous step, the formula in the column would be:
   c:"Hotel.Price"
3. Navigate to the Keywords tab and do the following:
   1. Optionally use a filter to display just the keywords you want to edit.
      For example, use a filter to display keywords that inherit the "Sleepwell" hotel ID:
      Hotel.ID Contains Sleepwell
   2. In the toolbar above the table, click the Edit ▼ button and select Set Ad Param 1, Set Ad Param 2, or Set Ad Param 3.
   3. In the bulk edit panel, change Set to ▼ to Set to formula column ▼. Then select the formula column you created in the previous step.
      
   4. Schedule the edit to run regularly.
   5. Click Save.

When the edit runs, Search Ads 360 will set the keyword parameter to the value from your business data table. If you schedule the edit run nightly, any time you edit or upload updated business data, the parameter values will also be updated when the edit runs.