Direct Commander does not load the list of companies. New Direct Commander: application overview. Receiving and sending data - all-in-one

Direct Commander is a program that makes it easier to work with advertising campaigns in Yandex.Direct. With its help, you can configure new and edit existing ACs in one window. An indispensable tool for PPC professionals.

Direct Commander will be useful for specialists who run dozens of large-scale campaigns in Yandex.Direct. The program will allow:

  • quickly find specific key phrases from different advertising campaigns and ad groups;
  • find ads with a given text in a matter of seconds;
  • manage bids for an array of key phrases in a few clicks;
  • make changes and add negative keywords for hundreds of ads at once;
  • find overlapping phrases and remove duplicates, even if they belong to different ad groups or campaigns;
  • change the text and links of landing pages in dozens of ads;
  • create new campaigns in one click, loading information for ads from files of any format.

In this article, you will learn how to download, install and start working in Direct Commander. The article will be useful for contextual advertising specialists and marketers.

How does the new Direct Commander differ from the old one?

In October 2017 Yandex announced about open beta testing of the new version of Direct Commander. It lasted for about a year. In September last year, the company announced that a revised version of the program is available for download. Both versions of Direct Commander will exist until April of this year, after which the old one will be deleted forever.

Yandex specialists have added many useful functions to the new version of the program. Among them:

  • work with clarifications - the ability to customize sets of clarifications for several ads from different groups and even campaigns;
  • adjusting rates for socio-demographic characteristics and for mobile devices;
  • work with video ads;
  • optimization of a set of key phrases - cross-backing and gluing of duplicates;
  • setting field values ​​of one object to many other objects on the tab.

In addition, file import and export is faster and more stable. The program stopped freezing while working with large data sets.

According to Yandex representatives, in the near future Direct Commander will have an English version, adjusting bids for the retargeting list, the ability to copy and paste columns, and change the case of phrases.

How to download and install Direct Commander

To use Direct Commander, download and install the program, and then log in using your Yandex.Direct username. This is not difficult.

Downloading

To download Direct Commander, go todownload page programs and click on the button with the name of your OS. You can download a version for Windows or for macOS.

The download will start instantly. The file size is about 110 MB.

Install

When the file is downloaded, install the program on your computer. Find it in the list of downloaded files and double-click on it with the left mouse button.

If you are installing the Windows version, operating system will ask for permission to run the file. Give it and wait about a minute for Direct Commander to get up on your PC.

After 1–1.5 minutes, a welcome window will appear with the text of the license agreement.

Read it, click on the button "I accept the terms of the license agreement" and log in

We pass authorization through the required account

You can get to work.

Before starting work, familiarize yourself with the Direct Commander interface. On the top toolbar, you can set the settings for the program itself.

Here you can add a new login, switch between saved logins, exit the profile or the program, view the hotkeys for undo and redo operations, highlight and delete data. You can also change the interface settings - adjust the width of the working columns, hide or expand the main, additional panel and "Inspector", switch to full-screen mode, etc. If you have any questions during your work, click on the "Help" section and read the help or submit an appeal to the support service.

Myself interface represents three columns. The first, left, column is the main panel. Information about advertising campaigns will be displayed here - their names, statuses, statistics.

Center column is an additional panel. Here you will see data about ad groups, ads, and keywords.

Right column - "Inspector"... It consists of three blocks - a navigation block, an editing block and a block with information. In it, you will edit advertising campaigns, get detailed information on them, navigate from ads to groups or campaigns, etc.

Above the columns is a panel for exchanging data with the server. Through it, you can upload campaigns from your dashboard to Yandex.Direct and get statistics on them.

Now let's take a closer look at how to work with advertising campaigns in Direct Commander.

In a minute, the interface will display all the ACs that you created in the Yandex.Direct web interface.

For campaigns loaded into Direct Commamnder, you can upload short or detailed statistics - information about clicks, CTR, expenses, etc. Click on the RC you are interested in in the list, click on the “Get” button again and select “Basic data” or “All data”.

After unloading the campaign and obtaining statistics, proceed to creating text or image ads. To do this, click on "Add" in the center column to create an ad group.

You will have a new ad group.

Name it something, set the display region, set negative keywords per group ads. To view all settings, use horizontal scrolling, and to change the data, double-click the left mouse button on the desired column of the ad group and edit the information in the pop-up window. The same can be done in the "Inspector" - the right column of the Direct Commander.

Be sure to save all changes in the "Inspector" by clicking on the "Save" button. After that, proceed to creating ads.

To add a new text ad, switch to the Ads tab in the secondary central panel and click Add. From the pop-up menu, choose Image & Text Ad.

The new announcement will be displayed in the additional panel, and the fields for editing will appear in the Inspector.

Edit the new ad. Write down Heading 1 and 2, add the ad text, provide a link to the landing page, add a business card, if needed, upload an image (with a link to a picture or upload from a computer), etc. Save all changes by clicking the "Save" button in the Inspector.

After saving, the new announcement will appear in the list of the additional panel, and you can edit it if you forgot to write something, or add another announcement to the group.

To quickly replace an image, click on "Images" in the column of the additional panel. And if you want to delete an ad, click on the unnecessary ad and click on "Delete" in the same place.

Add a new announcement or send the created one for moderation.

To add a new image ad, in the “Ads” tab of the additional panel, click on “Add” and select “Image ad” from the pop-up list.

Image ads have fewer fields to fill out. You can upload image and provide a landing page link.

An image will not load if its size or weight does not match the template. Check out the service's recommendations by clicking on the question icon in the pop-up menu to upload images.

When your ad is ready, submit it for moderation - find the "Status" section in the "Inspector" and select "Submit for moderation" from the pop-up menu.

In order not to fill out an ad from scratch, right-click on the template and select "Copy" from the pop-up menu. Then right-click on the ad and click Paste.

In the copied ad, change the settings by going to the Inspectors tab. In multiple highlighted ads, you can change the titles, description text, landing pages, and more. Don't forget to click on the "Save" button in the "Inspector" to save your changes.

Several announcements can be sent to one click moderation... To do this at the same time, select them in the list while holding the Ctrl key, and if you need to select all ads at once, press Ctrl + A, and then change the settings in the "Status" section.

If the ads pass moderation, the "Run" item will be unlocked in the "Status" section. After clicking on it, your ads will start showing to your target audience.

Yandex Direct Commander makes it easy to work with large campaigns. We have described several situations where it is simply irreplaceable.

Features and benefits of Direct Commander:

  • This is not an online service, but a program that is installed on your work computer.
  • The program needs to be updated from time to time. Yandex itself will offer you to click a button and update the program when needed.
  • Commander allows you to quickly edit hundreds of ads.
  • Allows you to load campaigns from Excel files and make uploads of different formats.
  • Supports work with multiple Yandex.Direct accounts.

How Commander helps a PPC specialist.

Loading campaigns with a lot of ads.

This situation is typical for online store advertising with extensive semantics. Direct has a restriction on uploading and editing ads from a file. As a standard, each account is assigned 64,000 points per day in the interface. This is usually not enough to load a large campaign file.

The number of points for each operation can be found in Yandex Help:

  • adding an ad - 12 points;
  • editing an ad - 4 points;
  • adding a phrase - 2 points;
  • editing a phrase - 1 point.

When working with Direct Commander, the number of points can differ dozens of times. Also, this functionality is implemented in some automation systems. contextual advertising such as GetDirect from CPA admitad.

Strategy for getting maximum conversion.

If there are a lot of campaigns and in the distribution of bids you use the strategy of getting the maximum conversion by goal, you need to check from time to time if you have accumulated enough statistics for this. If you check using the Yandex.Direct interface, you need to log into each campaign, it will take a lot of time:

In Commander, you simply switch between campaigns:

Disable keywords.

There are times when a specialist mistakenly uploads non-targeted queries to a campaign. If we created for each request a separate group ads, it will be difficult to disable or delete them. Especially if there are no common words in the queries. In Commander, you can open all the keywords of your campaigns at once and, by analyzing their list, disable unnecessary ones.

Placement of negative keywords in the campaign.

This is useful in search campaigns - the program analyzes all keywords and refines them using negative keywords. Everything is done by correcting phrases, in the same window where requests are disabled:

After the correction, the table looks like this:

Removing duplicates.

This function allows you to remove implicit duplicate requests. Such as permutation of words and duplicates of word forms:

Bulk search and replacement of keywords.

This can be very useful if you need to edit a large campaign in a boilerplate. For example, you generated a campaign in Excel and misspelled the word. Let's say you sell Hyundai cars, but your keywords are “Hindai”. You need to do a search and replace for all keywords:

The same actions should be carried out with the text of the ads, if necessary.

Bulk keyword matching change.

To change the match from wide to phrasal, you need to enclose each keyword in quotation marks. One of the options is through search and replace in the Commander. We need to check the "Use substitutions" checkbox and, one by one, first add the quotation mark at the beginning, and then at the end of the phrase:

Everything is pretty simple and transparent. When you have made changes to the campaign, you need to send it to the server.

Errors when working with Direct Commander:

  • Editing a campaign without loading recent changes... Before you change anything in the campaigns, you should download the campaigns themselves and separately the data with which you will work from the server.
  • Violation of Yandex.Direct rules when creating a campaign from a file: ad texts and headlines are longer than the allowed limits, prohibited characters in ads: anything that does not apply to the alphabet, numbers and punctuation marks.
  • Incorrect encoding of the Excel file (it must be in UTF-8 encoding).

If there is an error encoding, the file looks like this when loaded:

Conclusions.

Using Direct Commander, it is convenient to:

  • upload campaigns with a large number of ads and groups;
  • implement strategies for getting maximum conversion;
  • disable keywords;
  • place negative keywords in the campaign;
  • delete duplicates;
  • massively search and replace keywords;
  • massively change keyword matches.

Commander allows you to quickly work with bulk operations: simplifies routine work and saves time. Of course, these are not all the functions of the program, but the most popular ones.

Direct Commander is a program for managing Yandex Direct. You can install it on your computer and make changes without logging into your browser.

There, for example, you can make bulk replacements in ads and upload changes to Direct faster than via Excel.

You can download Direct Commander from this link.

After installation, add your username and password to Direct Commander - you can download all your campaigns to your computer. On a Mac, the login selection menu looks like this:

In addition to the massive changes in Direct Commander, there are several other interesting features.

We remove duplicates and internal competition

Select your campaigns for one specific region (with this support, the Commander does not take into account regional differences), go to the "phrases" tab and, having selected all the phrases, click "correction of phrases":

This way you can automatically remove duplicates and re-minus within the phrases of your campaign, i.e. remove internal competition.

Looking for ineffective phrases

Statistics are also uploaded to Direct Commander. This can be done by selecting phrases and clicking on the "get prices and statistics" button:

Thanks to this and filters, you can select phrases whose CTR is below the threshold you need. Such advertisements will definitely have higher bids. They need to be deleted and recreated - then the rates will fall.

This is where the filter comes in:

Using the horizontal scroll, we find the required columns and set restrictions in them. For example, a CTR of less than 5 and impressions of more than 50:

Now we set, for example, a very low bid for these ineffective phrases. And export the snapshot of the account to Excel:

In Excel, we select phrases in our special low bid, rewrite ads and delete the ID of the phrase and ads. We now have new announcements. It remains to delete the old ones - you can do this through the same Direct Commander.

Want to create context? Here's my advice - (link to old version) and master this useful program with a friendly interface. The time spent will pay off with interest!

To say that using Direct Commander is much more convenient than working in the Direct interface means to say nothing. Therefore, we will analyze the convenience of the program into real examples... And here are 7 arguments for you " PER". In search of useful material for this article, I discovered two new features that I did not know about before. Read to the end!

Argument 1 Cross minus or cross minus

I already told you about Yandex operators, in particular about operator minus "-"... It is used to exclude impressions for queries that are not of interest to us. In addition to eliminating "junk" queries, I use the minus operator for the so-called cross-minus. Let's say in our advertising campaign there are the following phrases:

If the user types in the query "buy a vacuum cleaner in Moscow", then our advertisement can be shown both for this phrase and for the phrases "buy a vacuum cleaner" and "vacuum cleaner". How can the system determine which phrase to select for display? In this case, in order to avoid confusion and competition between phrases, we use the function cross-minus, which is provided in the Direct Commander program... Note that there is no such function in the Google AdWords Editor program (a program for automating work in Google Adwords). And if there is a need for cross-minus in Adwords, then you have to resort to third-party services.

For cross-minus in Direct Commander, just click on the button " Multi-editing", Select" Correcting phrases "from the drop-down list, then Correct intersections" and press OK ". The program will perform the required action. Look at an example of how easy it is.

Argument 2 Remove duplicates

It is perfectly logical to argue in favor of Direct Commander with such a function as "Remove duplicates". Similar to cross-minus, removing duplicates avoids competition within the same ad campaign. This function is called with the same button " Multi-editing". Only now we select "Delete duplicates". Try it, nothing complicated!

Argument 3 Change case

Before I opened the function of changing the case in Direct Commander, I used a text editor Word. I copied the phrases in Word, used the "Register" function and then copied the phrases back to the advertising campaign in Excel. Now this can be done in just a few clicks, without leaving the place. The "Multi-edit" button comes to the rescue again. See how.


Argument 4 Image Wizard

Do you know what is YAN? Of course you know! Advertisements blocks with colorful images that get our attention. I often use different variants of images for testing, usually from 3 to 5. For quick image editing, I use the Direct Commander “Image Wizard” function. What could be easier?


Argument 5 Virtual business card

Filling in virtual business cards using Direct Commander is a pleasure! With the help of simple manipulations, we create one business card for the entire advertising campaign or prescribe it with differences for each group.


Argument 6 Filter

The Direct Commander filter supports a special query language. To start the query entry mode, enter the "=" sign. Next, we select the value we need, as shown in Fig. Finding and / or filtering out the values ​​you want is easy.

Argument 7 Copy the column

A convenient function for editing texts is to copy the entire column at once. It is convenient to edit the copied data in Excel and then transfer it back. For example, in this way it is convenient to edit the texts and titles of ads.

So, in this article we have highlighted seven useful functions that are supported by the brainchild of Yandex. Therefore, I urge you once again: " Download Direct Commander and work with ease and pleasure. "

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