Google has a free desktop tool for managing Adwords accounts. Obviously downloading all your data on to your desktop offers the potential to remove some of the latency inevitable in managing large amounts of data online. However the Google Adwords web app was sufficiently good and the desktop app sufficiently bad that it wasn’t really an improvement. It was buggy (if you tried to add a phrase as broadmatch when you already had it as exact match you got a blank wizard window), lacking in basic GUI etiquette (simple things like Ctrl+click and Shift+click selection didn’t work) and slow. I can’t have been the only developer to delight in that fact that the gods of Mountain View had feet of clay when it came to desktop apps.

Anyway they seem to have fixed some of the issues and the latest version (3.5.0) is reasonably useable. Some of the things that I prefer it for over the web interface include:

• adding new keywords to multiple campaigns
• looking for inactive keywords across multiple campaigns
• looking for keywords with low CTR or high conversion costs across multiple campaigns

I just wish they would add lifetime stats, as well as stats for the last 30 days, 7 days and yesterday.