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Home >> Blog >> 10-best-tools-to-manage-a-ppc-campaign
There are so many tools out there nowadays that can help to improve your PPC performance and make your life managing an account easier. There are many options for different tasks at different price points. We had a roundtable discussing the different tools out on the market, our experiences using each, and came up with a comprehensive list of our 10 favorite tools to manage a PPC campaign that takes into account the value of each.
SEM Rush is a highly used and a top rated keyword research tool out on the market. This is one of the more important tools that we use for both PPC and SEO campaigns. It can easily provide a list of keywords for certain services and products that are being advertised. Out of all keyword tools on the market we believe that this comprehensive in features and provides more or equal features to all similar tools on the market.
A big part of advertising is competitor intelligence. It is one of the first steps in researching what competitor keywords to target and avoid in a successful PPC campaign. SpyFu provides an easy to use interface with infomation on competitor keywords, copies of different landing pages, and competitor rankings. SpyFu easily provides great value for the features it provides as it is relatively inexpensive compared to most tools out there, while providing all the necessary competitor information.
A common value added service for a PPC campaign is including customized landing pages. One of the three quality score metrics on an advertising platform is Landing Page Relevance. An Easy way to score higher on this metric and lower your average PPC cost is to make customized landing pages for important keywords. Unfortunately if you were to code seperate landing pages it would take forever and would not make sense to do so from a cost benefit point of view. Unbounce allows you to easily create landing pages and variations of landing pages to give you the leg up when it comes to ad copy placement and average cost per click for keywords.
We highly value using an AI powered bid management system such as Acquisio. Although Google and Bing Ads have embedded automated tools, we usually dont recommend using them. Most advertising platforms, automated services although efficient in some ways, are also very good at spending budgets too quickly and not in a controllable way. However, with Acquisio you get the benefits of being able to manage the CPC for different keywords and get recommendations that can be manually checked and approved. This is much more efficient than just eyeballing and tabulating by hand what your bid should be for the thousands of keywords in your PPC campaign. Additionally, we really do like the reporting features included in this software.
Like Acquisio above, Marin is also a PPC management tool that we really like. Honestly the difference between Acquisio and Marin is like splitting hairs. If you ask a professional their preference you will probably get differing opinions. What we do like about Marin, however is that we believe its bid management algorithim is very robust and possibly the best in class.
Adbeat is another competitor intelligence tool like SpyFu previously. Again we like both for different reasons. This is probably the most robust tool for finding out about competitor advertising out there. This tool is very powerful and has more detailed information on which keywords, markets, and platforms competitors are most successful in. Particularly for a mature account, we like to use this tool to drill down on more granular competitive angles we think can improve your performance.
Google Scripts is a really powerful tool that can be used to automate alerts, dig down for unique data insights, and automate the timing of bids, amongst other things. There are a multitude of ready made scripts out there that can really help to improve your acccount. Need a custom solution you can also code your own scripts for your campaign. For enterprise accounts event based bidding is a normal use of scripts, while for all our accounts we like to use it to dig down and gain additional granularity for where we can improve bids and which combination of keywords may be over/underperforming more than meets the eye.
Really a great tool that we love. Answer the Public is great for keyword brainstorming and research. It is a tool that shows variations of inputted keywords and also common queries that happen using a few keywords. This can really help you see unique and new ways to improve your keyword game. It can also show you variations that are hidden in your account that are underperforming. There really is a myriad of ways to use this tool. We like to sometimes even use the tool to brainstorm for how we want to plan out ad copy or marketing campaigns.
The Google Ads/Bings Ads Editor are both must use tools, particularly for larger campaigns or campaigns that have been around for a while. If your PPC campaign has been operating for several years you are likely to have thousands of keywords, ad groups, and ads in your account. These tools allow you to make edits on large amounts of ads all at the same time. Without this tool, making changes would be much more tedious and time consuming.
What you will notice when operating a Google Ads campaign particularly when you first start your account is that you will probably get a lot of fraudulent clicks whether you know it or not. Google does a good job of screening and elimating bot clicks or other nefarious clickers from raising your daily spend, however there are probably still a lot of fraudulent clicks that get through. Clickcease helps to block these clicks almost immediately and we believe it more than makes up for its monthly cost.
Overall, there are many powerful tools out on the market that can really improve your ability to manage a PPC account. At High Octane, we try to always stay current and use the best tools to try and outperform our competitors.
2022 High Octane Advertising, All Rights Reserved.