Gone are the days when Google’s Keyword Planner was the only pay-per-click (PPC) tool in town.
Today you need to optimize your PPC strategy for the full sales funnel, from the first touchpoint to that all-important sale – and hopefully many repeat sales following that.
The following PPC tools help to keep your ads running at maximum potential, automate much of the time-consuming tasks like audience expansion, protect your business from malicious clicks that eat away your budget, and so much more.
These products come with varying learning curves and budgetary considerations. Agencies who specialize in paid marketing know and likely use many or all of these tools.
If you just don’t have the time to learn how to use them properly, or they just don’t fit into your marketing budget, you can still make use of them through a PPC digital agency.
[Want a hand? We have the best PPC agencies ready to lend theirs.]
Otherwise, run your PPC campaigns like a paid marketing professional with these 7 tools:
WordStream is a suite of search marketing and social media advertising tools that helps businesses streamline and centralize their digital strategy.
Key features of WordStream focus on keyword research and management for PPC and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns. It integrates with Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines and helps to place ads.
WordStream’s ‘secret sauce’ is that they gather blended data from all the search engines mentioned and help businesses perform PPC campaign management and keyword research, as well as improve upon SEO strategies.
Price:
Best For: Large to enterprise-sized businesses
The key feature of Optmyzr is to optimize manual bids, maintain oversight when using Smart Bidding, improve campaign performance, and provide measurable data to prevent wasted ad spend.
Campaigns that target the wrong keywords hemorrhage money. As ad engines further limit the data they share with advertisers by restricting third-party cookie data, search term optimization is more important than ever.
Another beloved feature is Optmyzr’s one-click help button.
The feature provides suggestions on how to improve the quality of your campaigns by adding or eliminating keywords.
It can also change bids, adjust placement on display networks, and implement similar strategies to improve return on ad spend.
Price:
Best For: Large, enterprise-sized businesses
hape.io is new on the scene but quickly gaining popularity amongst marketing professionals.
The user-friendly marketing suite offers a sleek, simple UI and helps you to turn valuable PPC performance data and key results into powerful marketing insights and strategies.
Shape offers a range of features within the PPC management platform:
For medium to large-sized businesses, Shape can help keep spending on track for thousands of campaigns with easy-to-use dashboards and AI-driven tools.
You can also import cross-channel data into reporting and business intelligence tools to provide easy-to-understand reports for clients, managers, and key stakeholders.
Price:
Best For: Large, enterprise-sized businesses
Research shows that up to 30% of paid media budgets are lost to fraudulent activity, yet only 12% of marketers are aware of this.
PPC Protect is a click fraud protection software that detects and combats click fraud through automated, AI-powered software.
This PPC tool protects you from possible sources of fraudulent, costly, and illegitimate pay-per-click ad clicking.
The platform allows you to launch PPC campaigns with no worry that malicious people and activities will drain your advertising budget, keeping you from engaging with your real and potential customers.
The AI uncovers fraudulent clicks that are not recorded in its database.
Once it’s done confirming that an ad click is malicious, the user who clicked is immediately blocked via their IP from viewing the ad or making any further clicks on your ads.
Price: Three tiers of service ranges and features. Contact their sales team for a quote.
Best For: Medium to enterprise-sized businesses
Get PPC Protect
ClickCease is a close competitor to PPC Protect. This is another click fraud protection software that prevents ad campaigns from malicious activities that eat away at your budget.
Fake clicks are a serious problem, especially if you are running hundreds or thousands of campaigns.
PPC tools like ClickCease restrict the fake clicks by identifying fake IPs that work to derail ad campaigns of the advertisers using their platform.
The software conveniently integrates with AdWords and Bing Ads and helps you maximize conversions and increase ROI by only allowing a legitimate and relevant audience to click on the ads.
Price:
Best For: Small to medium-sized businesses
SpyFu is a cloud-hosted system that is focused on search marketing.
Tools like Spyfu provide valuable information on the most profitable keywords and ads for paid and organic search that are being utilized by competing marketers.
This PPC tool gives users a distinct competitive advantage and insight into where competitors are spending.
What really sets Spyfu apart? The platform allows you to search for any domain and see every place that domain shows up on Google over the last nine years!
Incredibly, this PPC tool unveils every keyword the domain bought on Adwords, every organic rank, and every single ad variation over that time.
With this insight, users leverage their competitors’ lessons by drawing on historic hits and misses and can implement those lessons in their PPC strategy.
Price:
Best For: Small to medium-sized businesses
There are many valuable tools beyond Google Ads. However, this remains the ultimate place where most of your PPC strategy should begin and end.
With Google Ads, you pay to get their advertisements ranked at the top of the search results page (SERP), targeting specific keywords.
As the platform runs on PPC advertising, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. The system functions as an auction where people bid for clicks.
Price: Free to use (aside from your ad spend, of course!)
Best For: Small to medium-sized businesses
This page last updated on February 17, 2023 by Dan Politz
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