STUDIO 40’S ­ 43 BEST PPC MANAGEMENT TOOLS AS VOTED FOR BY EXPERTS 17 December 15 Posted In Paid Search 11 Comments Authored By George Bates

Paid advertisements are a great way to drive targeted traffic and relevant people to a

website.

However, if you’re new to the PPC game or have not optimised your campaigns to their

full potential you could be throwing money away!

There’s a whole bunch of management tools out there that can help with optimising your

PPC campaigns but how do you know which ones are the best?

In this article, I asked 21 PPC experts for the tools that they could not live without.

Their answers include a wide range of free, paid and free trial option tools. Take a

look…

1. EXCEL (PAID) – As recommended by Melissa Mackey of Gyro, Amy Bishop of Clix Marketing, Philip

Wendell of Click Click Media, Heather Cooan of Infusionsoft, Aaron Levy of Elite SEM,

Lisa Sanner of Point It, Kirk Williams of ZATO Marketing, Euan Brock of Screaming

Frog and Christi Olson founder of iSEM Consulting

We’ve all used Microsoft Excel at some point in our online lives.

You may be forgiven for thinking that there’s not a great deal it can do to help improve

the efficiency of a PPC campaign… but you’d be very wrong!

Knowing the ins and outs of Excel and fully utilising it is crucial for creating and

understanding data whether you’re just starting out with PPC or you’re a fully fledged

expert (as proven by Excel claiming top spot!).

I couldn’t live without Excel. I love it and I’m always looking for

more ways to expand my Excel expertise.” – Amy Bishop of Clix

Marketing.

2. ADWORDS EDITOR (FREE) – As recommended by Justin Freid of CMI Media, Kirk Williams of ZATO Marketing,

Melissa Mackey of Gyro,Amy Bishop of Clix Marketing, Philip Wendell of Click Click

Media, Aaron Levy of Elite SEM, Euan Brock of Screaming Frog and Christi Olson

founder of iSEM Consulting

Ooh so close! Number 2 in our list is the free AdWords Editor.

Needing to make mass changes to an account? Wanting to implement a new AdWords

feature across all your accounts to improve their performance? AdWords editor is THE

ultimate time saver and you can even carry on working when offline.

Working in the agency world, being able to quickly update ad

text, make bid changes, add/remove ad text or keywords in a

short period of time can help tremendously. – Justin Freid of

CMI/Compas.

3. GOOGLE ANALYTICS (FREEMIUM) – As reccomended by Larry Kim of WordStream, Amy Bishop of Clix Marketing, Lisa

Sanner of Point It andEuan Brock of Screaming Frog.

Another Google product and another firm favourite for those in the know when it comes

to PPC; Google Analytics is a crucial tool.

Well over 10 million websites across the world use ‘GA’ and there’s hundreds of

reasons why. You can track everything from organic website visits to the demographic

of users who click a certain button on a Wednesday afternoon, for example. Potent.

Analytics is great for looking at accurate ecommerce data related

to campaigns as well as helping provide insight to building new

campaigns and looking at top performing pages/products. – Euan

Brock of Screaming Frog

4. SEMRUSH (PAID) – As recommended by Zac Johnson, Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media, Phillip

Wendell of Click Click Media and Christi Olson founder of iSEM Consulting

SEMrush is an industry favourite for both SEO and PPC insights. This versatile,

competitive intelligence suite has a multitude of paid features.

You can use SEMRush to generate analytics reports that allow for understanding your

competitors strategies, utilise powerful tools to estimate keyword difficulty and cross

examine many domains all in one nicely presented package.

SEMrush is an extremely versatile service with a great selection

of analytical reports and tools for Organic, Paid and PLA

competitive research. Why learn from your mistakes when you

can benefit from your competitors’ success? Yulia

Shevardenkova of SEMRush.

5. BING EDITOR (FREE) – As recommended by Aaron Levy of Elite SEM, Kirk Williams – ZATO Marketing,

Melissa Mackey – Gyro andChristi Olson founder of iSEM Consulting

Not quite matching up to it’s Google rival when it comes to votes from the experts, it’s

Bing’s Ads Editor. Just like it’s AdWords cousin, the Bing editor allows the user to make

huge changes to your campaigns in one fell swoop and upload them in bulk.

“For working with any level of volume, the editors are simply

unbeatable in making changes en masse.” – Aaron Levy of Elite

SEM

6. ADALYSIS (PAID) ­As recommended by Chris Haleua of Adobe, Melissa Mackey of Gyro and Christi

Olson founder of iSEM Consulting

AdAlysis is a hugely powerful advert testing platform for AdWords that offers a 30 day

free trial. The tool allows you to easily find advert insights, increase workflow, automate

tests and much more. This tool was one of the favourite ad testing tools amongst the

experts.

“AdAlysis is my favourite PPC tool for testing” – Chris Haleua of

Adobe.

7. ADWORDS SCRIPTS (FREE) – Sam Hurley of Midas Media, Euan Brock of Screaming Frog and Christi Olson,

founder of iSEM Consulting

Google AdWords Scripts are an amazingly efficient and underrated way of optimising

your campaigns. Not only can you generate historical Quality Score reports and

automate account health check ups, you can also find underperforming keywords and

use insights to improve them.

A great time saver if you’ve inherited a large account. See all

broken links in a simple spreadsheet report. – Sam Hurley of

Midas Media

8. GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER (FREE) – As recommended by Margot da Cunha of WordStream and Ryan Lees of Studio­40

In at number eight is Google AdWords Keyword Planner which allows you to get

keyword ideas, see performance insights and generally plan Search Network

campaigns.

We’re just surprised this isn’t higher up in our list as Keyword Planner is many an

Expert’s go to for keyword and ad group ideas, as well as historical data. It’s also

completely free to use.

Keyword Planner is a great tool for researching keyword

variations and taking your AdWords account further than just the

broad search terms. It’s also great for seeing average search

volumes, competition & average CPC’s around a variety of

keywords. – Ryan Lees of Studio­40

9. FACEBOOK POWER EDITOR (FREE) – As recommended by Michelle Morgan of Clix Marketing and Heather Cooan

of Infusionsoft

Facebook’s very own ‘Power Editor’ tool allows the user to create multiple ads at one

time and have ‘precise control of their campaigns’. However, it’s recommended that if

you don’t have to create hundreds of ads at a time, you should simply use Adverts

Manager instead.

Power Editor is only currently supported in the Google Chrome browser but it’s

completely free to download.

Facebook campaigns used to be pretty laborious but the new

editor makes things so much easier and allows for easy scaling

through campaign duplication. Definitely a must for Facebook

(and Instagram) advertisers! –Michelle Morgan of Clix Marketing

10. BING ADS INTELLIGENCE (FREE) ­As recommended by John Gagnon of Microsoft and Chris Haleua of Adobe

Bing Ads Intelligence is keyword research tool that allows you to easily digest the

performance of keywords on the Yahoo Bing Network.

It’s free to download and allows you to work with keyword lists of up to 200,000 words,

align ads with Bing’s policies, tailor your bidding strategy and much more. No wonder so

many PPC Experts loved this tool!

Bing Ads Intelligence gives search marketers insane details no

other tool does. Want to know the number of clicks in position two

for the keyword [cheap auto insurance] or the number of

searchers 25­34? The data comes straight from the search

engine. – John Gagnon of Bing

11. OPTMYZR (PAID) As recommended by Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media and Kirk Williams of ZATO

Marketing

Optmyzr is a leading Google AdWords optimisation tool for advertisers, consultants, and

agencies alike. It offers a Quality Score tracker, landing page checker and a free trial!

What’s not to love?

Me and my cofounders saw the challenges of managing

AdWords and Bing Ads first­hand while working at Google and at

PPC agencies. We set out to create the equivalent of a swiss

army knife for PPC so that account managers could do common

optimisation and reporting tasks in a fraction of the time other

tools would take. – Frederick Vallaeys of Optmyzr

12. ACQUISIO (PAID) As recommended by Mona Elesseily of Page Zero Media and Lisa Sanner of Point It

Acquisio is a popular search marketing platform that enables the user to optimise

campaigns as well as offering the ability to report on social, mobile, and display

initiatives.

Having reportedly hired a rocket scientist to help design the program, Acquisio claim

that: ‘It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to use the Acquisio search marketing platform. It

did, however, take one to design it.” Awesome!

13. SPYFU (FREEMIUM)

– as recommended by Sam Hurley of Midas Media and Christi Olson of iSEM

Consulting

Spyfu is a brilliant tool for competitor research and both PPC and SEO insights due to

the huge database of information that it possesses. See adverts, sources and keywords

for over 300 million sites in a concise and smoothly designed interface.

If I’m pitching a new client and need to do competitive research I

can’t live without access to SpyFu to dig into apx budgets,

keyword lists, and ad copy variations.­ Christi Olson of iSEM

Consulting

14 – 43: THE BEST OF THE REST The following tools all received a single mention each from one of our experts but no

PPC Management tools list would be complete without them!

Check them out…

POWER MAP FOR EXCEL (FREE) – as recommended by John Gagnon of Microsoft and Chris Haleua of Adobe

Microsoft Power Map for Excel is a 3D data visualisation tool that allows for analysing

data in a totally unique manner

Plot geographic data on a 3D globe , display it over time, create visual tours and much

more all in one handy tool!

AUDIENCE INSIGHTS WITHIN FACEBOOK ADS TOOL (FREE) Facebook has the richest data out there, which includes point of

sale, your matched email and web customer files, and their

behaviors. It’s not just what they like or did on Facebook like a

few years ago. This the equivalent of showrooming, where you

can try on stuff for free in the store and then go buy it elsewhere.”

– Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics

SUNNY REPORTS (PAID) – as recommended by Ryan Lees of Studio­40

SunnyReports helps you to automate customisable and professional AdWords reports.

With the ability to easily add the statistics and visualisations that you want and build

reusable reports, SunnyReports takes the hassle out of reporting.

DOUBLECLICK SEARCH EXECUTIVE REPORTING (PAID) When looking to understand market trends, consumer behavior

and other cross account trends, Doubleclick Search’s Executive

Reporting tool has been extremely helpful. I can easily aggregate

information from all or select accounts and splice the data any

way I want. This eliminates the need to mess around with large

excel files and gets me the information I need quickly to look at

SEM from a holistic viewpoint. Justin Freid – CMI Media

UNBOUNCE (PAID)

the tool I use for landing pages, it is easy to use, implement,

optimise, and create. It’s also very affordable. Kirk Williams –

ZATO Marketing

BIZBIBLE (PAID) Bizible allows you to see your campaign data alongside your

Marketo data to easily track leads and spend to closed

customers. This has made my life much easier when making

optimizations in my lead gen accounts. –Michelle Morgan – Clix

Marketing

STEADYBUDGET (PAID)

I use Steadybudget to keep me within budget constraints for

clients. Its autopilot mode is especially helpful for pausing entire

accounts in both Adwords & Bing whenever budget is reached.

Kirk Williams – ZATO Marketing

SEOBOOK’S PPC AD KEYWORD WRAPPER + PHRASE BUILDER COMBO (BOTH FREE) Plug all your existing keyword ideas into Phrase Builder which

concatenates them, creating brand new experimental terms.

Now, copy this list and enter it into Keyword Wrapper to quickly

grab every combination of broad, phrase and exact match. See

how they each perform in AdWords and apply the search terms

report. The broads can be used to investigate elusive, less

competitive terms which achieve clicks. Boom! – Sam Hurley

Midas Media

MERGE WORDS (FREE) – Ryan Lees – Studio­40

Great for building out campaigns with longer tailed keyword

variations and doing it quickly. For example, adding location

keywords onto the end of a bulk amount of broad keywords in

one go. – Ryan Lees of Studio­40

ADSTAGE (PAID)

AdStage is one of the few campaign management solutions out

there that has LinkedIn API access. In AdStage, we’re able to

see LinkedIn performance and track conversions. AdStage has

been a major victory for my clients who advertise in that channel

and want to actually track through to a conversion Michelle

Morgan – Clix Marketing

KEYWORDTOOL.IO (FREE) Search Query reports are the oil changes of PPC. They need to

be done on a regular basis to both prevent problems and improve

performance. Using a suggestion tool like Keywordtool.io can get

a lot of the work out of the way ahead of time. It’s a common tool

for positive research, but underused for proactive negative

keyword research. Insert your search term, remove it from the

results and see what junk you want to exclude ahead of time. –

Aaron Levy – Elite SEM

MARIN (FREEMIUM) – as recommended by Lisa Sanner of Point It

Marin Software is a cross­channel advertising platform that allows you to Optimize your

Search, Social & Display ads across channels and devices.

With Marin you can simplify your work day and ‘Win the battle for revenue across

search, display, social & mobile.’

SYSOMOS (FREEMIUM)

My agency currently utilizes Sysomos (for social listening), and

by tapping in and understanding what your target audience is

talking about on social media can help you find new keywords

and phrases to target both through paid search and

content/organic that may not be spit out by Google’s Keyword

Planner.

Justin Freid – CMI Media

ADWORDS WRAPPER (FREE) – Ryan Lees – Studio­40

AdWords Wrapper speeds up the process of keyword wrapping

and makes life a lot easier when building out your ad groups with

a variety of keyword match types. – Ryan Lees of Studio­40

SEARCH TERMS REPORT (FREE) ­As recommended by Margot da Cunha – WordStream

Search Terms Report is less a standalone tool and more a feature within Google

AdWords that helps marketers fine tune their campaigns.

Utilising Google’s Search Terms Report helps you to understand the searches that are

triggering your adverts and helps you to learn what the intentions of the users

performing those searches are.

KENSHOO (PAID) – As recommended by Lisa Sanner of Point It

Kenshoo is a huge name in Digital Marketing and in 2015, brands will reportedly

generate over $350 billion in sales through their award­winning ‘Infinity Suite’.

Kenshoo also claim that each second, web users click 4,000 Kenshoo­served ads

across the world. Those stats don’t lie!

WORDSTREAM’S 20 MINUTE WORK WEEK (FREE) – as recommended by Margot da Cunha of WordStream

WordStream have created a great little checklist, accompanied by a handy video, that

helps you optimise your PPC accounts.

They have produced a workflow guide outlining the tasks that will make the most impact

on your bottom line.

FACEBOOK AD PLANNER (FREE) – as recommended by Larry Kim of WordStream

Facebook Ads are notorious for their precise, laser targeting and ability to target the

exact demographic that you wish to view and engage with your brand.

Facebook Adverts Manager is the social media giant’s very own tool for managing

adverts and analysing their performance. There is now an Adverts Manager app, too.

OPTIMIZELY (PAID) – as recommended by John Gagnon of Microsoft

Optimizely, or Optimisely if we’re using the Queen’s English ;), is an enterprise­level A/B

testing platform that helps you personalise and optimise pages across desktop, mobile

web and mobile apps.

Used by such high profile companies as Sony, The New York Times and NBCUniversal,

there’s no doubting it’s prowess!

BOOMERANG FOR GMAIL (FREEMIUM) Boomerang helps you empty your inbox by adding scheduled sending and integrated

email reminders to Gmail.

Tracking client correspondence is as important as optimising

campaigns –Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics

BASECAMP (PAID) – as recommended by Dennis Yu of BlitzMetrics

Basecamp is one of the most respected project management and collaboration tools out

there. If you’re working on a collaborative PPC campaign and want to share information

or changes made in the account then Basecamp is perfect!

Features include: To­dos, files, messages, schedules, milestones and much more.

CHANGE HISTORY (FREE) – as recommended by Heather Cooan of Infusionsoft

Another feature of AdWords rather than an individual tool, Change History is a hugely

underused view that can be found in the ‘Tools’ menu.

The tool lets you see changes in the campaign such as when it was paused, which user

added or removed keywords and budget changes.

MONITOR BACKLINKS (PAID) – as recommended by Zac Johnson

PPC Experts can analyse where their site is ranking in Google

and based on the search volume, competition and CPC decide

what keywords should be optimized more for PPC. In Monitor

Backlinks, you can also see where competitors are ranking

organically for the same keywords. Felix Tarcomnicu of Monitor

Backlinks

GOOGLE ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS GALLERY (FREE) as recommended by Elizabeth Marsten of CommerceHub

The Google Analytics Solutions Gallery features dashboards, custom reports, segments

and other insights to help you make the most of Google Analytics and utilise the data

provided.

This tool is great for both PPC newbies and experts alike and is another tool that is

greatly underrated.

US CENSUS DATA (FREE) As recommended by Elizabeth Marsten of CommerceHub

Data is always vital when it comes to starting a PPC Campaign and the more you can

gather together the better.

Whilst the United States Census Bureau’s website might not be everyone’s go to PPC

‘tool’ of choice, reliable data is a huge commodity online in 2015!

HOW MUCH DOES PPC COST TOOL (FREE) – as recommended by Ryan Lees of Studio­40

Our very own PPC Calculator tool displays the costs of AdWords for over 20 business

sectors. It uses real data calculated from Google AdWords statistics to give an overview

of how much your potential AdWords campaign will cost.

ADOBE MEDIA OPTIMIZER (PAID) – as recommended by Chris Haleua of Adobe

Adobe Media Optimizer is an ad­buying solution that allows marketers to choose the

best mix of ads depending on your budget.

It’s automatable and even suggests the best way to deliver the content to your

audience. Take a look.

LONG TAIL PRO (PAID)

– as recommended by Zac Johnson

Long Tail Pro is the keyword research software that enables marketers to find the best

long tail keyword ideas. Boasting over 70,000 users, this competitor analysis software

has a multitude of features including, but not limited to, pay­per­click analysis, real­time

filtering and a rank checker.

GOOGLE PLANNING TOOLS (FREE) Google has a variety of planning tools on their ‘Think with Google’ site that are great for

roadmapping any campaign, especially a PPC one. For example, Google Trends uses

real­time search engine data to help you understand user search patterns. The

‘Consumer Barometer’ tool displays the source of purchases and details the process

from start to finish.

My favourite collection of tools is Google’s Planning Tools,

especially Trends & the Consumer Barometer, as they can help

you understand an audience. Adam Devlin of Google

KEYWORD MACHINE – as recommended by Ryan Lees of Studio­40

Keyword Machine is a powerful and easy to use PPC tool for search marketers that

specialises in improving ad relevance, accelerating campaign builds and improving ad

copy writing.

Which is your favourite PPC management tool?