Are you planning to start with paid search marketing?
Your first step should be to conduct competitor research to get insight into keywords, ad copy, and even which AdWords extensions to use.
I have been learning from my competitors’ successes and failures to improve my campaigns. Your competitors have been paying for these ads and know what works well for them.
You don’t need to spend much time using PPC tools to get more out of your campaigns.
The right PPC tools will help you to:
- Save time
- Offer crucial insights
- Increase ROI
These are the 20 tools that I have used and would recommend too. Some of them are used regularly, while others are used less often, but every tool on this list is valuable and time-saving. These tools will help you to perform a keyword, ad copy, and profit analysis.
If you’re all set to take an evolutionary leap of your own, then check out my list of 20 efficient PPC tools to get started.
Cost: Free
Formerly known as AdWords Editor, this desktop app is used to create, track, and edit your Google ads. The app enables you to make bulk changes to multiple ads, create or revise your ads offline and preview edits in draft mode.
It helps you to take care of a lot of things like:
- Make numerous changes using bulk editing tools.
- View statistics of all your campaigns.
- Maintain, edit and view multiple accounts at the same time.
- Undo and redo multiple changes while editing your campaigns.
- Allows to create and assign a bid strategy to campaigns strategy.
- Provides flexibility in moving items between ad campaigns.
Cost: Free
Bing Ads Editor is an all-in-one tool for managing your Bing Ads Campaigns. It’s an ultimate must-have tool for people using Bing Ads. This solid top has managed to garner over 5 billion inquiries daily.
It’s a similar software to Google and allows you to make offline revisions to your ads, uploaded to the online platform after you regain your Internet access. This management tool helps you to research keywords, monitor your performance, and manage your bids.
On the other hand, this tool has some disadvantages like:
- It doesn’t support Call Only ads.
- Bing’s ‘Exact Match’ type doesn’t work as great as Google’s.
- The tool has lower traffic volume, particularly on mobile devices.
- It doesn’t allow you to bid on copyrighted keywords.
Cost: $264/month for 12-month plans
This software is designed to help small-and-medium-sized businesses to get maximum results from their online advertising. This management tool is built for PPC experts who want to eliminate repetitive tasks like keyword research, bid optimization, landing page optimization, and reporting (as in Google Ads).
You can manage your PPC campaigns on Google, Bing, and Facebook – all under one roof.
This software allows you to:
- Build campaigns.
- Identify positive and negative keywords.
- Adjust budgets.
- Create optimized landing pages.
- Track and create reports around conversion and call data.
This PPC campaign expert offers a 7-day trial. It’s worth it!
4. Google Ads Performance Grader
Cost: Free
This PPC reporting tool can analyze your account and give you a detailed report, highlighting your businesses’ weaknesses and strengths in just 60 seconds or less.
It also teaches you how to beat your competitors and provides you with actionable tips to amp up your PPC game.
This software helps in scanning your Google Ads account and analyze metrics like:
- Quality score
- Impression share
- Negative keywords
- Long-tail-keyword optimization
- Ad text, etc.
5. AdEspresso
Cost: Monthly plan starts with $69
AdEspresso is a cross-platform ad manager that assists in creating Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram campaigns from one interface to another.
This saves your time of switching between platforms. You can also opt for automated custom audience creation wherein you don’t need to upload endless CSV files to Facebook any longer.
It supports direct integrations with marketing platforms like:
- Mailchimp
- Hubspot
- GetResponse, etc.
6. SEMrush PLA (Product Listing Ads) Research
Cost: Monthly plan starts from $99
PLAs are obtained when someone searches for a product on Google that has a listing on Google Shopping.
This report acts as a powerful source of research for e-commerce websites and digital advertising agencies to gather competitive intelligence on e-commerce competitors.
SEMrush not only allows you to analyze your performance of advertiser’s Google Shopping ad campaigns but also helps you with the following:
- Reveal your competitor’s target keywords for PLAs.
- Identify the positioning of your competitors’ shopping ads.
- Look through the pricing of your competitors’ products/services.
- Examine the keywords that trigger every ad.
7. Spyfu
Cost: Annual plans start at $49
This tool allows you to see every place your competitor has been on Google. It includes all of their keywords and ad variations used until now. You can also see the most profitable keywords of your competitors, depending on their advertising history.
Some of its cool features include:
- Ability to download all of your competitors’ keywords
- Easy user interface with at-a-glance information
Cost: Free
It will be a shocker if you aren’t using Google’s Keyword Planner. This is an essential tool for keyword research that starts with one seed keyword and gives you many search term ideas with different CPC and search volume.
When searching for new terms, make sure you specify your location as keyword metrics differ across cities and states.
To get more suggestions related to your niche, provide some seed keywords or relevant websites from your industry – lookout for automated keyword suggestions from Google.
9. CallRail
Cost: Pricing starts at just $45 per month
This call tracking tool helps to obtain valuable data-driven insights to drive inbound calls. This has some incredible features like the ‘Keyword Spotting’ and ‘Call Highlights.’
- Keyword Spotting allows monitoring inbound phone calls to identify keywords and phrases that are targeted in your PPC campaigns.
- Call Highlights analyzes the content of those phone calls to acquire new keywords that can be used in your PPC campaigns.
10. Unbounce
Cost: Pricing starts at $49 per month
Are you looking for a remarkable landing page tool? It’s right here!
Landing pages are a customer’s first interaction with your brand and set a platform for relationships. Your landing pages can hurt your Quality Score.
Fortunately, this tool provides 80+ templates for every type of landing page like lead generation, products, sales, etc. My marketing team has been using this tool for several years as a backup solution whenever the designing team gets overloaded.
They equip you with comprehensive post-click analytics, A/B test, view visitor stats, and launch experiments along with the convenient drag-and-drop page builder.
11. LeadPages
Cost: Pricing starts at $25 per month
This is an excellent landing page resource that works seamlessly with WordPress websites through a free plugin. It allows the customers to create an unlimited number of landing pages and opt-in forms in multiple domains.
This popular web-based service offers excellent features like:
- Build unlimited landing pages on the LeadPages server and your hosted website too.
- Exclusive library of available landing pages arranged by best conversion rates.
- Mobile responsive and Facebook compatible landing page designs.
- Super responsive and useful customer service through their email support ticket system, etc.
12. BuzzSumo
Cost: Pricing starts at $99.00 per month
Many of you might be agreeing with me on this: BuzzSumo is an all-in-one solution for SEO, SMM, and PPC related searches. This tool is just awesome, as it gives me a list of shared content across the web instantly.
It majorly helps in identifying and analyzing the content that performs best for any competitor.
Find desired content from articles, videos, and infographics on a given topic/keyword and even from a specific domain.
To make the most of these tools in improving your content marketing, let me give you 3 simple ways:
- Tip #1: Choose the keyword/topic that has the chances to get maximum exposure and traffic
- Tip #2: Lookout for social media influencers in your niche
- Tip #3: Conduct a content analysis and run social reports
13. Adbeat
Cost: Pricing starts at $249 per month
Spoiler alert: Try browsing top ads and text, flash, video, etc. format ads. This is the key to become a leader in the content advertising channels.
This online marketing spy tool works as an undercover agent uncovering your advertiser’s ad strategy and understands what works for them. It can spy on ad copy split testing and know about all the unique creatives used by your competitor.
14. KeywordSpy
Cost: Pricing starts at $89.95 per month
This one has the capability of unveiling your competitor’s most profitable ad copies and keywords. To be precise, this tool exposes the competitive landscape by highlighting the competitor’s PPC campaign strategies, profitable keywords, and ad copy combinations used.
Start by running a few sample queries and take full advantage of the tool’s unlimited data.
15. AdGooroo
Cost: Request demo and pricing details
AdGooroo is useful in getting an in-depth analysis of your competitor’s ad copy and landing pages. It makes things easier for you by analyzing your competitor’s PPC strategies such as ad copy, landing pages, keywords, impressions, and likewise.
The best part is that: It is the only provider of mobile search trending data, including spend, performance stats, and ad creative, which is critical for marketers looking for their performance in the marketplace.
16. Captivise
Cost: Free
Captivise is synonymous with simplified keywords. It shows you how many bids have been changed for different keywords. Get real-time bid calculations and achieve optimal performance based on margin or cost-per-sale defined by you.
It’s a one-click setup wherein you set your margin or target cost-per-sale, click ‘run’ and the tool will run the bid management for you easily. This tool enables to:
- Maximize profitability
- Optimize campaigns
- Save time
- Eliminate admin for more creative tasks
17. Wordtracker
Cost: Free
This leading keyword research tool helps to choose the keywords you bid on carefully. It shows you real words searched by people to segment your keywords into various ad groups such that every keyword has a different bid, landing pages, and ad copy.
It also helps you in Google Adwords PPC advertising. Here, you only pay if someone clicks on your ad while in offline advertising, you need to pay for people to see your ad even if they don’t respond to it.
18. Invoca
Cost: Pricing starts at $1,000 per month
Every phone call is essential and valuable for your business. It’s one of the best call tracking tools for marketing that gives you greater visibility into your marketing campaigns by thoroughly measuring, automating, and optimizing call data in just one click.
Call tracking can help marketers to:
- Customize caller experience
- Optimize campaign performance
- Improve customer reach
- Increase every digital action
Get acquainted with their amazing features like integrations, signal AI, custom call treatment, dynamic number insertion, and likewise.
19. WhatRunsWhere
Cost: Pricing starts at $299 per month.
You can see your competitors’ advertising strategies in Google AdWords, including text, banner, display, and mobile, by going through 150,000 unique publishers.
If you’re planning to start a banner/display advertising and need inspiration on designing creatives, then ‘Moat Ad Search’ is a great tool. Here, you get a lot of banner ads used by established brands.
The one thing that I like about this tool is that it enables you to see your competitors overall paid advertising strategy. It’s a highly recommendable tool that helps you create your own strategy to combat big market player dominance.
Cost: Pricing starts at $599 per month.
It’s a precision ad intelligence tool that provides real-time competitive intelligence to monitor brand and trademark use.
The Search Monitor is an ultimate tool for enterprise-level ad monitoring, giving marketers full visibility into industry leaders’ paid search activity, competitors, and affiliates across 1200 verticals.
This fantastic tool is essential for search and affiliate marketing. You can also get insights from comScore to study about your industry.
Over to you!
To excel in this industry, you need to have an in-depth look into a keyword, ad copy, and profit analysis. Every marketer requires the right tools to learn from your competitors and introduce some of the above tools to get significant results.
Try to invest in some of the tools mentioned above and see the difference. I hope this blog has helped you to get started. Stay hooked for more!
