10 PPC tools every Head of Digital should know

As Head of PPC, you already know all about the ins and outs of paid media campaigns and know how difficult and time consuming it can be. Finding adequate keywords, fighting against well-established competitors, figuring out how to get results in a short timeframe… All these tasks entail a high amount of dedication from your team, not to mention a high budget. Knowing this, you are no doubt searching for any and every PPC tool in existence that can come to your rescue and ease your team’s daily workload. 

Whether you are a company managing its SEM activities in-house or an agency juggling multiple clients’ campaigns, incorporating a PPC tool into your strategy can be invaluable. We’ve selected ten of our favorite PPC tools to help you automate tasks and save time. Plus, we’ve organized them in several categories so that you can easily find what you need! Keep in mind that some of these tools may also have further functionalities that would make them eligible for more than one category. 

PPC tools for discovering the best keywords

One of the most important steps in the establishment of a PPC campaign is the definition of the best, most appropriate keywords. Making poor choices at this stage can negatively impact your campaign’s performance, as your ads may not be shown to your target audience. Curating an extensive list of keywords is crucial for an optimal ad campaign, but you cannot deny that it’s a very time-consuming task. With the considerable number of options to test, approve, and discard, finding the perfect rundown of keywords can quickly get overwhelming. Here are some tools to help you ease such a complex and challenging job: 

1- adCore. A versatile PPC campaign management tool with a remarkable feature: it can generate suggestions from a website’s content. This means you won’t have to figure out which keywords will work best for your new clients, saving you hours of tedious work. Only the basic functionalities are free.

2- SeoScout Suggest. Running out of ideas for new keywords? This handy app will make your day. Just enter a keyword you already have, no matter how random it may sound, and the app will generate hundreds of new possibilities that you can explore in less than a minute. It is ideal for international campaigns, since it lets you choose both the target language and country. 

PPC tools for keyword management optimization

You’ve already detected the perfect keywords, compared them with your competitors, designed and uploaded your ads...But you still aren’t getting the results you expected. There may be many small aspects that you’ve overlooked and still need to fix. What if, instead of spending hours manually reviewing all of your keywords and ads, you have a software do it for you?

3-SEISO. This cloud-based marketing analytics system can provide detailed reports about ad and keyword performance. High and low performing operations can be identified based on its ROI from landing page analytics, so that you can learn from the former and correct the latter. This tool also provides suggestions on queries that could potentially improve conversion rates, even filtering users by demographic variants.

4- OrbitalAds. Out of the three keyword management optimization tools listed, this AI-Powered Keyword Management Platform, is probably the most powerful. In addition to performing extensive keyword searches, it includes a wealth of algorithms to help you effectively optimize Google Ads search campaigns and increase conversion KPIs. Its Search Term Analyzer can automatically discover brand new keywords from thousands of Google searches, and its Smart Locator can identify the most relevant ad groups for your existing keywords. And these are only two of the many functionalities available on the platform! This tool and its automated processes will save you hundreds of work hours that you can then dedicate to more valuable, strategic activities. 

5-Optmyzr. This suite uses machine learning technology to detect what’s going on with your ads and keywords and provide solutions for the issues you are having. It can get data not only from Google, but also from Facebook, Bing, Amazon and many other sites where you’re placing your PPC campaigns.

PPC tools for analyzing the competition

While creativity is certainly important, there are times when it is wiser to draw on what has previously been done – and has been proven to work successfully – rather than creating something new. You can always directly google your competitors and find out! The two PPC tools below will help you discover how your contenders are logging wins, draw from their best ideas, and improve them:

6-Wordstream Grader. This little free app is convenient for a particularly precise task: it analyses the actions you’re testing on your account and spots which ones are working or not compared to competitors in the same industry. The whole process usually takes no more than a couple minutes. It is an easy, quick reference that can help you identify where to keep the focus and where to adjust your strategy. 

7-Ahrefs. While mostly developed for SEO techniques, this platform is also very useful in SEM, as it provides a thorough report of a website’s performance down to the smallest detail. You can use it either to check out what is working well for other actors on the market or to track your own page and discover its flaws; both possibilities are effective in improving your campaigns. It also detects the keywords for which a given website is positioned, ranking them according to diverse criteria to help you decide whether you should focus on one of them or not.

PPC tools for multi-campaign management

Handling a single campaign is challenging in and of itself. So you can only imagine the mess if you must keep several campaigns running at the same time. Fortunately, there are a couple tools that can prevent you from losing your mind – and your time – when facing such a challenge:

8-Adhawk. Interested in getting data from each one of the campaigns you’re currently running, all neatly and clearly displayed on the same dashboard? Adhawk is one of the easiest to use options we’ve found so far for this matter. Not only does it extract relevant data from your campaigns, but it also analyzes different aspects to give you suggestions to improve your results. 

9-ADchieve. If you feel swamped with all the different accounts you manage, ADchieve could be the right fit for you. This platform helps you establish workflows for each account. Through its  supply algorithm,  it automatically creates text campaigns, selects targets, assigns keywords, detects synonyms and negative keywords, and rotates ads from a pool to make sure it always offers an optimal performance. You can also link the ad campaign with the stock availability in order to stop promoting a product you’ve run out of.

A PPC tool for offline editing

PPC campaigns can be very extensive. They may include hundreds or thousands of ad pieces, each one with their own features and subtle particularities. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to edit a whole batch at the same time and then simply upload them? We have some good news for you, it is possible!

10-Google Ads Editor. Of course, you probably already knew this one… didn’t you? Let us remind you, just in case. This piece of software can be downloaded to your computer and allows you to change items in numerous ads at the same time, then preview them in draft mode. You can easily make corrections for all the ads to ensure the result exactly matches your expectations. 

These are only a few of our favorite PPC tools that you can use to automate tasks and ease your daily workload. Now it is up to you to select which one (or ones!) best fit your needs. Remember that all these programs are worth nothing without a good SEM manager taking advantage of their capabilities. But you already have one of those in your team, don’t you?