Top 6 PPC Tools That Should Be Essential for Every Digital Marketer

 PPC stands for pay-per-click. PPC is a form of online marketing where advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their ads. 

The most common form of PPC advertising is through search engines, such as Google Ads, where advertisers bid on keywords and their ads appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) when those keywords are searched for. 

PPC advertising can also be done through social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, and through display advertising on websites.

With so many PPC tools at your disposal, how do you choose which one is right for you and your business?  In this article, I’ll walk you through some tools that every marketer should be using to ensure that they are managing and growing their PPC accounts efficiently.

Insight Tools

Your journey to PPC management starts with generating insights. These insights can be a look at competitor intelligence, keyword data, demographic information and more. Below are a few areas to concentrate on:

• Understanding your ads versus your competitors’ so you can ensure your offers are relevant, timely and targeted, and as good as or better than your competitors’ ads.
• Knowing your competitors’ keywords to determine where you have coverage gaps and where you might want to add keywords. You can also find areas where your competition is weak and use that to your advantage by driving more traffic in that area.
• Getting to know your audience so you can create targeted messages that prompt them to respond more favorably to your ads.
• You may raise the effectiveness of your marketing campaign overall by utilizing these insights regarding your audience, competitors, and data. 

Bing Ads Intelligence is one of my best, although little used, insight tools. With the help of the free Microsoft Excel plugin Bing Ads Intelligence, you can conduct research, deal with keyword lists, and accomplish other tasks that the Keyword Planner tools can handle. 

The way that Bing Ads Intelligence varies from the other tools is that it lets you get location- and demographic-specific data for your studies. Before you spend money on keywords, this is one of the quickest ways to obtain demographic information on those terms. 

By utilizing your competitors' advertisements and keywords, two further insight tools that offer a wealth of competitive intelligence data are SEMRush and ahref.

Collaborative Tools

As you build and manage accounts, you will need a central repository to share documents, images, files, and so forth. Dropbox, OneDrive, G Suite, and Box are all good contenders that allow your entire team to have access to the assets used in the account.

Build Tools

After using various market analysis tools, you must develop new campaigns or grow your current PPC accounts. 

This can be accomplished fairly effectively with Excel, AdWords Editor, and Bing Ads Editor  together. But the landing pages are where these tried-and-true tools falter. 

Wordpress or Unbounce are my favorites for landing pages. Unbounce is a good option if I need specialized pages. Unbounce makes it simple to create landing pages and has numerous integrations with call tracking and analytics providers so you can organize all of your data in one location. 

But Wordpress comes in really handy if I'm in charge of a whole microsite designed to drive conversions and not using a company's standard content management system. Developer tools, plugins, and templates abound.

Ongoing Management 

Once you have an account built and everyone has access to information, it’s time to manage the account.

Project management

Project management is one of my favorite PPC tools since it can be used as both a collaboration tool and an ongoing management tool. 

I want to handle PPC like a project, thus I need a platform that lets me manage recurring chores, have various users with varying levels of authorization, and have templates that make it simple to set up a new account. 

Selecting a project management software is a cooperative endeavor. Instead of just another location to log work, you need a tool where people feel like it's helping them get things done more efficiently and things don't slide through the cracks. One team may adore a tool while another team may detest it, in my experience. This is

There are many strong project management tools on the market and here are a few of my favorites: 

• Trello: Easy to learn and use kanban style management 
• Jira: Enterprise level management for those with software & teams to manage
• Basecamp: Great for teams and permission control
• Podio: Very easy to control workflows from sales to onboarding to fulfillment
• TeamworkPM: Built for those who like Basecamp’s feature; but not the interface.

Bidding

• If you’re not using CPA bidding or rules baked directly into the search engines; you will need a bid management company. Typically Acquisio is wonderful for agencies and Doubleclick, Marin, and Kenshoo are best for larger companies.
• There are some good speciality providers out there, such as Finch for ecommerce.

Automated Recommendations and Testing

A massive amount of data will be generated by your PPC account. The challenge with an abundance of data is that it is hard to ensure that you are staying abreast of every piece of information and adhering to best practices. 

The second thing to avoid is squandering time looking for something when, in the end, there's nothing worth looking for. It's quite simple to lose a whole day dissecting your configuration simply to discover that there were no adjustments needed. 

This is where recommendations and automated data testing are useful. These programs conduct the backend data analysis for you, only alerting you when there's real work to be done. This frees you from needless data processing and gives you more time.

For instance, a program can automatically monitor and alert you when any of these issues arise:

• Ad testing
• Negative keyword suggestions
• Positive keyword suggestions
• Quality score insights and recommendations
• N-gram analysis
• Broken link detection
• Missing ad extensions

Reporting 

PPC accounts need to be invested in. Customers and business partners are interested in knowing how their money is being used, what insights they can gain from their investment, and what results they may anticipate as it grows. 

You should think about employing reporting solutions to expedite reporting so that everyone has quick and accurate data insights. In most cases, reporting can be done straight from your bid management interface if you're utilizing a bid management system like Acquisio. 

Google Data Studio is an excellent choice if you require a reporting solution that doesn't integrate a lot of third-party data because it can be used to build reports on a variety of data dimensions and connects to AdWords, Google Analytics, and other third-party data sources.

Wrap Up

Not all tools are equal, and not all tools will work for everyone. If you’re just getting started, I’d highly recommend starting with a project management tool. This tool can tell you what to do and when to do it. It dictates the usage of other tools.

Once you have your project management setup in place, then move to recommendation engines. These are a new part of the PPC game, but as they are scanning your account and crunching the data for you; they will bubble up a to-do list without you having to check your project management tool every day. These tools will help you make sure tasks don’t get missed.

The next place to automate is reporting. It is important that your company and your clients understand how your accounts are performing and pull data as necessary to share in other departments or find new customer insights. Reporting is one of the largest time sinks in any company and agency, and you can free up a lot of time by automating your reporting efforts. 

Now that you have project management, automated recommendations, and reports automated; these tools will tell you what needs to be done. This could be keyword research; so you’ll want to look at keyword research tools; or it could be bulk changes, in which case, the editors are great to use. 

PPC accounts can be time consuming to build, optimize, report, and manage. That’s where PPC tools come in. They can help you stay organized, easily build and grow your account, and automatically take over the data crunching and bidding for you so that you can focus on ensuring that your accounts are hitting its goals and staying profitable. 

Learn how to keep your PPC account profitable by taking a look at our PPC training. The Isha's Digital learning Institute PPC training course will show you how to build and manage accounts, so you’ll be equipped to successfully build and run your own PPC account.