Unlike organic content marketing, PPC campaigns provide quick instant results when done right.
That said, it isn’t wise to take a laissez-faire approach to paid advertising. You’re spending real money and risk blowing a hole through your advertising budget without results if you don’t optimize and manage your campaign properly.
PPC tools can help your paid campaign efforts by providing valuable data and metrics that help steer your efforts toward profitability. This article reveals the best ones available in 2023.
With over a decade of experience in digital marketing, Romain Berg is an agency that produces results. We’re digital marketing and SEO experts, so you can count on us to make recommendations that will help your campaign management and optimization efforts.
What Is PPC?
PPC is a digital advertising payment model, short for pay-per-click and also known as paid search. PPC advertising works because an advertiser (you) pays a fee each time an internet user clicks on one of its ads.
There are several types of PPC ads, and each type is suitable for a different marketing channel. The most common ones include text (e.g., sponsored links), video, and images (e.g., animated gifs, banner ads, and display ads in different dimensions). You can commonly find PPC ads on web pages, and search engine results pages, and social media feeds.
When you hear a digital marketer or advertiser talk about PPC, they’re most likely referring to a campaign that’s destined for a search engine results page (SERP). This form of PPC advertising is the most prevalent, and it involves bidding for a keyword so that your ad appears at the top of SERPs as a sponsored link when someone enters the keyword into a search bar.
Naturally, targeting an audience is crucial when leveraging paid advertising campaigns. This guide goes into more depth on PPC campaigns and audience targeting.
How PPC Tools Can Help You
When done right, a PPC campaign can result in an impressive ROI. However, considering that thousands of internet users can click on an ad, you’d be right to assume that PPC advertising can get expensive. The above is especially true if you target the wrong users.
PPC tools help advertisers manage their campaigns in several ways, including:
- Providing tools for keyword research and audience targeting
- Providing insightful analytics that helps with decision-making
- Sending automatic alerts about current campaigns
- Optimizing a campaign’s performance
- Producing shareable, aesthetically-pleasing reports
- Analyzing competitors’ PPC campaigns
Incidentally, the above are some factors to consider when choosing a PPC tool for your campaign.
Are you considering PPC marketing for your e-commerce venture? This article shows how PPC and e-commerce make a dynamic duo.
The Top PPC Tools in 2023
The PPC tools listed below offer the best features for managing and optimizing your online ad campaigns.
1. Google Ads
Google has the largest market share in the search engine industry, so it makes sense that its Google Ads platform is one of the top PPC tools for optimizing and managing ad campaigns.
This all-in-one tool includes features for creating campaigns, monitoring performance, analyzing results, and more.
In addition, it includes a Keyword Planner tool that lets you investigate and target keywords your audience uses when searching for products or services like yours. You can bid on the keywords you find and rank at the top of Google’s search engine results page.
Google Ads is free. However, you must sign up for a Google account to access the platform.
2. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an industry-standard analysis tool for PPC campaigns. Like its sister product, Google AdWords, the software is free, and you can access it with a Google account.
When you connect your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts, the former tool provides deeper insights into the PPC campaign you’re running on the latter. You can view metrics like the number of impressions your ads have generated, the number of clicks, the cost-per-click, the session duration for each visitor that clicks through to your website or ad, bounce rate, etcetera.
If you want to make data-backed decisions that can maximize the chances of receiving a better return on your investment, Google Analytics should be in your PPC-campaign-arsenal. It’s free.
3. SpyFu
SpyFu helps you optimize your campaigns in a peculiar way, i.e., by letting you spy on your competitors. This PPC tool provides insights into your competitors’ ads, revealing data like the keywords they’re currently bidding on and their estimated monthly ad budget.
In addition, SpyFu lets you peer back in time through a competitor’s ad history. This feature is excellent because you can incorporate the insights you find into your future campaigns and mirror your competitors’ successes.
SpyFu has three plans: Basic ($39/month), Professional ($79/month), or Team ($139/month).
4. PPC Entourage
PPC Entourage is for Amazon-focused e-commerce businesses. This PPC tool helps businesses optimize their Amazon ads by providing comprehensive analytics for e-commerce KPIs. In addition, it offers a bulk engine that lets you manage multiple campaigns simultaneously, eliminating the need for spreadsheets.
You get access to data that prevents ad spend waste while helping you make informed decisions quicker and with greater confidence. Its Margins Profit Maximizer reveals hidden costs that eat into your profits and provides insight into your sales, particularly how taxes, ad spending, product returns, and merchant fees impact them.
As of April 2023, PPC Entourage currently charges monthly subscription fees as a percentage of your monthly ad spend. For example, if you spend $4,100 a month on Amazon ads, PPC Entourage will charge you 2.9% of the amount ($118.90) per month.
5. Optmyzr
Optmyzr is a platform that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning when optimizing ad campaigns for Google and Bing.
You can use this PPC tool to set safeguards that prevent waste and automate bids on display ad networks. It also excels at helping you monitor your ad account’s performance through alerts for pre-set KPIs and budgets.
In addition, Optmyzr’s PPC Insights feature reveals a treasure trove of information hidden in your PPC data. You can analyze Google Shipping data, see ad spend projections, and more.
As of April 2023, Optmyzr starts at $228 monthly (depending on your monthly ad spend).
6. AdEspresso
AdEspresso is a PPC tool for three major advertising platforms: Google, Facebook, and Instagram. It provides features for A/B testing and campaign optimization and lets you create all your campaigns from a single digital hub. As such, you don’t have to switch from one ad manager to another when optimizing your campaigns.
Its analytics tools are impressive. They provide a full picture of your campaign over time, revealing the KPIs you need to track. The team behind the software wanted their tool to be user-friendly, so the dashboard displays all the information in an easy-to-read format.
Meanwhile, its All Ads feature makes editing ads you’ve already published straightforward. If multiple ads feature the same error, you can make the changes simultaneously using its bulk updates feature.
AdEspresso currently has three plans: Starter ($49/month), Plus ($99/month), and Enterprise ($259/month).
7. Adalysis
Adalysis helps businesses automate their paid search ads for Google and Bing. The software provides over 40 tools for PPC campaign optimization, monitoring, and analysis while letting you pace your ad spending using budget alerts.
Thanks to its features for campaign creation, you can create hundreds of campaigns in under a minute. The tool will extract the data from your uploaded files, ensuring you create campaigns in record time.
In addition, Adalysis provides automatic audit checks that spot issues in your campaigns, ads, keywords, search terms, ad extensions, placements, and landing pages. And it produces interactive reports that provide insight into your campaign’s performance.
Adalysis has plans that start at $99/month. The price is payable and corresponds to your monthly ad spend (e.g., $99/month for ad spending up to $50k).
8. SEMRush
SEMRush is a tool for SEO. Not only is it excellent for optimizing your organic marketing content, but it also provides some excellent features geared toward PPC marketing. You can use it to do everything from keyword research to competitor analysis, and it shines at helping you perform the latter task.
If you want to learn about your competitors’ ad creatives and estimated PPC budgets, SEMRush can provide that data. The tool provides a window into your competitors’ campaigns, letting you model yours against the most successful ones. Also, you can use it to benchmark your PPC costs, ensuring you don’t overspend.
SEMRush is also helpful in performing keyword research. Also, you can analyze Google Shopping campaigns.
Currently, SEMRush has three tiers: Pro ($119.95/month), Guru ($229.95/month), and Business ($449.95/month).
9. Opteo
Opteo provides a suite of tools for Google Ads management. This intelligent software provides recommendations for performance improvements, freeing up time you’d otherwise spend poring over performance data. In addition, you can easily implement the improvements you agree with. Opteo will push them live to Google Ads.
You can easily diagnose and rectify performance issues with this tool. Its segments feature lets you pinpoint your worst and best-performing segments within an account, providing insights into possible budget adjustments, marketing angles, etc.
Opteo integrates with the popular messaging app Slack. Combined with its Alerts feature, you can receive alerts about ad spend (e.g., when you’ve overspent), performance records, and more directly into a Slack channel of your choice.
You can subscribe to four Opteo tiers: Basic ($99/month), Professional ($199/month), Agency ($399/month), and Enterprise ($799/month).
10. MarketingCloudFX
MarketingCloudFX is a full-suite marketing tool with PPC campaign management and optimization features. It provides insightful data that lets you make informed decisions to drive revenue and increase your bottom line.
The software’s ad technology provides data on website visitors, campaign analytics, calls, and so on. Additionally, you can use MarketingCloudFX to learn about your target audience and tailor your campaigns to meet their needs better.
MarketingCloudFX has three tiers of its standard monthly license: Foundation ($875/month), Pro ($1,375/month), and Enterprise ($5,975/month).
11. Ad Badger
Ad Badger is another PPC tool aimed at Amazon sellers. It helps prevent wasted ad spend while providing features that help you manage, monitor, and automate your Amazon PPC campaign. In addition, the tool boasts user-friendliness that eliminates the need for previous PPC knowledge.
One of Ad Badger’s key features is its bidding algorithm that provides “profit-boosting bid optimization at the click of a button.” This technology analyzes your conversion data and makes micro bid adjustments so you can hit your advertising cost of sales (ACOS) targets.
Similarly impressive is the tool’s negative keywords feature, which parses your ad campaign over a six-month period and roots out all inefficient keywords in it. The tool adds them to a negative keywords list, and it’s all completely automated. Unlock your demo here to learn about its price.
Outsource Your PPC Campaign Management to Romain Berg’s Team of Experts
Searching for a PPC tool to help manage your campaign is all well and good, but PPC campaign management is merely one facet of your business. When time isn’t your friend, and you have a packed schedule, you should consider outsourcing the management of your campaign to a team of experts.
Romain Berg can help.
Our team of experts has decades of experience using PPC tools to manage campaigns for clients of all sizes. We know the best tools for the job, use a data-driven approach, and apply the best strategies to drive conversions and clicks.
Contact us today, and we’ll use our expertise to ensure your PPC campaign produces tangible and profitable results.
