PPC tools: the most frequently asked questions
We often receive questions about how PPC management tools can be useful. So here are the most frequently asked questions and our take on them.
The Adalysis team has worked in the paid search industry since it emerged 25 years ago. We started when the competition in Google Ads wasn’t nearly as high as it is now. In order to be successful, you just had to be diligent enough to study the system and use A/B testing to find your sweet spot.
But look where we are now! Google Ads is constantly evolving. It can be hard to keep up with new developments and apply them to our projects.
On the other hand, competition is growing at an incredible pace, increasing pressure and CPCs for most keywords, making quality scores and wise allocation of budgets more important than ever.
Despite all the new online advertising channels, paid search is here to stay. Logical, as it’s one of the few ways to engage your bottom-of-the-funnel audience, who’ve explicitly signaled their interest through their Google or Bing searches.
So, it’s more important than ever to keep up: to identify problems affecting your PPC campaigns quickly and grasp growth opportunities faster than your competition. That’s where PPC tools come in. As the volume of data becomes overwhelming, their algorithms can support you with finding insights and potential errors.
PPC marketing tools are designed to monitor and optimize the performance of pay-per-click campaigns. They automate the most time-consuming and data-intensive tasks within PPC campaign management. Powerful algorithms provide hidden insights, which a strategic PPC marketer can then leverage for improving the overall performance of the PPC account.
PPC management tools may be designed for one or several pay-per-click advertising platforms. For example, Adalysis helps advertisers to manage Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts more efficiently. You can also find tools for Amazon or Facebook ads, etc.
Some tools deal with a few specific pay-per-click management areas, for example, bidding management, keyword research (finding words beyond Google Keyword planner), or quality score analysis. Others are more comprehensive solutions. They can help you with multiple tasks:
- Overall analysis of PPC accounts
- Tracking and monitoring performance
- Budget management
- Bid management
- Keyword research
- Quality score management
- Reporting
- A/B testing
- Building PPC campaigns from scratch
- Competitor research
It’s important to distinguish between different types of PPC tools. Some provide you with detailed information about your performance, but don’t allow you to make changes to your PPC campaigns from the interface. To implement any recommendations, you’d have to switch to your Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising account (or use Google Ads Editor).
The best tools work in both directions. For example, you change your bids and budgets directly from your third-party PPC tool. The changes will then be synced with your Google Ads / Microsoft Ads account.
In the past, PPC management tools were mostly considered by users with large or multiple online advertising accounts (for example, digital marketing agencies or large in-house teams in e-commerce or travel). Now, they’re affordable enough so that smaller accounts also benefit from them, and the potential gains are worth the investment.
The main benefits of using a third-party PPC tool are:
- saving time (for example, by bulk creating campaigns or PPC ads, using a keyword research tool, or receiving automated recommendations on bid adjustments)
- automation (e.g., regularly checking for issues like broken links or keyword conflicts, duplicate keyword tools, A/B testing ad copy)
- simplifying workflows (professional tools provide an opportunity to fix issues or apply optimization ideas with a click of a button)
- applying advanced techniques (PPC tools solve tasks that were only achievable by scripts – like analyzing n-grams, or hourly performance heatmaps to set bid adjustments. In most cases, using PPC tools is easier and faster than setting up a script)
The main strength of PPC tools is that powerful algorithms can process much more data significantly faster than humans and allow them to automate the most mundane tasks. They are typically more efficient when it comes to numbers and calculations. However, not all processes can be automated (see how we decide what to automate).
Also, very importantly, PPC tools can’t replace humans in strategy and creativity. As a PPC manager, you’ll still need to be able to understand your audience, define your unique selling proposition, and craft a compelling message that resonates with your audience. (This can often only be understood by testing multiple versions of an ad, and here again, PPC tools can help you with setting up A/B tests.) It’s also crucial to optimize your landing page so that it reinforces the message and shows your users why your solution is exactly what they need (some PPC tools also provide an overview of how your landing pages are performing).
The best way to approach PPC tools is to see them as your copilot —great at analysis and repetitive tasks. Together, you’ll complement each other to achieve the best results.
The amount of data in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads can sometimes be overwhelming. You can easily overlook things in all these numbers, and in the current competitive market, it can become a lost opportunity for your business.
The best PPC tools strive to provide value beyond what you can find in PPC accounts. For example, some PPC management tools will show you a detailed analysis of your quality score factors and provide a priority list of ad groups and keywords that are impacting your performance most. In Google Ads, you’ll only see the numbers for each keyword and will have to do all the further analysis yourself.
On top of that, many advanced features like n-grams or hourly performance reports in Google Ads are only available via scripts. If you’re not comfortable coding, script errors can become an issue.
If you would like to see how PPC management tools work in action, you can get started for free and without any commitment. The Adalysis PPC toolkit offers a free trial, with full functionality available. No credit card needed. Securely sign in with your Google Ads account and see if PPC campaign management tools are a good fit for your paid search campaigns.
Here are some of the tools Adalysis PPC software includes:
Adalysis was founded in 2013 by PPC experts with more than 20 years of experience. Since then, we have helped PPC agencies and PPC marketers for brands from all over the world to effectively optimize their PPC efforts.
