PPC Tools: the most frequently asked questions

We often receive questions from people who have not yet tried PPC management tools on how they can be useful. So we decided to collect the most frequently asked questions and try to answer them.

Working in the Paid Search industry almost since it emerged 20 years ago, we have witnessed times when the competition in Google Ads was not nearly as high as it is now. In order to be successful, you just had to be diligent enough to study the system inside out and do a lot of A/B testing to find your sweet spot.

But look where we are now! Google Ads is constantly evolving (for example, they changed the way phrase and modified broad match works, removed Average Position metric, introduced audience targeting and eliminated accelerated delivery for Search Campaigns, introduced campaign-level conversions, just to name a few). It’s sometimes hard to absorb the new knowledge and apply it to our projects quickly.

On the other hand, competition is growing at an incredible pace, increasing pressure and CPC for most keywords, making the Quality Score and wise allocation of budgets more important than ever.

Despite all new, emerging online advertising channels, paid search will apparently stay with us for a long time, which, frankly, is quite logical, as this is one of the few ways to deal with your bottom-of-the-funnel audience, explicitly stating their interest by hitting the search button in Google or Bing.

So, it’s more important than ever to keep up with the industry: to identify problems hindering your success with PPC as soon as possible and grasping growth opportunities faster than your competition. That’s exactly where PPC tools come in handy. As the volume of data is overwhelming, their algorithms will support you to win this game.

What are PPC tools?

PPC tools are essentially marketing technology solutions that are designed to monitor and optimize the performance of pay-per-click campaigns and automate the most time-consuming tasks within PPC campaign management or the tasks that involve deep analysis of large data volumes. That’s where the magic happens: the 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 specifically 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. There are tools out there that help with Amazon ads, or Facebook ads, etc.

What type of tasks can PPC tools do for you?

There are tools out there that are developed to 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. On the other hand, there are all-in-one 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 would proceed to your Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising account and make updates from there or use Google Ads Editor.

There are also tools that work in both directions – for example, you will be able to change your bids and budgets directly from your 3rd party PPC tool and the changes will be synced with your Google Ads / Microsoft Ads account.

Who can benefit from using PPC tools?

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 are affordable enough so that smaller accounts also benefit from them, and the potential gains are worth the investment.

The main benefits of using a 3rd 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 of many tasks (e.g., regularly checking for issues like broken links or keyword conflicts, duplicate keyword tool, A/B testing ad copy, etc.),
  • simplify workflow (professional tools provide an opportunity to fix all the issues or apply the optimization ideas with a click of a button),
  • apply advanced techniques (PPC tools allow to solve tasks that before were only achievable by scripts – like analyzing n-grams, or collecting heatmap for the hourly performance of your ads to set bid adjustments. In most cases, using PPC tools is easier and faster than setting up a script).

What PPC tools can’t do for you?

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 and put yourself into your customers’ shoes, define your unique selling proposition, and craft a compelling message that would resonate with your audience (which often can only be understood by testing multiple versions of an ad copy, and here again the PPC tools will help you in 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).

Hence, the best way to approach PPC tools is to see them as your virtual assistant which is great at analysis and repetitive tasks, and together you’ll complement each other to achieve the best results.

Why bother about 3rd party PPC management tools?

The amount of data in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads can sometimes be overwhelming – you can easily overlook something in all these numbers, and in the current competitive market it can become a lost opportunity for your business.

Also, professional PPC tools typically 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 list the priority list of ad groups and keywords to fix the ones that are impacting your performance most, while in Google Ads you will 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, which sometimes might become an issue for non-coders (in cases when a script throws an error, for example).

Start using PPC management tools free

If you would like to see how PPC management tools work in action, you can do it now for free and without any commitment. Adalysis professional PPC toolkit offers a 14 day free trial, full functionality available. No credit card is required to start your free trial. Just 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 under their belt. Since then, we have helped PPC agencies, in-house PPC marketers and small business owners from all over the world to optimize their PPC efforts in the most cost-effective way.

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