Your inbound marketing strategies are more important in the era of Covid-19 than they’ve ever been before, as businesses everywhere struggle to revitalize and stabilize lead generation and lead conversion rates. A solid mix of paid search strategies, including pay-per-click campaigns, should be part of any inbound marketing funnel you have in place.
Why Do You Need PPC Software?
In the world of online advertising, you need to quickly be able to identify the right keywords for the campaign you’re planning and be able to quickly create and post targeted advertisements. While it’s possible to manage these PPC campaigns manually, you’ll get better results and more efficiency using a PPC campaign management software tool. The software can help speed up your decision process and helps to provide immediate access to the necessary metrics for tracking the ROI on PPC campaigns, such as conversion rates, costs, and click-through rates necessary to establish a solid path forward for your marketing team.
Join us as we explore the following topics:
- What Are the Different Types of PPC Advertising That Software Helps to Manage?
- When Should You Purchase PPC Software?
- Tips for Choosing the Best PPC Software
- 10 Recommended PPC Software Providers
What Are the Different Types of PPC Advertising That Software Helps to Manage?
When researching our top software lists, we generally are dealing with fairly wide industry segments like HR or PR that require software that performs different functions. This usually allows developers to create flexible software options that can handle any combination of business applications. In the case of PPC software, you’re often managing a very basic purchasing process based on keywords and ad placement, so there isn’t a wide variety of software types to manage PPC on the market. What the PPC market does require, however, are software solutions that help manage the different types of ads that can be posted across multiple platforms.
Google Shopping Ads
For eCommerce websites, Google Shopping advertising campaigns are one of the most effective PPC strategies you can launch to support your brand. When a query is read by Google to be a shopping inquiry, a carousel of advertisements appears above the organic results of the search. These visual Google Shopping ads show the viewer pricing and details in a very impactful way before the user has even navigated to a website. What’s extremely valuable in Google Shopping ads is the impact you can have just in visual presentation without paying for the interaction, and how much higher a chance they’ll click on your advertisement in these online window shopping sessions.
Search Advertising
These advertisements appear within the search engines themselves and are most often associated with Google and Bing. These ads generally appear as bookends at the top and bottom of organic search results and are marked with a small “Ad” indicator before the listing. In a sense, because of placement, you’re bidding on these ads to bypass the time it takes to earn a top spot in organic search results through traditional SEO methods.
Display Advertising
An extremely targeted form of advertising, display ads appear across Google’s partner websites. Targeting tactics can include your own targeted buyers’ persona, visitors to similar websites, or specific industry websites to ensure entire communities see your ad. This highly customizable approach using a mix of image- and text-based ads ensures your budget will allow you to get the best ROI possible.
Social Media Advertising
Advertising on social media sites allows a more personalized connection with your target audience. Designed to capitalize on social proof marketing tactics, ads in the social media arena can be shared and appear in targeted user feeds or hangouts and help to push brand awareness to new levels. Social media ads work well with inbound funnels, allowing ads to lead targeted users back to landing pages and other forms of lead generation on your home site.
Remarketing
An extremely effective marketing tactic, remarketing PPC campaigns show ads for your brand to website visitors after they’ve navigated to other sites. The intent is to remind previous visitors that they were interested in your brand and to entice them to return to your site and continue through your inbound funnel towards conversion or making a purchase. More advanced versions of remarketing ads can actually show the visitors the same product they were previously viewing.
Sequential Remarketing
Remarketing ads are limited in scale and generally a short-term marketing tactic. Sequential versions of remarketing advertising campaigns take a long view of this tactic, setting up advertisements that evolve over time to give the visitor an experience of your brand and even more effectively draw them back to your site.
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Other Popular PPC Advertising Avenues
As PPC advertising evolves with modern marketing strategies and user behaviors, PPC ads are appearing on other platforms and incorporating different types of content.
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The popularity of video content has marketing specialists integrating video content into PPC campaigns across platforms that support video ads.
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Gmail Sponsored Ads allow advertisers on Google’s Search, Shopping, or Display ad channels to extend their ads into user Gmail, where the ad will appear as an email but expands into ad content when clicked.
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Of the eCommerce platforms, it’s important to remember the sheer scope of business that flows through Amazon’s marketplace and to leverage the platform’s PPC advertising opportunities.
When Should You Purchase PPC Software?
The question of when you should buy PPC software implies a sequence of events leading to the need for more substantive tools in order to accomplish your marketing goals. The road to “when,” then, is heavily influenced by marketing managers having to make the decision of what tools will best drive a marketing campaign and convert leads into paying clients. What sets PPC management software apart is that these software tools are designed to give marketers extremely granular control over advertising assets in order to maximize the value they bring to the bottom line.
Industries That Benefit From PPC the Most
Paid search campaigns are versatile marketing tools that can be adapted to a number of different industries and business types to create extremely effective PPC advertising initiatives.
Businesses with High Margins on Single Purchases
For businesses selling extremely high-priced products or services, a single sale can fund entire advertising campaigns, so an effective PPC advertising strategy can generate massive revenue streams.
Exclusive Services and Products or Products with Limited Availability on the Market
If your business doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar presence that customers can visit, then a well-structured PPC campaign can expose your services or products to the exact target audience who is most likely to be interested in what you have to sell.
Lifetime Value of Acquiring a Client Exceeds Costs of PPC Campaigns
For businesses that offer services or products where profitability depends upon long-term relationships with customers, PPC campaigns are highly effective at attracting and converting the right types of clients. Converting the clients that will patronize the business for as long as your services meet their business needs ensures a long-term income stream that will fund advertising efforts over the long term.
Event-based and Seasonal Services and Products
Products that are only available or popular during holidays or seasonally benefit greatly from PPC tactics due to the ability of the sellers to target very specific keywords and take advantage of local SEO marketing tactics.
Tips for Choosing the Best PPC Software Solution
Purchasing a Pay-per-click management software does require some consideration before making the investment. If your business has reached a point where it’s necessary to expand and capitalize upon your digital marketing efforts across diverse online channels, these are some questions you should have an answer to before you make the decision to add to your software stack.
Do You Have the Expertise and Bandwidth In-House to Manage PPC Software?
Many small businesses and startups are structured to operate as efficiently and with as much agility as possible, so there’s a likelihood in many smaller organizations that individuals on the team might possess the marketing skills to understand and effectively deploy PPC software. In larger organizations, there are often dedicated marketing departments, with skilled individuals whose careers are focused exclusively on staying up to date with marketing strategies and tools.
When neither of these situations are true, your organization should consider that instead of taking on the role of managing a PPC solution in-house, that it might be more cost-effective to bring in a marketing agency. The specialized training and ability to dedicate time and resources can often result in much more effective marketing strategies and PPC campaigns than if you saddle your own staff with the task of managing your marketing efforts when they don’t have the experience to do so.
What’s the Cost to Add the PPC Management Tool to Your Software Stack?
In a time when businesses are only just recovering from the financial impact of the pandemic, marketing budgets are a finite resource that must be respected. Ensure that the tools that you are considering incorporating into your operations fit into your cost projections and that the expected revenue from the ads you plan to launch with the tool will not only cover purchase or ongoing fees, but also meet your income projections from increased lead conversions. When considering the software, also look into whether the software has a free trial that you can use to ensure the tool meets your needs.
Does the Software Meet Your Short-term and Long-term Business Needs?
Before purchasing a software solution for your paid search campaigns, it’s important to identify what functions and tasks you need the tool to accomplish. Once you have a feel for both your short-term needs and your long-term strategies, research the tools on the market and decide whether or not to go with a solution that meets one or the other, so that your investment doesn’t unnecessarily waste resources.
How Robust is the Support for the Software Solutions You’re Considering?
In business, there are times where you might have a business need that exceeds the expertise of your staff, but your current budgetary restrictions might prevent outsourcing. In such cases, it’s important to choose a tool that comes with significant support and educational materials to assist in your employees overcoming the learning curve associated with the tool and effectively deploy the solution to maximum effect. Things to look for include 24/7 support desks; online learning portals; and customer service that is reachable by phone, online chat, and email as needed.
10 Recommended PPC Software Service Providers
Now that you understand what to look for in PPC software, let’s consider some of the options on the market that exemplify and excel at managing the types of ads we’ve discussed and provide users with the tools they need to excel.
End-to-End Software Solutions
Many of the platforms on the market are designed to help marketing experts manage the advertising workflow from start to finish and across all marketing applications. They often provide tools for SEO management, content creation, and other marketing activities.
Pricing: SEMRush’s overall platform has three pricing tiers that include gradually increasing levels of access to more complex marketing tools depending on the size and needs of clients. Certain growth and listing tools are additional cost items. Pricings listed are the per month cost of an annual plan; true pricing can be as much as 17% than those listed below.
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- Pro tier cost is $99.95/mo and provides support for a limited number of projects and keywords that can be tracked. Designed for small teams and to help marketing staff learn new skills.
- Guru tier cost is $191.62/mo and is designed for small businesses, marketing agencies, and freelance consultants to handle multiple clients.
- Business tier cost is $374.95/mo and offers enterprises and large agencies the tools they need to manage multiple large-scale marketing campaigns.
Trial: While there is a Free tier that allows marketing professionals limited access to the tools available to paying clients that allow them to give the platform a test run and see if it’s right for their business needs, users can also access a 7-day trial of the higher paid tiers to give a better idea of how the tools can help your business.
Paid search and PPC campaigns support complex SEO strategies, so it makes sense that one of the most popular SEO tools on the market includes functionality that can be leveraged to execute PPC campaign management tasks. The Ahrefs platform is a great tool for researching what competitors are running for ads, what keywords they are bidding on, and what channels their website traffic can be sourced back to. All of this data can in turn be used to tweak and optimize your own PPC campaigns.
Including Ahrefs on this list is intended to provide readers with an alternative to purely PPC-focused software solutions for businesses looking for end-to-end marketing tools that can enhance their overall marketing strategy.
Pricing: There are four pricing tiers, with the option to pay monthly or annually; the annual pricing listed below is discounted to provide users a reduced fee equal to two free months versus monthly pricing. Each successive tier increases the scope and reach of the services available and the data that can be gathered.
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- Lite plan costs $82/mo
- Standard plan costs $149/mo
- Advanced plan costs $332/mo
- Agency plan costs $832/mo
Trial: The Lite and Standard plans are offered at $7 for seven days on a trial basis that provides access to all tier features; the trial is not available on the annual pricing plan.
Not only is NinjaCat considered a full end-to-end marketing solution, but it’s built specifically to help agencies support their clients by offering tools to manage multiple accounts. Client data can be fully integrated into single reports that provide customers with insight into their ad campaign performance and show where the agency can help to make improvements. The tool integrates with more than 750 other applications and can be used in conjunction with the Google advertising suite as well as social media and other search engine advertising tools and customer relationship management platforms.
NinjaCat is a unique presentation tool that helps agencies translate the complicated data generated by PPC advertising analytics into clear and easily understandable metrics that agencies can then use to guide their clients in making the best decisions for their paid search campaigns.
Pricing: NinjaCat’s pricing is gated with a demo request and not available for verification on the website.
Trial: No trial is listed on the site.
PPC-Focused Tools
Several tools on the list are dedicated to the management of PPC campaigns and the optimization of those campaigns.
Unlike some of the stand-alone planning tools on this list, WordStream is a planning tool that helps to manage Google Ads. Because of the complexities involved in managing PPC campaigns, WordStream automates much of the analysis of the data flowing from your Google Ads account, identifies ways to reduce advertising costs, consolidates and automates reporting from the platform, and even provides suggestions on ways to optimize your actual ads that are running in order to improve lead generation and conversions.
We’ve included WordStream in this list because it provides small businesses and consultants with an extensible automated tool that can be used across multiple search engine advertising and social media advertising accounts, all built around activities that can be accomplished within a 20-minute window throughout the week in order to optimize your marketing team’s time.
Pricing: The WordStream platform is $49/mo for access to the online advertising platform and includes a robust customer support service and online learning platforms for clients to improve their skills with the tool. The same price holds for agency access that allows marketing professionals to white-label the services by the client.
Trial: WordStream offers a 7-day trial, as well as an assessment by their team to show potential clients how best to leverage the platform.
Alexandra Van Doren, Director of Marketing at Agency onethree, says, “With Wordstream we can track the overall performance of PPC campaigns and see the areas we can improve. We get a bit more granular in the native analytics of the platforms where we then transfer it over to a Google sheet to track and formulate our next action steps to improve or scale that campaigns.”
Samantha Jones, Customer Support Representative at Technbrains, agrees by saying, “WordStream PPC Advisor is the best software tool for managing PPC campaigns.”
A self-contained solution that doesn’t require knowledge of coding or complicated integrations by your IT team, Optmyzr is an all-in-one solution for your PPC advertising management needs. From keyword and search term analytics to optimization tools for keyword bidding and making informed budgets, the tool is built with the ability to also test and restructure your PPC ads to ensure they are as compelling as possible.
Optmyzer is a unique addition to this list because instead of integrating with your Google Ads account, the company built improved interfaces that allow users to better identify keywords, AB test ads, quickly and efficiently manage bids, and rapidly build out complex campaigns for larger clients that otherwise take multiple days to create.
Pricing: Optmyzer offers users an interesting pricing structure based on the amount of advertising spend your business has allocated per month. The ad spend tiers range from $10,000 per month to $500,000 per month, and plan costs at the time of writing range from $208/mo to $665/mo, but these prices are discounted rates equal to two free months offered for those who pay for an annual plan.
Trial: Optmyzr offers visitors a 14-day trial upfront with no obligation to convert the account to a fully paid option.
Eric Lituchy, CEO at Hunter Digital, had this to say about the program, “We love Optmyzr! It’s an amazing tool to manage Google Search and Shopping. The support is excellent and honestly the price is pretty awesome too.”
The Adalysis platform provides marketing teams with an advertising workflow management tool. Adalysis automates much of the PPC management process, including providing users with insight into data and metrics on ad performance and how to adjust bidding strategies, budgets, and content of ads in order to improve that performance. The software also helps users understand and manage their quality store and provides insight into creating competitive advertising campaigns.
Adalysis is lauded in the rankings of PPC software for the platform’s ad testing automation and auditing process, allowing users to test and tweak campaigns quickly in order to best maximize profitability.
Pricing: The Adalysis pricing structure is built around monthly ad spend; pricing below reflects the 15% discount users get for annual contracts.
- Up to $50,000/mo bills at $84/mo
- Up to $150,000/mo bills at $169/mo
- Up to $250,000/mo bills at $211/mo
- Up to $500,000/mo bills at $424/mo
- Beyond $500,000 requires consultation with the sales team for pricing
Trial: The website lists a 14-day trial with no commitment to buy.
Specialized PPC Support Tools
In the PPC management software arena, there are a number of tools that have extremely specific functions. These can be tools designed to accomplish extremely specific marketing tasks related to PPC, manage PPC on platforms other than Google or search engines, provide insight into the competition, or to protect your campaigns.
In PPC marketing, it’s crucial that you are building and executing campaigns designed to outperform the competition. The only way to accomplish this is through understanding the strategies and ad campaigns being executed, which is the underlying premise around which the creators of SpyFu built the platform. In addition to PPC research and strategizing, SpyFu offers marketing teams SEO research tools, backlinking functionality, list generation tools, and data analytics for tracking and reporting the impact your marketing efforts have across each channel.
An extremely unique tool on this list, SpyFu analyzes any given website’s paid keyword and ad spend history, identifies where the brand has been successful and where it is weak, and provides high-level data that allows users to decide which content and ad copy to drill into for further analysis. This can be used as a way of determining which keywords you should be focusing your own ad efforts on and where your copy has been most effective.
Pricing: The SpyFu pricing tiers provide increased access for users to the number of projects that can be managed, the number of keywords that can be tracked, and the number of results included in a report. Higher tiers provide access to historical data, customized and branded reports, and at the highest level API access.
- Basic tier costs $33/mo to $39/mo
- Professional tier costs start between $49/mo and $69/mo
- Unlimited access can be secured for between $68/mo and $129/mo
Trial: There is no free trial period, but the platform does provide a 30-day money-back guarantee with little to no red tape involved.
With the legalities of ad fraud and click fraud murky at best, your PPC ads are constantly in danger of being targeted by malicious competitors and others acting with ill intent. ClickCease provides protection for PPC campaigns by blocking competitors, automated bot tools, click farms, and other forms of interaction that intentionally or unintentionally waste your PPC budget by interacting with your ads.
The effectiveness of your PPC campaigns depends largely upon your investment in ad spend and keyword bidding. Malicious actors and tools look to undermine your campaigns by wasting your budget so that your ads stop appearing and they can take your business for themselves by running ads on the same keywords or long-tail key phrases. We’ve included ClickCease to give you an idea of the types of software available to defend and protect your PPC campaigns from these types of attacks to ensure the long-term ROI on your advertising efforts.
Pricing: Plans cover an unlimited number of Google Ads accounts, but tiers vary depending on the scope of protection. Pricing below are annual rates and indicate a 20% savings over standard monthly rates.
- Standard Plans protect a single domain and cost $40/mo for 5,000 clicks.
- Pro Plans allow the protection of unlimited domains and pricing scales based on the number of clicks you’re looking to protect against. Pro tier includes a dedicated account manager and cross-domain blocking.
- Pro pricing starts at a max of 10,000 clicks for $60/mo
- Pro scales up to 100,000 clicks for $200/mo
Trial: ClickCease provides a 7-day trial to give users an idea of how the platform can protect your advertising budget.
Unlike many of the tools on this list, Ad Badger is designed not to manage PPC ad management on search engines, but rather to help marketers and eCommerce-based businesses manage their paid search and PPC advertising on Amazon’s marketplace platform. Like Google Ads tools, Ad Badger helps Amazon Advertisers dig deep into their ads and identify ways they can improve keyword bidding and tweak existing keyword focus to more appropriate and less competitive but equally lucrative keywords.
Much of the allure of Ad Badger lies in the platform’s automation tools that help to minimize the time your team needs to invest in manually tracking your PPC performance. The built-in analytics help with bulk campaign optimizations and even allow the users to optimize around negative keywords as well.
Pricing: Review sites have listed a range of pricing models and tiers that aren’t listed on the software’s site. On Ad Badger’s website, pricing is walled behind a form requiring visitors to request a demo video of the product. Tiers aren’t named, but rather broken down by your monthly ad spend levels. Pricing spreads include discounted annual agreement pricing versus 6-month commitment pricing.
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- Up to $25,000/mo ad spend costs $340-$400
- Up to $75,000/mo ad spend costs $510-$600
- Up to $225,000/mo ad spend costs $708-$833
- Excess spend at each tier results in a fee equal to half of the monthly subscription cost.
Trial: Ad Badger’s own Help Center states that Ad Badger does not have a free trial period.
One of the major influences on your PPC campaign performance is your site’s Quality Score. The higher your score, the better-ranked your ad position will be relative to other companies bidding on the same keywords. While it’s a highly important element of Google Ads, Google’s advertising management platform doesn’t provide tools to manage or affect your Quality Score. Tenscores helps advertisers to improve Quality Scores through analysis and ad revision and optimization, and analytics to show the impact of your changes.
Tenscores is a great inclusion on this list because it provides users with a tool that goes about PPC optimization at the root of the factors that impact PPC performance and with the right optimizations, can save your organization money over time, as a higher Quality Score means your ads will cost less.
Pricing: There are three pricing tiers based on the size of your organization and the scope of your business’s needs.
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- SMB accounts cost $25/mo
- Agency accounts are a more robust Ad management tool that allows a business to manage up to 10 Google Ads accounts for $165/mo
- For Enterprise level clients, pricing starts at $1,999/mo and requires customization through a service agent.
Trial: Small- to medium-sized businesses can take advantage of a 14-day Trial Period.
Run A Paid Search Campaign that Generates a CTR That Supports Your Goals
The software options seem endless. In addition to our top 10, we also want to provide a few special mentions.
“With HubSpot, we’re able to track multi-touch attribution across ad campaigns back to deals, revenue, and referrals. Not only that, but we’re able to create or change ad audiences in real time using automation based on the efficacy of each campaign or actions across multiple campaigns.”
Alex Leybovich, CEO, Auden Digital
“Databox centralizes all of our data and allows us to combine the relevant metrics from all of the best PPC management software.”
Anders Rydholm, Owner, PrimeTime Web
Google Classics and Business Intelligence
Of course, there’s no substitute for business acumen and first party data when carrying out paid search campaigns.
“The most important tool for managing PPC campaigns successfully is Google Analytics 360. When we think of PPC, it is likely <85% of the investment is being spent with Google, so might as well leverage their most powerful analytics resource.”
Daniel Shainker, CEO, IntakeNow
“Google Ads is the primary tool you should be using first.”
Drew Kleppe, Account Director, Booyah Advertising
“The ROI for Google Ads has proven time and time again that, when used to it’s full potential, it’s the most targeted and cost effective way to drive higher quality traffic to client’s websites.”
Patrick Delehanty, Director of Digital, GrahamSpencer
“Google Data Studio allows for the creation of multiple dashboards with countless datasets that suit your business needs.”
Brian Vuong, Director of Digital Strategy, The Search Architects
“Google Analytics is completely free and very powerful when used correctly with proper conversion tracking and event tracking enabled and custom segments used to measure conversion activity.”
Zack Duncan, President and Principal Digital Strategist, Root and Branch Group
“Even the best tools require that you use human intelligence to supplement any tool and to know when to reject machine learning.”
James J Bilello, President, US Marketing, Inc.
Choosing the right PPC software for the types of ads your firm runs is a crucial step in the process of extending your marketing tech stack because the return on investment for paid search advertising is significant, but only when optimized with the right tools. To learn more about PPC strategies, software solutions, and how marketing agencies can support your advertising efforts, visit our marketing and SEO B2B service providers on the UpCity marketplace.