The truth of the matter is, not every marketer out there has the money, access or resources needed to adopt premium search engine marketing tools such as RavenTools, WordStream, HitWise and Omniture. Although these premium PPC advertising tools are all great and perhaps much easier to use, the same sort of results can be generated using free to use tools. In fact, many PPC marketing agencies and professional PPC advertisers have admitted to using some of the known free tools to effectively monitor and manage their pay per click campaigns.
We at Trend Marketers have taken the time to prowl the internet for what we deem to be some of the top 3 must-have PPC advertising tools and they are described below. However, while there are countless more paid and free useful pay per click advertising tools out there, these are some of the ones we believe have generated reasonable results in terms of performance, efficiency and time.
SpyFu:
SpyFu is one of the few PPC advertising tools that has been around for a while now and is quite popular among PPC advertisers. The software provides competitive intelligence for keywords and ad copy analysis and is a great tool for identifying any keyword gaps you might have with your competitors. Although you can get a big picture overview by just sticking with the free version, you have the option of upgrading to the pro version.
Compete:
Particularly similar to Spyfu, Compete is another one of those PPC advertising tools that allows you to research your competitors and identify the keywords they are using to beat you in the PPC result standing. However, the results between the 2 sometimes differ but the more you use either of them or both the more you’ll start to see a correlation and how to get the best out of them. Compete also has a paid pro version.
Google Tools:
As far as free PPC advertising tools go, Google provides a little over 10 tools that can be used to monitor, analyse and improve your PPC campaigns. However, instead of write long paragraphs on each of them, we will pick some of the most commonly used ones and quickly highlight what they are/ what they do.
- Google Ad Words Editor: Perhaps the best free PPC advertising tool ever created, this tool allows you to create, setup and manage bulk campaigns from a single user interface.
- Google Website Optimizer: To win the PPC advertising game, you need to have well optimized website/ landing page contents. This tool allows you to do that with ease.
- Google Analytics: Analyzing how well your PPC adverts are doing will go a long way to save you money. Google Analytics provides you with just about everything other expensive analytics package can for free.
- Google Insights for Search: is an excellent keyword analysis tool when it comes determining seasonal keywords and trends.
- Google Mobile Ad Preview Tool – With this free PPC advertising tool, you can quickly see what your ads will look like on mobile devices.
Other Google tools that fall well under the “free PPC advertising tools” include: Google URL Builder, Google traffic estimator, Google Ad Planner, Google Alerts, Google Trends, and recently released competitive tools through the Ad Words dashboard.
Conclusion:
Many marketers argue that you need the premium tools to succeed on the internet but countless people have reported great success using some or all of these must-have PPC advertising tools. In saying so, the best way to know which one works best for you is to take a look at what you want to achieve and give some or all of the tools a try; work more with what works for you and discard what doesn’t.
