24 Pay Per Click (PPC) Tools Used by Experts
Pay-per-click (PPC) has always been one of the most commonly used marketing channels. But chances are you aren’t getting the most out of your implementation cause of not having the right PPC tools in your repertoire.
When implementing PPC campaigns, there are many components. From writing compelling ad copy to selecting the right audience you want to show your ads to, you need to make sure it’s worthwhile your investment.
This is where PPC tools can save you a lot of hassle. These tools can help you with many aspects of PPC marketing and save money and time, ultimately increasing your margins.
Why do you need PPC tools?
Keyword research
You need to conduct ample keyword research to give direction to your ad campaign. Many SEO tools can be used to do this too. Additionally, you need to optimise your ad copy and design your landing page for better conversions.
Competitive Intelligence
There are tools on the market that can give you insights into your competitor’s PPC marketing strategy. You can then adapt your own marketing strategy and apply your own tweaks. Furthermore, You can find gaps in your competitors’ efforts and fill them with better alternatives.
Digital Analytics
You always should use digital analytics to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. PPC is no different. There are plenty of PPC tools out there that can monitor certain aspects of your campaign, allowing you to iterate and improve.
With so many tools out there, it can be hard to decide which one to use. That’s why we’ve decided to ask PPC experts what tools they use.
PPC Tools Recommended by Experts
1. Optmyzr
Working with 100+ PPC accounts, a real game changer for us was implementing Optmyzr into our daily routine. Automating whether the accounts are spending their budgets and getting alerts whenever something is off tracking-wise, or when ads are disapproved, freed up a lot of time for us.
Optmyzr gives you the confidence to step back and take the time to optimise each account thoroughly. It also gives you various tools to monitor and troubleshoot your campaigns.
Instead of micromanaging our campaigns, we are now spending more time with our clients, ensuring we have the correct information to feed the algorithm/machine learning. And now we are reaping the rewards.
Bio: Nicolas works at HK Link in Trondheim, Norway, where he has the pleasure of managing 100+ PPC accounts in various industries, from brick-and-mortar businesses to major brands.
On top of that, he is part of a robust team working across most SoMe & Programmatic platforms. Although PPC is where he feels the most at home, He is also very interested in CRO, web analytics, and the tracking and measurement part of the field.
2. Semrush
Semrush is a critical tool for me, as it allows me to quickly understand a new vertical with an astonishing amount of PPC data.
- Paid position distribution: This tool is highly informative, showing which companies dominate the first 3 spots on the SERP page and by what percentage. Knowing this information can inform budgeting and keyword strategies.
- SERP features: This tool highlights what type of content is being used by competitors. If you’re operating in a niche, it identifies new ways to interact with customers.
- Secondary source for Identifying campaign reach: I use multiple sources for reach and CPC to get an aggregated opinion, and Semrush usually gives highly accurate estimates.
- Keywords by intent: This is useful when operating a PPC campaign in a new domain. You can simply identify transactional keywords and use non-transactional keywords as negative keywords in Google ads.
Bio: Richard has been working in PPC since 2014 with a wide range of companies, such as Facebook and Google, to name but a few.
3. Intentwise
Intentwise is an up-and-coming PPC automation tool to look out for; its user-friendly interface, intuitive recommendations and AI optimisations are top-notch. But what sets it apart for me is the reporting dashboards, which you can customise according to your need.
You can connect it to Google Data Studio, Tableau, Snowflake or any other database tools you may use to build more complex reports. Another thing I like about it is its superb customer service; they have a built-in chat service within the tool to which they reply within a few minutes. If I’m having more complicated issues, they readily jump on a call with me to help me fix the issue right away.
Bio: Sam Millendo is an Amazon PPC Manager at Page One and has been in the PPC industry for 10 years. She has experience with managing campaigns for Google, Facebook, Microsoft and LinkedIn Ads.
4. Google Ads Editor
My favourite everyday PPC tool is, for sure, Google Ads Editor. I guess every PPC manager would agree that this is an essential tool for any campaign manager, from small to high-scale campaigns, making our life so much easier. The editor saves so much time when building a new campaign, expanding existing ones, creating new ads, extensions… the list goes on and on.
The latest version now enables creating and editing Discovery and Performance Max campaigns. Ad extensions are also upgraded and, in my opinion, are faster and have shown fewer errors than the previous Editor versions.
Our team has saved so much time every day using the tool. For anyone starting as a PPC manager, I’d highly recommend getting started on Google Ads Editor. Take your time and get comfortable working with the tool. It will be your best friend for many of your everyday tasks as a PPC manager.
Bio: Ana is the Senior Biddable Media Manager at Javelin with over 10+ years of experience in marketing strategies. Working across various industries, helping brands reach the right audience through the right channels, with the main focus on paid search.
PromoNavi is an excellent tool for multiple PPC tasks such as keyword research, gathering recommendations, and more.
I use this tool because it takes a ton of weight off my shoulders. I can see data and changes for all my accounts in its dashboard, and the notifications help me notice and react earlier to the changes. The keyword research tool gives a ton of relevant results. The best part is that it has more to offer than mot tools out there.
It is constantly improving. One of the newest upgrades lets you use the tool with Microsoft Ads accounts.
Bio: Patrik is a Senior PPC Expert who has helped more than 100 companies to reach their marketing goals since 2016.
6. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a powerful tool which is constantly being improved, owned by Neil Patel, who is best known for SEO, this tool has many useful features. Apart from the keyword suggestion feature, there is a handy tool called keyword visualisation. NP digital, the owner of Ubersuggest, purchased answerthepublic.com back in May of this year, and this is now integrated into Ubersuggest.
This powerful tool gives you insights into what questions are being asked, along with many other helpful keyword suggestions. For example, keywords by prepositions, comparisons or alphabetically.
I use this tool for keyword research but specifically for negative keyword research as it gives you a great insight into the types of questions being asked. So for example for the keyword [ppc marketing specialist], we have search terms like “what is a PPC analyst” or “Is PPC hard to learn” or “marketing PPC explained”. These search terms would be on my negative keyword list.
I also find it helpful to find the types of questions or doubts that my target audience may have and then use a FAQ section on my landing page to answer them. Thus improving the conversion and bounce rates.
Overall, I think that Ubersuggest is a very reasonably priced and effective tool to have in your PPC toolbox.
Bio: Anthony is a freelance Google and Bing Ads consultant. He has been running his own PPC business in Spain for the last 5 years and focuses on lead-generation campaigns in English and Spanish.
7. TrafficGuard
I wanted to discuss a tool moving beyond Keyword research, ad copy testing & competitor research. I wanted to focus on the quality of traffic coming from PPC campaigns. Yes, you can do this to a certain degree with optimisations, different bid adjustments, focusing on higher quality keywords and pre-qualifying traffic via ad copy.
PPC fraud protection tools can add another level of assurance to your PPC traffic. Your need for this tool will vary depending on the industry and your PPC account(s) size. While there are several PPC click fraud protection tools, I will highlight the benefits of TrafficGuard due to familiarity. These companies will have different levels of fees, so research what is best for you. Below is a brief overview of what these companies can offer.
Preventing factors that are harming the quality of your PPC traffic:
- Bots, hosts and malware
- Non-incremental engagement
- Non-genuine engagement
- Duplicate clicks
Most click fraud tools will offer a free trial so that you can use this as a proof of life trial:
Some top-level benefits of implementing a click fraud tool:
- Protect your budget by stopping the source of bad traffic through their routing negative IP addresses.
- Improve your ROI or reduce CPAs on campaigns by “unlocking” PPC spending. Spend more on quality traffic and less on poor-quality traffic.
- Get granular – see locations/keywords that are driving a higher-than-average invalid click rate.
- Set custom rules from account level to campaign level.
By using a PPC clicks fraud tool, you will spend your budget more efficiently and increase the performance of your KPIs.
Bio: Sean is a passionate marketing professional with experience on the in-house and agency side, excited (and cautious) about the future of paid search. Constantly testing and learning.
8. Search Ads 360
Throughout my 10+ year career in PPC, I’ve certainly seen the benefits of using PPC tools such as Google Ads Editor, where you save tons of time on ad copy updates. I also cannot imagine my day-to-day work without Google Analytics. However, the tool that really made the difference and helped me to increase leads, sales, CVR and ROAS is Search Ads 360 (SA360).
While working for an online travel company, where we had just over 3,500 campaigns, we implemented SA360. This allowed us to grow ROI consistently without straining our resources. Accounts at that scale certainly require platforms which help to streamline the process in terms of automated bidding and to help grow ROI.
SA360 allowed us to group the campaigns based on target ROAS and grow in the highest profitability areas. This was critical for our business throughout the two years of the pandemic. Search Ads 360 would suit large organisations best and can significantly impact your ROI if managed well.
Bio: Alicja O’Malley is a Senior PPC Manager with 10+ years of experience successfully managing, optimising, and launching PPC campaigns in Ireland, UK, Scandinavia, Canada and Poland. She is currently working for Neilson Financial Services, managing PPC in the UK and Canadian Markets and successfully launching PPC campaigns in the very competitive life insurance vertical. Alicja is also a finalist of “Best Search Campaign” in Dublin’s Digital Media Awards (DMA).
9. Spyfu
Keywords are the backbone of PPC, and Spyfu proves to be a productive tool in this regard. It gives you a clear picture of keywords so that you can plan accordingly. Moreover, you can also keep an eye on competitor keywords to find the gap to optimise your campaigns in a better way. It also helps you to find competitive density so you can be aware of the competition of your selected keyword.
Spyfu also helps you have an in-depth competitor analysis, such as how much your competitor is spending on advertising.
Paid advertising is the most crucial aspect of digital marketing, and proper research & planning will help you get better results. For this purpose, Spyfu is one of the best options, as it allows you to conduct keyword research, competitor research, ad tracking and much more.
Bio: Taloot is a PPC Manager at GK Hair & founder of FoxWing agency. Having 8+ years of experience in digital marketing & ecommerce industry.
10. Supermetrics
Supermetrics is a tool I’ve just for years now and one of the most efficient ways I’ve found to collate data. Having data pulled from multiple sources and stored in one location makes multi-platform performance analysis so much easier. Discovering trends, comparing seasonal campaigns, and tracking ad budgets all in one location has just made work a lot easier and saved a lot of time over the years!
I would say you need to have a fundamental to strong understanding of writing formulas to get the most out of this tool, but you can definitely get far with the basics. The good thing about the data pulling into a Google Sheet is that any dashboards you create are fully customisable!
Bio: Maddie entered digital marketing 6 years ago as an apprentice but quickly found her interest in PPC; she loves putting a campaign live from concept to creation and then getting to analyse all the data.
11. Meta Ad Library
Meta Ad Library is a super useful tool PPC managers mainly use for research. You can see what other advertisers are up to on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and other meta platforms and get some insights to apply to your campaigns.
You can find competitors by brand, products or keyword ideas and narrow your research filtering by language, country, platform, dates, category and active status. Also, Meta Ad Library allows you to get information about page creation, history and ad information (audience size and composition, money spent, impressions, etc.)
I highly recommend this tool if you have social media ads. It’s super important to keep an eye on other brands and check out the landscape to see what your ads will be competing with.
Bio: Sofia is an Argentinian PPC Manager with over 7 years of experience running PPC campaigns. Working for VIVA! Conversion (one of the 10 best agencies in Spain) since 2020, having clients spending more than €250K on PPC investment.
12. Microsoft Excel
I’ve used many PPC tools over the years, but the one I couldn’t live without is good old Microsoft Excel. I use it daily to help create, track and manage our clients’ paid ad campaigns.
Excel makes analysing campaign performance much easier and saves me a lot of precious time by using many of its features, formulas and shortcuts.
I use Excel for everything from auditing ad accounts, collating keyword lists, planning new campaigns, creating ad headlines, heat mapping and reporting.
Excel has everything I need to make sense of large amounts of data and help turn it into new opportunities to improve our clients’ ad campaigns.
Bio: Dean is a PPC Manager at UK agency Maley Digital, helping businesses to grow and maximise ROI through paid advertising channels, including Google, Bing, Facebook and LinkedIn.
13. Adveronix
Adveronix makes it much easier to pull data from multiple data points into a reporting software of your choice. I use Adveronix because it’s an easy-to-use and intuitive Google Sheets plug-in. Since Hippo Group uses various channels for our marketing efforts, this software is a real-time-saver.
Although we pay for this software, due to how often we use it, I definitely recommend trying it for free initially and seeing if it matches your needs. There are numerous ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) tools out there, and I have used a number of them, but given its snappiness and easy-to-use interface, this is the one I’d recommend to any digital marketers out there.
Bio: Umar Ditta, PPC Manager at Hippo Leasing, part of Hippo Motor Group, has over 5 years of experience in digital marketing, PPC and strategy deployment. He has worked with companies in the consumer sales, SaaS and automotive sectors.
14. WhatConverts
WhatConverts makes it easy to attribute sales to traffic sources based on phone calls, web forms and transactions. It offers a full circle lead tracking system where you’ll no longer be left wondering where leads originated or what leads converted.
Using a simple feedback loop, it can provide deep data analytics into source tracking, lead quality, and revenue generation. It is simple to set up and seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics and Google AdWords.
This allows you to track all leads by keyword and campaigns, with the ability to integrate with a CRM. This means you know which keywords are bringing you the most sales.
Bio: Kamil works as an SDR for WhatConverts, helping agencies show the value of their marketing through a transparent lead track, allowing them to retain their clients for longer.
15. Ahrefs
Although Ahrefs is one of the most popular tools for SEO, it also comes in handy when setting up PPC campaigns.
It allows us to conduct extensive research on our competitors and provides us with some handy insights. These include the keywords competitors are bidding on, the cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword, which keyword sends the most paid traffic, the pages they’re sending traffic to and the ad copy of their search ads.
It also provides data on the number of organic and paid searches for each keyword. Moreover, Ahrefs’ extensive database makes it one of the most preferred keyword research tools in the PPC environment, as it provides a comprehensive list of semantic keywords.
Bio: Tamas Mihaly has recently graduated from UWE Bristol in Business Management and Marketing, specialising in digital marketing. He has both an SEO and PPC background, currently working as a PPC & Biddable Media Executive at Loom Digital. He works with both B2C and B2B clients from various backgrounds.
16. Looker Studio
Every PPC specialist knows that reporting is key to showcasing your performance marketing efforts, but it can be quite time-consuming and confusing for some clients who are not ‘experts’ in the field. That’s why Google’s Looker Studio (aka “Data Studio”) is a game changer.
It allows for automated reports that combine all Google channel data into one dashboard, saving you time and making it easier for your clients to digest. It also integrates with popular connector apps like Supermetrics, which lets you pull data from Meta, LinkedIn, HubSpot and many other marketing platforms.
Reporting is real-time, but a variety of date ranges and custom comparison ranges can also be viewed. This allows your clients to play with the report even without editing rights.
All in all, Together GA4 and Looker Studio combo can create fantastic and detailed visualisations, which enables you to keep track of your entire marketing mix – making life much easier for both you and your clients!
Bio: Elani is a Paid Media Specialist with over 3.5 years of PPC experience and a passion for strategy, consumer behaviour & insights.
17. Wordstream Performance Grader
Wordstream Performance Grader is a free tool that helps you grade your Google Ads account performance and instantly identify improvements. It analyses your keywords, text ads, landing pages, quality score, and click-through rate on ads. The tool will also check if you’re following the best practices for mobile PPC (which is obviously a must).
As a result of your account analysis, you get a grade out of 100 and recommendations on how to increase the score. Another good thing is you’re able to see where you stand in the competition and whether your landing pages are better or worse than your competitors’.
Bio: Mariia is a B2B and B2C digital marketing expert with over 7 years of experience. In the past, she’d worked for two leading digital marketing agencies delivering strategy and projects for SMEs worldwide. Now she holds the position of Head of Marketing at Cloud Insurance and also provides digital marketing consulting for small businesses that sell online education, SaaS and ecommerce products.
18. Google Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner helps to research and plan keywords for search network campaigns. It’s a handy free tool that shows keywords people are searching for alongside estimated monthly volumes and costs to target them.
It makes the planning of keywords and negative keywords much easier. It’s also integrated into your Google Ads account, which makes it easy to use.
2nd suggestion by: Mariia Shvets
19. Outbrain
Outbrain offers premium native advertising solutions that are designed to help you expand your reach while delivering relevant content to your target audience.
Native advertising lists your ad like an article, a newsletter section, or a display ad.
In Outbrain, each piece of content is endorsed to the most interested readers in their network using more than 50 algorithms. These algorithms will prioritise the headlines that are most engaging in your campaign and figure out which content is the most effective to attract new customers.
Hence your ad is shown to users who are most likely to be receptive to it right now and not only in general. Another good thing, with Outbrain, you’re paying per click (PPC).
3rd suggestion by: Mariia Shvets
20. Taboola
Taboola is a content discovery and native ad platform commonly used for brand awareness and lead generation. It enables businesses to reach relevant audiences by publishing content on top-rated websites and social media.
Ads on Taboola are paid on a CPC basis. They appear beneath relevant content or trending content of partner websites, resulting in content and advertising consistency. Website visitors might not even realize they are being tracked.
The platform provides publishers with a simple but useful control panel that includes a reporting area as well as a section for restricting certain content. Today, it’s used by publishers, advertisers, and agencies to keep people on their sites, monetize their traffic, and distribute their content to high-quality audiences.
This platform helps to run A/B testing and gather actionable data insights, deliver unique experiences based on user behaviour and optimize the content.
4th suggestion by: Mariia Shvets
21. Lengow
Do you work on paid advertising campaigns for various channels like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon and Microsoft? If the answer is yes, you already know that each one of them has thier own specific requirements for the configuration of their product feed.
Feed management is a basic task to streamline and optimise online sales processes. Adapting the information and attributes of our products can be very complex. This is where feed managers come into play.
These tools help us generate online catalogues to be able to position the products on different sales platforms (marketplaces, price comparators, affiliate networks…). They create a data feed.
I personally work with Lengow, which has personalised plans and does not include a sales commission, but there are many similar tools like Channable, Shopping Feed, Channel Pilot, and Feed Manager…
With these tools, we can optimise our data feed with the main objective of increasing the performance of Shopping campaigns.
Where to start with Lengow?
The first step is to import the catalogue information into the tool through an .xml or .csv file, or direct integration with your CMS (Shopify, PrestaShop, Magento or WooCommerce). There are various sources you can use for data import, manually, with price trackers or API connection.
Once your business data is imported, you must join the dimensions and create the attributes that relate yours to those of the tool.
When you have everything finished, export everything you have worked on. Depending on the platform, it can be done via a feed, which is retrieved from time to time, or API, which connects and updates any changes made in prices or availability.
What are the advantages of using a feed manager?
- Bring together all channels in a single tool.
- Adapt the feed to the specifications of each platform and see applicable improvements (fields not filled in, incorrect, quality of the feed…)
- The product information (prices, stock…) will be synchronised with the export channel.
- They categorise your products easily by relating your categories to those of hundreds of marketplaces.
- You have all the rules you can imagine.
- Complete fields that you have empty in bulk or individually.
Bio: Diego is an international paid media specialist with over 7 years of experience in digital marketing, offering eye-catching solutions that help brands to stand out from the crowd and connect with their customers. With an in-house and agency background, he has worked for a diverse mixture of clients from large companies with large brands to small start-ups with great ideas.
22. Copysmith.ai
Search copy is super important. And now more than ever, the variations we use in the copy need to stand out. With the likes of Responsive Search Ads from Google, we need lots of variations of headlines and descriptions, across plenty of ad groups. It’s hard to stay creative in such a numbers-focused field.
Copysmith generates AI ad copy based on suggested keywords and landing pages. It sounds like it’s going to be awful, but you find the copy being pretty OK and it evolves with iterations. A few small tweaks later and you’re left with some great ideas for further testing in your search ads (and landing pages).
They offer a short free trial that I’d recommend making the most of. It’s also very affordable for even the smallest of PPC budgets. Your content team can also take advantage of it!
Bio: Ben is the Head of Acquisition for Bremont Watches, with 9 years of paid search & digital marketing experience making data-driven decisions & improving data accessibility.
23. Postscript
SMS tools such as Postscript have been turnkey for my clients in the last year.
We’ve entered a new realm where consumers are more open than ever to receiving SMS marketing which is great. In my direct experience seeing over 50,000 SMS subscribers come through in the last year, the open rates can be 2-3x higher than email.
Personally, I’ve been using Postscript because of their stellar customer service. But I’d highly recommend testing any popular SMS solution out if you’re looking to gain consumer attention.
One pro tip would be to have an exit-intent popup with a clever message and email capture ready to show up for any user that did not participate in the initial landing capture.
Bio: Rory is a seasoned growth marketer with a decade of experience leading user acquisition strategies for VC-backed startups and Fortune 500 brands including Uber, Coinbase and Tempur-Sealy International.
24. Google Tag Manager
The most important aspect of PPC is conversion tracking. However, importing conversions from Google Analytics isn’t enough. Setting up conversions manually provides greater accuracy and accounts for engaged view, view-through, and cross-device conversions. These are instrumental, but even more so for campaigns relying heavily on ML, such as Performance Max.
This is because the conversions offer key data to optimise for the actions that matter. Here is where Google Tag Manager shines, PPC practitioners can easily deploy conversion actions and much more from a user-friendly interface – avoiding all the hassle usually involved with making changes in the website’s backend. Now you know how to easily and safely track conversion actions accurately!
Bio: Felix is a specialist in full-funnel digital marketing including PPC, SEO, design, content creation, CRO, & implementation. He is a PPC & SEO Specialist at Alphageek.
Conclusion
So, there you have it! We hope you have chosen the right PPC tool or combination that best suits your marketing needs. Remember that every campaign is unique. Feel free to test your tools, gather feedback from your team, and make changes for maximum compatibility.
You can also trust our Google Ad agency to target more audiences for your business. Check out to know more.
We hope this coordination will help you find the PPC tool of your dreams. We would like to thank all the experts who contributed to this article.
But if you think we missed anything, then please let us know! We might be able to get you featured!
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