Many businesses looking to optimise their PPC campaigns for better ROI turn to PPC software apps before they turn to digital marketing agencies.
These apps are cheaper than digital marketing agencies, though there is a trade-off for that; less personalised services can only do so much. Depending on your goals and your budget, however, PPC software may be the better choice.
That’s especially true if you use these alongside specialist PPC training.
What sites and services can best help you?
SEMRush are leaders in the field of competitor research. You’d use SEMRush in the early stages of building a PPC campaign to see where your competition outperforms you. That gives you a clear picture of where you can work to improve your market share.
Combining this information with CPC (cost per click) data can also highlight keywords which aren’t going to be cost-effective to compete for. Remember to check this regularly, as CPC may change over time and opportunities may open up.
WordStream Advisor promises to provide users with “60% more leads from online advertising than AdWords… alone.”
Designed specifically to support SMEs, it promises an average CTR (Click-Through Rate) increase of 44% and an average increase in conversions of 30%. The software also allows you to manage Google AdWords and Facebook Ads PPC campaigns from the same platform, at the same time.
WordStream Advisor also incorporates some basic automated keyword recommendations based on your current campaign. It’s designed to reduce the amount of time taken in managing and expanding your campaigns.
Keyword Tool Pro is a great keyword planning service. One of the things that sets it apart from a lot of other software in the same field is that it can be set to sort potential keywords by many different metrics.
It’s also highly useful if your PPC campaign includes keywords targeting different locations; Keyword Tool Pro will allow you to sort out which keywords are performing well in which areas, allowing you to more effectively manage locational keywords.
Funnel Science was born out of a desire to “build the perfect sales funnel”. This cloud software service tracks all sales funnels in one place. As well as monitoring PPC performance from all PPC campaigns across providers, you can also use this to keep an eye on organic search performance.
Like the team at novi.digital, the Funnel Science approach is highly data-driven, tracking customer behaviour and employing A/B testing and analytics to assess sales performance. This can be broken down by sales funnel, product, and other metrics. You’re provided with an excellent reporting and analysis tool which is flexible enough to answer a wide range of questions.
Opteo provides a suite of tools to streamline AdWords PPC management. It automatically reviews your campaigns against performance targets, using conversion data to propose improvements and modifications. The PPC manager can then review these and send them on automatically.
Opteo also compiles AdWords performance metrics into a single location. These include some metrics not accessible through the standard AdWords interface (QS Components, AdRank, etc.) This service is designed to make it easy to diagnose performance issues in real time.
TEA Software offers some very rare functionality; fraud analytics. It’s a bid management software program which includes click fraud and engagement fraud protection. This uses heatmap tracking to easily identify the difference between human browsing behaviour and bot programming.
Bots are automatically blocked, and a quarterly report is filed with Google to reimburse your account for the results of click fraud.
Click fraud is uncommon but can be a substantial problem if your business is one of those targeted. TEA Software automates detection and reporting.
Captivise is an automated PPC bid management platform. Designed to maximise profitability, the platform automatically emphasises high-performing keywords and de-emphasises or even pauses poorly-performing keywords, significantly increasing your Return on Investment. Unlike many other bid management systems, Captivise isn’t tiered and no functionality is gated off at any payment level.
The system works in real time, updating prices faster than any human could even if they could perform calculations at the same rate. Captivise is designed to allow PPC managers time to work on new campaigns and develop other assets without existing campaigns being left to underperform.
We’re a little biased about Captivise! it was developed to directly mimic our in-house bid management basic rules. But the fact it copies those rules is also why we can endorse the work it does.