(Last updated March 2024)
Paid search campaigns drive traffic to your site, creating quality leads and sales opportunities for your business.
But monitoring and revising your campaigns manually takes time and effort. That’s why PPC analysis tools make life easier and save resources for more important tasks. The right tools:
- Tell you which ads, sets, and campaigns perform best
- Help identify creative – copy and visual ads – your audience likes
- Give you an idea of costs and Returns on Ad Spend (ROAS) across all your ads
Yet, there are so many tools on the market. How can you tell which ones you need – and don’t need? By reading this write-up, where we share some of our favourite PPC analysis tools!
Why You Should Be Using PPC Tools
Amazingly, only 10% of marketing managers consistently optimise PPC campaigns.
There are reasons why, of course. It’s difficult to stay on top of PPC campaigns. There are multiple moving pieces and optimising campaigns requires consistent attention and effort. However, there are specific reasons why you should be using PPC tools.
For one, you might not pivot in time to reduce ad spend and maximise profits. You may have a campaign that is performing okay which could, through optimisation, perform far better. PPC tools help you identify these opportunities and implement them in a timely fashion.
Even small improvements in ad campaigns can provide a significant boost in revenue. For example, increasing Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) on $10,000 of ad spend by just 10% will add $1,000 to your bottom line each month.
This is what PPC analysis tools can help you do. They allow you to determine which campaigns are performing best, why they’re performing well, and what you can do to improve them for even better results.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the best PPC analysis tools on the market.
Tenscores – Best for Google Ad Optimisation
Tenscores is a tool that tells you how you can increase your Quality Score (QS) and whether you’re losing ad spend due to a low QS. It is intuitive and easy to use, and it provides fairly accurate results.
By providing valuable insights, Tenscores helps improve the relevance and performance of your ads. It tells you how much your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) is being hurt due to irrelevance, suggests specific ways to improve your Click-Through-Rate (CTR), and uses A.I. to generate ideas for better ad copy.
Features: Reviews and analyses keywords, suggests new keyword groups, finds losing ads.
Pros: Gives you better ads with less CPC and more CTR.
Cons: Works best with the U.S. market.
Adalysis – Best PPC Automation Tool
Adalysis is a paid search optimisation and automation tool that analyses your keywords, and then either gives you suggestions for improvement or optimises your ads automatically.
Using Adalysis is the same as running thousands of ads and split-testing their results to identify the winners. It provides you with a Quality Score for your ads, provides content recommendations, identifies broken links, highlights keyword conflicts, and much more.
Features: QS analysis, bid suggestions and tracking, conversion optimisation tips, ad testing and optimisation on auto-pilot.
Pros: Very powerful, highly profitable when used right
Cons: Expensive with a steep learning curve
SEMRush – Best Combo PPC/SEO Tool
SEMRush is a comprehensive PPC and SEO monitoring system. Their Keyword Magic Tool allows you to identify billions of related terms, find niche topics, and find keyword questions that will help you build a strong PPC campaign.
The Advertising Research Tool allows you to see what keywords your competitors are bidding on, view examples of winning ad campaigns, and discover new ads in Google Ads. With their Keyword Research Tool, you can identify relevant keywords, evaluate how competitive they are, and estimate your CPC if you bid on those keywords.
Features: Competitor analysis and ranking monitoring, advertising research, display advertising monitoring.
Pros: Provides in-depth information, very sophisticated, has both SEO and SEM stats.
Cons: Can be hard to navigate, SEO features can be distracting.
Pricing: Starts at $99/month
Hyros – Best Tracking Tool Post iOS13
Hyros is a PPC analysis tool that allows you to attribute like iOS 12 again. It allows you to see the full customer journey (and behaviours) from click to purchase. You can also take Hyros customer behaviour data and feed it into your ad platform for better targeting and to maximise ROAS.
Powerhouse online marketers such as Tony Robbins and Grant Cardone recommend using Hyros as part of a brand’s marketing mix. It works on all channels, including email, phone, and your website.
Features: Ad attribution, email marketing tracking, call funnel tracking, long-term value calculations.
Pros: Consistently increases ROAS for users.
Cons: None
WordStream – Best Performance Analysis App
WordStream is a Google Ads and Facebook Ad Performance Grader that allows you to see how your ads are really performing. It works quickly, integrating with your Google Ad account in seconds. It provides accurate information about your Quality Score and CTR.
It also helps you create ads in accordance with best practices and allows you to reduce your wasted ad spend. The tool provides quick, actionable insights to make your ads perform better and cost less.
Features: Free keyword research tools, quality analysis of Google and Facebook ads, recommendations for improvements, tips for mobile optimisation, and more.
Pros: Provides a thorough analysis of your ads’ quality
Cons: Only does one thing well, the keyword planner is okay but not amazing, the Google My Places optimiser didn’t impress
Pricing: Average $294/month
Optmyzer – Best PPC Management Tool
Optmyzer is an all-in-one PPC management software that helps marketers manage multiple accounts and campaigns, optimise ads and campaigns, and take control of advertising budgets.
It provides a one-click optimisation tool that can help you optimise your campaigns quickly. It also offers in-depth reporting on campaigns and provides unique insights into your PPC efforts.
Features: Helps marketers manage multiple accounts, offers suggestions to optimise PPC campaigns, collects data from multiple sources, analyses it and provides in-depth insights.
Pros: Robust tool set for managing and optimising campaigns, in-depth reporting, one-click optimisations, budget optimisation, and more
Cons: Pricing is fairly expensive
Pricing: Free trial. Starts at $208/month
Google Ad Suite – Best Google Keyword Research Tool
Google offers many free tools that allow users to do research on trends and keywords.
Google Ad Suite is a free tool that allows you to run and manage campaigns.
It shows you how your ads are performing in regards to KPIs such as total clicks, conversions, cost per conversion, total cost, CPC, and more.
Google Keyword Planner allows users to do keyword research. It shows you estimated search volumes for keywords, how competitive they are, and your estimated CPC.
Google Trends provides information on long-range trends in industries. It shows you which search phrases are peaking and the popularity of certain phrases.
Pros: Quality information straight from the source, a variety of different tools (Ads, Planner, Trends, and Google Analytics if you want to get combined SEO/PPC info). All tools are free and run by the largest search engine.
Cons: Tools don’t integrate together particularly well, meaning you get relatively disorganised information.
Price: Free
AdEspresso – Best Facebook Ad Tool
AdEspresso is a strong PPC analysis tool that enables you to create, run and analyse your Facebook ads all in one place. The platform allows you to manage your Facebook ad campaigns from when you first create your ads until your campaigns are complete.
All advertising channels can be managed from the platform, meaning you don’t have to switch back and forth between ad managers. Actionable insights are provided to you so that you can optimise your campaigns in real-time.
You can get as granular as you want with your analysis, enabling you to tweak the right parts of your campaign for optimum results.
Features: Create and launch FB campaigns, collaborate with clients to get approval for campaigns, get in-depth reports on campaign performance, optimise FB ads in real-time
Pros: Allows you to have total control over your FB ad campaigns from start to finish
Cons: Only available for Facebook
Pricing: Free trial; starts at $49/month
Opteo – Best Google Analytics Add-On
Opteo constantly scans your ads, always looking for ways to make improvements. If it finds a potential optimisation, it will suggest it to you and you can push it live within minutes.
It can help you improve ad creative, optimise bids, manage keywords, exclude bad traffic, and more. It also provides detailed performance monitoring so that you can always know exactly how your ad campaigns are performing.
Performance reports can be created within minutes, making it easy for you to communicate the value of Google Ads to key stakeholders. The Opteo report card gives you key pieces of information at a glance so that you can quickly get a sense of how your campaigns are performing.
Features: Google Ads optimisation, management and monitoring. Provides more metrics than provided by Google.
Pros: Significantly reduces the workload involved in Google Ads campaigns while also reducing ad spend.
Cons: None
Pricing: Starts at $99/month
Adthena – Best High-End PPC Tool
Adthena is an incredibly smart AI tool that automates many of the PPC tasks. The Brand Activator automation tool will automatically stop bidding on keywords if your brand is winning organically on those keywords and there is no competition for them.
The tool also allows you to get a full picture of the competitive landscape, identifying threats and opportunities, defining the messages that will resonate most, and discovering insights that come with drilling down into the data.
Adthena’s perfect if you want an “unfair” advantage against the rest of the field
Features: See what competitors are doing – which creative they’re running, who they’re targeting, get automated notifications about hot advertising opportunities, see what people are looking for locally.
Pros: Extremely powerful and versatile
Cons: Expensive, a little tricky to use because it’s so feature-rich
Price: $3,000/year/user
Adalysis – Best Multi-Campaign Management Tool
Adalysis uses automation to gather and organise data from your campaigns, making it easy to optimise them in real-time. The platform automatically creates to-do lists that will improve your campaigns, and most of the tasks can be done with a single-click.
The platform also provides daily recommended bid adjustments for demographics, location, devices, audiences and ad schedules. Their budget reporting tools allow you to pace your spending and identify the best budget allocation model. Adalysis also provides a Quality Score for your ads and makes recommendations for how to improve the quality.
Features: PPC automation tool to improve management, productivity and accuracy. Identifies new opportunities and trends. Identifies most profitable segments.
Pros: Uses automation to make managing multiple campaigns as easy as possible. Works with Microsoft ads as well.
Cons: None
Pricing: Free trial. Starts at $99/month.
Recap
A list like this can feel a little overwhelming. How do you know which are the best products for your business?
Follow these steps:
- Test products before you buy them – Take advantage of free trials, request demos, etc. Try to get as much information up front as possible.
- Verify that they meet your needs – A product might have all the features in the world, but if it doesn’t meet your needs then you shouldn’t use it. Make sure a product meets your exact needs before you pull the trigger.
- Don’t be afraid to mix and match – There may not be a single tool that can meet all your needs, requiring you to mix and match. On top of this, take advantage of the free tools that are out there. They can be surprisingly effective and also save you money at the same time.
- Ask for help when needed – Sometimes you just need some help in order to get up and running. We have years of experience running PPC campaigns and using the accompanying PPC analysis tools. We would love to help you get the maximum amount from your PPC campaigns.
Megaphone: Better Than Any Tool
Tools can help optimise your campaigns. But nothing helps create high-performing ads like a whole lot of experience.
This is why 350+ clients pay us to manage their ads for them. We spend over $10,000,000 on Google each month, so we know what’s working across all niches right now.
Want to see if we can help increase your ROAS? Jump on a free strategy call, worth $1,200, today.
If you end up becoming a Megaphone client, we’ll give you $600 in free Google Ad credit, no strings attached!
