What PPC Marketing Tools Should You Learn?

Pay Per Click advertising is growing more prevalent as digital marketing becomes a mainstay for business growth. PPC campaigns are critical to the success of any digital marketing team. But the questions that plague PPC marketers remain the same: How can I reduce costs while increasing revenue from my PPC campaigns? How can I increase click-throughs and conversions while maintaining traffic quality?

Is there anything I can use to make this less of a chore?

Sure thing. This useful collection of tools is a must-have if you want to succeed in your PPC career. And if you want to work in PPC eventually, these tools and platforms will let you obtain all the necessary hands-on experience!

Tool for PPC Competitor Research

It is vital to know about your competitors as well, while researching your competitors’ paid search marketing strategy, you can use free Google search or you can pay to use other search tools.

1. Competitor Research via Google

The first step is to see your actual competitors. AdWords has a great tool called ‘auction insights’ where you can see who you are competing against for a selection of keywords.

If you want to do a nice audit on these companies, take a look at:

• Ads: What offers are they including?
• Website: Are they using dedicated landing pages, unique offers, special discounts, or something else to entice the user?
• Their funnel: What is their overall sales funnel? To get a great idea of this, signup for their newsletters, download whitepapers, take a trial, and see how they interact with you.

Special note: Please don’t use your company email address for this!

2. Get Alternative Keyword Ideas

The Keyword Planner Tool is your go-to research place for AdWords. This tool makes it easy to look at keywords, find keyword volume, plan out your budgets, etc. Every marketer should know this tool.

3. Bing Ad Intelligence

Bing Ad Intelligence is a free Excel plugin that Bing offers to view a lot of great data about keywords, search volume and more. It has a great feature set and is one of the most overlooked PPC tools on the market.

4. Examining AdWords & Bing Auctions

Take a look at the live search results and use the Ad Preview Tools to see what these ads look like by devices (does your competition use a dedicated mobile site or special mobile offers?) You can gain perspective on all these aspects by analyzing the ads your competitors are using search results.

You could gain clarity on what are the various Google AdWords & Bing Ads features, like call extensions, sitelinks, automated extensions, and the ratings your competitors are using. You can even pay close attention to call tracking, dedicated pages, and special offers beyond the title, description, and link your competitors are employing.

The verbiage your competitors use in their ad copy could prove to be vital. You could consider quoting very affordable rates, to help convert the leads and grab the attention of potential coverts. These may be items you want to include in your ad to draw attention and clicks to your website.

Landing pages are quite essential when it comes to converting your clicks into customers. By adding a phone number to your landing page, you could have the benefit of a gaining a customer, instead of losing the person to your competitors.