Updated on 18/12/2023 at 10:12 am
Google Ad Tools | PPC Tools: Over the last couple of years we’ve been lucky enough to see the development of many PPC tools, and several have emerged that have been immensely helpful to businesses big and small when it comes to PPC setup, management and optimisation. They are game changers in that they save time, money and a great deal of effort where previously a considerable amount of technical acumen would have been essential to make PPC work for you.
With that in mind here are 58 free and paid tools that can seriously move the needle for you and your business in terms of sales and digital marketing – whatever the future brings (whether you’re trying to stay afloat or scale post corona lockdown).
Note: You can filter through the list to find the best Google Ad Tools | PPC Tools in the following categories.
Setting up, managing and optimising a PPC campaign can take a long time and prove to be a tough ask for anyone who has to juggle other balls within a business. Be it initial keyword research or landing page creation, to social proofing, ad copy and audience optimisation, to successful tracking of ROI. It can be really time-consuming.
But you can automate many tedious tasks with the help of PPC management tools, get valuable insights, and only require manual intervention once strategic data has been curated from the tools themselves. Make better informed decisions on budget, reach, clicks, ad effectiveness, etc. Stop wasting time and money. Stay ahead of your competitors.
If you run multiple ad campaigns, manage large ad budgets or deal in campaigns across multiple accounts on Google Ads, you need Google Ads editor. This tool comprises everything you require for making edits and optimisating Google Ads in bulk (4 to 5x faster in comparison to the Google Ads interface) and is similar in appearance too to make you feel at ease.
Free Application
Official website: https://ads.google.com/home/tools/ads-editor/
If Bing advertising is important to you and you are using Bing Ads, then the Bing Ads Editor is a must. It is an all-in-one management tool for your Bing Ads campaigns. This tool will tell you all you want to know about your website’s visibility on Bing and allow for easy setup, management and optimisation in seconds.
Free Application
Official website: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-in/solutions/tools/editor
This is free and awesome! It provides a thorough audit of your Google Ads account in less than a minute.
Free Application
Official website: https://www.wordstream.com/google-adwords
This is another awesome tool – specifically for Facebook ads – where advertisers can create, optimise or analyse ad campaigns in a really intuitive and easily navigable platform. You can try out AdEspresso with a 14-day free trial, which is more than enough time to see how powerful it is.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $49
Official website: https://adespresso.com/
There are lots of useful tools out there to help you create beautiful landing pages in a fraction of time (and with little to no web development skills). Instead of spending weeks creating pages, you just need to use a tool to simplify the job.
Need a good landing page tool? The most popular choice is Unbounce, which is an incredibly easy landing page building tool that can build complex landing pages within minutes. It offers you more than 80 varieties of landing page templates and you can build any sort of landing page you need for eCommerce, lead generation, lead magnets, sign-ups, etc. You can sign up for a 14-day free trial.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $79/month
Official website: https://unbounce.com/
LeadPages is one of the simplest landing page builders to use from scratch, you can also choose from dozens of landing page templates and a variety of mini-site design templates as well.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $25/month
Official website: https://www.leadpages.net/
ClickFunnels provides all the tools and strategic insights you need to market, sell, and deliver your products online, and enables you to grow the online side of your business through better aligned sales funnels. It’s an excellent tool with a very intuitive interface.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $ 97/month
Official website: https://www.clickfunnels.com/
One of my old favourites and great if you are wanting to see how subtle web page changes can turn ad clicks into conversions. Instapage has long been branded the world’s most advanced landing page platform with. Get up to 400% more from your digital ad spend with savvy management, optimisation and easy to coordinate split testing.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $ 149/month
Official website: https://instapage.com/
With Mailchimp, it takes just a few minutes to design beautiful landing pages that can really make people want to join your audience or buy your products / services. Forget the power of MailChimp as an email marketing platform, for paid advertising it is also a very powerful tool.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $10/month
Official website: https://mailchimp.com/features/landing-pages/
A/B test experiences help convert more visitors to customers and there are several tools for running effective A/B testing to improve your conversion rates and improve your ROI!
Google Optimize is natively integrated with Google Analytics, so you can quickly understand how your website can be improved. You can easily run tests on your website’s content to learn what works best for your visitors, including A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests.
Free Application
Official website: https://optimize.google.com/optimize/home/
Optimizely is a fantastic tool to help you easily split test landing pages. No programming needed. You just enter the URL of your landing page and Optimizely will readily upload the page into their system. You can then edit text even on call-to-action buttons, resize or rearrange, change colors, remove page elements, etc.
Free Plan Available
Official website: https://www.optimizely.com/
Crazy Egg helps you to check what’s hot and what’s not, and to know what your web visitors are doing with tools, such as heatmaps, recordings, A/B testing and more. It is a super tool to see how visitors interact on your website.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $24/month
Official website: https://www.crazyegg.com/
AB Tasty is a fast-growing provider of AI-powered experimentation, personalisation and feature management solutions, helping businesses increase revenues with greater speed and scalability. Use AB Tasty’s AI-driven experimentation, personalisation and product optimisation platform to rapidly drive ROI and continuously deliver outstanding user experiences.
Paid Application
Starting Price: $1000/month
Official website: https://www.abtasty.com/
VWO is a market-leading A/B testing and conversion optimisation platform that thousands of companies use to optimise their sales and marketing funnels. It provides you with the tools to easily discover insights, test ideas, and improve engagement – across the entire customer journey.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 199$/month
Official website: https://vwo.com/
These tools will help you implement tracking and effectively measure PPC campaign performance as an ongoing management task.
Google Analytics provides you with everything you require for tracking how effective your Google PPC campaigns are and how well your website is performing as a lead generation asset. Google Analytics is free, but for large enterprises, you need to get a premium option.
Free Application
Official website: https://analytics.google.com/
Manage all your website tags without editing code. Google Tag Manager is simple yet effective in that it delivers reliable, easily integrated tag management for free.
Free Application
Official website: https://tagmanager.google.com/
Tag Assistant helps to troubleshoot the installation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and more. You can create custom check rules to compare data values with expected ones; you can also set them right from the extension to avoid deployment dependency.
Free Application
Official website: https://get.google.com/tagassistant/
One of my absolute favourites! Using this tool, you can see how the visitors are really using your website, collect user feedback and turn more visitors into customers. Hotjar is a powerful tool that reveals the online behavior and voice of your users. By combining both Analysis and Feedback tools, Hotjar gives you the ‘big picture’ of how to improve your site’s user experience, performance and conversion rates.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 89$/month
Official website: https://www.hotjar.com/
Mouseflow helps you to optimise your website and increase conversions, get real insights on how customers are interacting with your website using session recordings and heatmaps. Mouseflow tracks clicks, mouse movement, scrolls, forms, and more and provides a full suite of heatmaps covering clicks, movement, scrolls, attention, and geography.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 24$/month
Official website: https://mouseflow.com/
FullStory is your digital experience analytics platform for on-the-fly funnels, pixel-perfect replay, custom events, heat maps, advanced search, and lets you know how user struggles (poor user experience) is affecting your revenue and retention. FullStory’s suite of tools can help product management, design and engineering teams diagnose issues that impact critical workflows and conversions.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 199$/month
Official website: https://www.fullstory.com/
Find and use keyword research tools to determine which strategic keywords to target. These tools can help you discover and analyse keywords quickly, easily, and best of all in ways that make sense for your ongoing digital marketing strategies. In short, keyword research tools help you find the keywords that are most relevant for your business.
Google Suggest or auto-complete is a Google search engine function that provides suggestions to users as they enter their search query into the search box. Through another function called Google Instant, the SERP adapts to the keywords or phrase as it is being entered. This is a very powerful tool for all manner of digital marketing activities.
Free Application
Official website: google.com
Do you need more keywords, traffic data or want to automate certain keyword strategy? Get thousands of related keywords via a really easy to use API. This is exceptional for long-tail keyword research as it can provide thousands of keyword suggestions from real user queries and search engine intent.
Free Application
Official website: https://keywordtool.io/
Unsure of which keywords you should choose to target? Identify the most relevant keywords for your brand, product or service with Google’s keyword suggestion tool. Find keywords relevant to your business and show ads when customers search for your product or service. Google Keyword Planner is a superb tool. Caveat: search volumes are not always spot on accurate. Don’t get seduced by them.
Free Application
Official website: https://ads.google.com/intl/en_in/home/tools/keyword-planner/
Build profitable SEO or PPC campaigns with the Keyword Magic Tool. Export your selected keywords to other SEMrush tools, get millions of keyword suggestions from the biggest keyword database on the market and pick the best ones for you in just a few clicks. Each keyword suggested has a range of metrics helping you evaluate its potential for achieving your goals. Free access to the tool will expire at the end of the beta trial.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 99$/month
Official website: https://www.semrush.com/features/keyword-magic-tool/
Keyword Everywhere is a free chrome extension that shows you monthly search volume, CPC and competition data on 15+ websites like Google Search Console, YouTube, Amazon and others. Keywords everywhere show you “related” keywords as well as “people also search for” keywords in widgets on the right hand side of Google and Bing.
Free Application
Official website: https://keywordseverywhere.com/
Web Survey tools are a powerful and useful way to learn about your customer base. Choosing the right online survey software or questionnaire tools help you as they are a great way to engage your audience and get insightful feedback. Online surveys are a fantastic way to mine data from your customers or site visitors as well as to engage with them too.
SurveyMonkey is a free online survey tool that captures the voices and opinions of the people who matter most to you – online visitors or paying customers. Very flexible and excellent for integration on your website.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 28$/month
Official website: https://www.surveymonkey.com/
Typeform specialises in online form building and online surveys with which you can create interactive experiences for your audience and get more responses. It’s very simple and intuitive, so it is very easy to glean the data you want from people. It lets you build interactive, engaging, and conversational online forms that power brand interactions.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 35$/month
Official website: https://www.typeform.com/
You can identify anonymous website visitors by using anonymous visitor identification tools. These help by translating IP addresses to company names, tracking clicks and more. Once you know that a particular company or person is looking at your website, you can then put them into your outbound sales pipeline and contact them proactively, or disable them from being able to see your site, your ads, etc. hence cost you money that has no chance of delivering ROI.
Leadfeeder shows you the companies visiting your website, how they found you and what they’re interested in. They then prioritise leads based on those activities on your site which means every lead has far more meaning and an identity of company / contact information.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 55$/month
Official website: https://www.leadfeeder.com/
Visual Visitor is a website lead generation and visitor tracking tool that identifies anonymous website visitors who are in the market for your services. It is a set of “Sales Enablement” tools with their core service as anonymous visitor identification (which operates a lot like caller-ID for your website). It is a cloud-based lead generation solution that helps small to midsize enterprises track and manage anonymous visitor identification.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 59$/month
Official website: https://www.visualvisitor.com/
Leady is a website intelligence solution that recognises the corporate visitors that come to your website and reports back to you. This information gives you new opportunities that you can easily turn into new customers. Leady turns your anonymous website visitors into business leads with a full company and person profile. It globally renowned as an excellent B2B lead generation tool and for long sales cycles in B2B sales.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 39$/month
Official website: https://leady.com/
SharpSpring marketing automation helps marketers drive more leads, convert more leads to sales, and optimise marketing ROI. The tool provides a fully-featured, powerful platform but at a hefty price-point. This is a fully integrated cloud-based marketing tool that offers customer relationship management, marketing automation, mobile and social marketing. Despite the hefty monthly fee, for big brand digital marketing it is well worth it.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 550$/month
Official website: https://sharpspring.com/
Professional click fraud software helps you save a lot of money by not wasting ad budget on irrelevant or fraudulent clicks. Click fraud detection software enables automated tracking of clicks, detection of click fraud and blocks bots and fraud clickers. Various options are available in the market, providing up to the minute checking, blocking and dedicated reports for identifying suspicious activities on your ads.
ClickCease detects and blocks click fraud on your ad campaigns. Automatically blocking competitors and bots from wasting your ads budget. It provides PPC click fraud detection, prevention and protection that will exclude invalid IPs and block fake clicks, which in turn will boost your campaigns and allow you to acquire more customers.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 15$/month
Official website: https://www.clickcease.com/
ClickGUARD allows you to detect, monitor, and eliminate click fraud and low quality traffic from your ad campaigns. It effectively safeguards and maximises your ads ROI without you having to deal with abusive, disruptive, fraudulent, and wasteful clicks. ClickGUARD really helps data-driven marketers to monitor, detect and fully protect PPC campaigns from low quality, and wasteful ad clicks, and is the most advanced click fraud protection software designed to stop money-wasting clicks and boost campaign efficiency.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 59$/month
Official website: https://www.clickguard.com/
PPC Protect is another leading click fraud detection software for your PPC campaigns and one I find very effective. Automated protection can be done in three clicks, so it’s very easy to setup, it is then an entirely automated solution that protects your ad campaigns with greater ease and accuracy than some of those above. The tool provides detailed insights into PPC traffic quality, fraudulent placements and advanced fraud analytics.
Paid Application
Starting Price: £40/month
Official website: https://ppcprotect.com/
Also Read: Best click fraud prevention software
Do you know what your PPC competitors are doing? There are several online tools to help you spy on your competitors – seriously 🙂 Competitor spying tools will show search, display, social and landing page intelligence and you can see whether they copy you. These PPC spying tools allow you to check what your competitor’s ads look like, where they are being shown, and how much they are spending. All priceless information when you are looking to get ahead of the game!
Want to gain insights into your competitors? SEMRush is one of the best tools I’ve ever used, especially for detailed keyword and domain data of your competitors. It offers solutions for SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research. It is a very popular tool, exceptional for competitor analysis, strategy planning and campaign optimisation.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 99$/month
Official website: https://www.semrush.com/
SpyFu helps you to spy on your competitors and shows you the search marketing secrets of those who are most successful in your industry. It is one of the best known names in the SEO game due to a deep feature set, excellent reporting and solid support for online marketing activities. The tool contains some great features that other tools lack, has a slick interface with lots of quick view snapshots and deeper reporting is readily available.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 39$/month
Official website: https://www.spyfu.com/
Google Ads preview and diagnostics tool allows you to check the status of your ads, create a quick mockup and test / tweak ad copy. You can add up to three ad copy versions with multiple extensions. You can build your own expanded text ads, with ad extensions, for Google Ads and Bing Ads and check its preview for desktop and mobile display.
Free Application
Official website: ads.google.com
iSpionage is an easy-to-use competitive intelligence research and monitoring platform for digital marketers who know what they are doing. The tool provides ultra-accurate, up-to-date competitive intelligence information and is one of the great ways for sizing up websites with their online marketing efforts that you are competing with. It is probably the most reliable competitor research tool to maximize online visibility with keywords that drive in targeted traffic to your website and can therefore generate more leads.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 59$/month
Official website: https://www.ispionage.com/
Adbeat provides great insights into many aspects of digital advertising. As a tool it helps you to see what your competitors are doing and how they are going about it. Besides seeing their ads you can also see their sources of traffic, a very handy information piece. This tool helps you to uncover your competitors online strategies and develop your own approach to compete with a superior display ads strategy.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 249$/month
Official website: https://www.adbeat.com/
With several banner generator tools available, you can create static visuals or animated HTML5 banner ads easily and professionally with minimal design skills. Banner Ad creation tools allow you to create beautiful, designer-quality display ad banners and typically do not require any prior technical knowledge because they are super-simple, use effective templating and work for all banner types / sizes.
Bannersnack helps to create beautiful and smooth animated banner ads within minutes. You can create faster and better banners with this tool than many others. It is a cloud-based solution that helps you to design customized banners, is suitable for midsize and large enterprises and allows you to create and download professional static and animated ads with minimal fuss.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 7$/month
Official website: https://www.bannersnack.com/
If you want to create stunning display ads and posts for Facebook or Instagram, Crello has 25,000+ professionally designed templates so that you don’t have to sweat over visuals for posts and social media! With Crello, you can quickly create a Facebook or Instagram Ad for free using their intuitive platform and tools that enable you to quickly design ads featuring fun, high-quality animations and videos.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 7.99$/month
Official website: https://crello.com/
Onlymega is one of the best online web tools for creating high-quality web html5 / javascript banners for ad networks, gif posts and covers for Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. The tool itself helps to quickly make amazing ads via high-quality, free banner design templates or making your own designs from scratch.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 8.33$/month
Official website: https://onlymega.com/
Reporting tools play a vital function in business operations, allowing analytics teams to generate constantly update snapshots of vital areas of the business. These reporting tools also provide the facility to navigate, filter, sort and view key real-time and historical data. They provide reporting functionality that enhances sales and marketing decision making and business intelligence capabilities.
Google Data Studio turns data into fully customisable, informative reports and dashboards that are easy to read and share. It also allows you to create branded reports with data visualisations to share with others. Google Data Studio provides everything you require to turn analytics data into informational, easy-to-understand reports via data visualisation.
Free Application
Official website: https://datastudio.google.com/
In our opinion, Reportgarden is the best client PPC reporting tool for agencies! This tool provides a single, central solution to manage clients, campaigns and reporting of your online marketing. Create analysis and performance reports, setup call tracking, monitor budgets and campaigns, all while trying to grow your business.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 125$/month
Official website: https://reportgarden.com/
Whatagraph reports are easy to use and extremely intuitive to handle, creating multi-source reports fast and accurately. It is in essence the most visual reporting tool for marketing analytics and social media reporting. It is a marketing performance reporting platform that automatically converts website and social media data into visual reports. The tool is created with digital agencies and their clients in mind.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 99$/month
Official website: https://whatagraph.com/
If you run an eCommerce store, then these are essential. When it comes to advertising on Google shopping, setting up the Merchant Center feed is the biggest challenge to marketers and business owners, but with the help of various tools it can take a few clicks to set up and automate the whole process.
This official app by Shopify will save your time setting up and maintaining Google shopping feeds. Its major advantage is that the Google shopping app automatically synchs products with Google merchant center so you don’t have to manually update or add any products.
Free Application
Official website: https://apps.shopify.com/google-shopping
Over 40% of small eCommerce business owners use WooCommerce. For you own store or for that of your clients WooCommerce is hugely powerful, resilient (secure) and flexible. It has a ton of features, one prominent one when we think of shopping feeds being that you can generate automated .xml Google shopping feeds – really handy for automation purposes.
Free Application
Official website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/webappick-product-feed-for-woocommerce/
Amasty is a powerful feed tool for creating and operating product feeds for Google Shopping, Bing, Amazon ads and many other comparison shopping engines. As with WooCommerce, Amasty is feature rich, it houses several tools that can help you to sell more, faster and in smarter ways.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 129$/month
Official website: https://amasty.com/product-feed.html
Another good one, BigCommerce is an app that helps you automate your Google shopping feeds. Easy to use in that it takes just a few clicks to setup the Google Merchant Center feed and really resilient in terms of security and integration.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 50$/month
Official website: https://www.bigcommerce.com/apps/shopping-feed/
DataFeedWatch (DFW) helps you to optimise data feeds and campaign performance on 1000+ eCommerce channels. You can connect your Shopify Store and enable merchants and agencies to optimise their data feeds and campaign results for Google with 1,000+ other shopping channels such as Google Shopping. You can also manipulate your feeds in many ways: add missing data, replace or combine values, exclude products, add categories and more. DFW also has good analytics and performance reporting to help you identify and remove unprofitable products from your feeds.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 34$/month
Official website: https://www.datafeedwatch.com/
Feedonomics helps you list your products everywhere people shop online, including Google Shopping, Amazon and Facebook. It is a powerful platform for optimising your product data and automatically gets your products listed on hundreds of different search, social, affiliate, and marketplace channels. With this tool, you can easily pull products from any shopping platform, feed file, or custom site with any kind of schedule.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 199$/month
Official website: https://feedonomics.com/
Adding eCommerce tracking tools to your website or app helps you to see the pivotal eCommerce data you need via analytics reports. You need to enable eCommerce conversion tracking tools to monitor ROI with any level of certainty because your conversion rate is the number 1 metric to track and optimise within campaigns.
There are some invaluable eCommerce tools to help you analyse conversion rate success, bottlenecks and other issues. eCommerce conversion tracking is so powerful as a tool that it can help you identify the performance of your ad campaigns in terms of generating leads, sales messaging, downloads, email sign-ups, web presence user experience and all other areas of digital marketing.
This Shopify App enables the easiest and fastest installation of your Google Ads conversion pixel (in two easy clicks). Implementation of Google Ads conversion pixel or tracking code is extremely important for running successful campaigns. If you are running a Shopify store we would suggest this is a must!
Free Application
Official website: https://apps.shopify.com/adwords-conversion-pixel
Google Ads conversion tracking on your WooCommerce store lets you know whether your advertising dollars are paying off and allows you to track the ROI of clicks on your ads.
Free Application
Official website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-google-adwords-conversion-tracking-tag/#installation
Dynamic remarketing tools help you to deliver messages tailored to your audience on targeted campaigns. There are a number of tools and strategies to help you with your dynamic remarketing making setup, monitoring and optimisation much simpler. They also allow you to upload data about products to your ad network and other services.
If you have a Shopify Store or you work for a client using Shopify, you should definitely try ROI Hunter App. Whether you want to run ads on Facebook, Google Display Network, or Google Search, ROI Hunter Easy will help you automate your advertising in a few clicks.
Paid Application
Starting Price: 9$/month
Official website: https://apps.shopify.com/roi-hunter-easy
If you have a WooCommerce shop and want to run dynamic remarketing campaigns with Google Ads, this tool will insert the customized remarketing pixel on all your shop pages. Google Ads will then be able to collect customer behaviour data such as product buyers, viewers, order value, cart abandoners, etc. You can also run tailored remarketing campaigns based on this data.
Free Application
Official website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-google-dynamic-retargeting-tag/
Here is some other use full PPC tools to create and manage Google ads campaigns:
Campaign URL Builder helps you to generate custom campaign parameters for your advertising URLs. This tool allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so you can track custom campaigns in Google Analytics. You can add parameters and values to your URLs manually, or you can use one of the following platform-specific URL-builders. Campaign URL Builder lets you track all your campaigns directly in your web analytics platform.
Free Application
Official website: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/
Campaign URL Builder helps you to generate custom campaign parameters for your advertising URLs. This tool allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so you can track custom campaigns in Google Analytics. You can add parameters and values to your URLs manually, or you can use one of the following platform-specific URL-builders. Campaign URL Builder lets you track all your campaigns directly in your web analytics platform.
Free Application
Official website: https://wordcounter.net/
TitleCase allows you to convert the text to any format you choose. Capitalise, Title Case, AP style, APA style, Chicago style, MLA style. We find this one really handy for all manner of content marketing tasks.
Free Application
Official website: https://titlecase.com/
If you are running any paid PPC Ads for your own business or for a client, we strongly recommend taking a look at some of the tools above. These are what we class as the best ones, handpicked as of 2021. To save you time, budget, effort, AND make much better informed decisions they will help you with setup, management and optimisation.
Finally, myself and the team at Oxedent would love to hear from you if any of these sound appealing to you, if you need help with your own setup, management or optimisation of campaigns, or simply if you think we’ve missed something off the list.
Have we missed out any of your favourite tools? Do you need help with any of the PPC campaigns you do run? Maybe you are looking to dip your toe into PPC for the first time or after a previous unsuccessful time. In any instance, get in touch!
This article was written by Biplab Poddar
Let’s discuss how to scale your eCommerce store with profit and if we’re the right partner to get you there.