No matter what industry you’re in, the Google Ads and PPC ad networks have never been more fierce when it comes to competition.
I’ve been in this game for a long time now, and it’s only becoming more expensive to compete and get cut through with targeting new customers or prospects.
It’s even more costly if you don’t have the right tools or processes in place to help you manage everything from;
You name it.
As you can see, there’s a lot to factor in for any marketer or founder. Even for experienced PPC and Google Ads marketers who’ve been doing this for years need the right tools in place in order to optimise campaigns and drive results.
Which tools are great for beginners, to advanced PPC marketers, to manage successful Google Ads campaigns that can scale with a good ROI and good ROAS?
These are my top recommendations that I’ve tested and used for different use cases over the years.
Madgicx provides companies with numerous ways to leverage multiple social media platforms through a no non-sense advertising platform. Data-driven advertisers can take advantage of Madgicx’s all-in-one advertising system that allows them to quickly optimise the results they see using marketing strategies powered by AI technology. The AI helps ensure optimal results by learning what works with your audience and what doesn't.
Plans and Pricing
Madgicx offers a free 7-day trial of their platform. After which, you can opt for their Monthly Plan ($49), Quarterly (priced at $44/month), or Annual Plans (priced at $39/month).
Revealbot is another useful tool that provides you with advanced automation of Google Ads and other social media channels such as Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads and even Snapchat Ads. It can track several metrics while having the ability to programmatically pause, restart or adjust the direction of specific ads based on their performance. It automatically tracks ROAS, CPA, and other metrics to optimise your running ads.
Plans and Pricing
Revealbot allows users a 14-day free trial period. Then you can choose between a monthly billing plan priced at $99/month, or a semi-annual plan priced at $83/month.
If you are unsure where to turn when it comes to tracking negative or fraudulent trends from your marketing campaign, then you may want to take a look at Morphio. It displays data from all of your digital marketing platforms through a single view, so monitoring conversions and making strategic decisions is quick and easy. You'll also receive alerts whenever something doesn't seem right, meaning you have an extra security layer in place protecting your ad campaign 24/7.
Plans and Pricing
Offers a 14-day free trial, and 3 price plans: Entrepreneur ($49/month), Advertiser ($120/month) and Agency ($280/month),
As part of the Perion Network, Paragone.ai is the company’s social advertising platform that makes it easy for performance marketers to advertise on social media by combining the power of AI and the technical know-how of actual digital advertising experts. Paragone helps businesses generate demand for its brand by having audiences engage and share content organically and efficiently.
Plans and Pricing
Since publishing this article, Paragone has not made its pricing information public. Though they offer a 3-months, “risk-free” trial for you to test their services once you book a demo and sign up.
The next candidate on our list of best PPC automation platforms goes to TapClicks. Its strength lies in its ability to deliver a comprehensive dashboard that brings together all of your marketing data and metrics in one place. This allows you to complete your digital marketing campaign at any given moment at the convenience of one comprehensive dashboard. As such, it helps marketers make sense of the enormous amounts of data generated by their campaigns from across social media channels.
Plans and Pricing
There's a 14-day trial period. From thereon, they offer various sets of automated marketing solutions powered by your data – from their Analytics, Reports, Orders, and Workflow. Though pricing starts at $79/month, the range of customisation that you require may require you to schedule a demo.
TrueClicks has made a reputation by being a leader in PPC monitoring services. When you use TrueClicks, you're not only getting access to multiple tools and features to help monitor your pay-per-click campaign, but you also get actionable recommendations that help you detect click fraud and other anomalies. It's like having an extra pair of watchful eyes to keep your data and reports authentic.
Plans and Pricing
There’s a free trial period of up to 6 weeks where you can give TrueClicks a try. Then pricing starts at $99/month or $79/month when you opt for annual billing.
Opteo leverages the data provided by Google Ads to provide optimisation recommendations based on its continuous account monitoring. The easy-to-use user interface allows you to spend less time crunching those performance data, and more opportunities to devote your time to other tasks that directly drive conversions and sales.
Plans and Pricing
You can give Opteo a try for free for as long as 1 month, then you can choose from any of the following price plans: Basic ($99/month), Professional ($199/month), Agency ($399/month), and Enterprise ($799/month).
Using machine learning and data science to drive business growth, Adzooma is another AI-powered platform that promises to deliver relevant marketing data out of your online campaigns. Much of the workload is automated, so you can focus more on running and growing your business while creating and managing your marketing content.
Plans and Pricing
The platform offers free lifetime use of some of its features. It encourages you to upgrade to its Plus version (£69/month or around $90/month) if you wish to unlock all of its powerful features.
AdScale is an Israel-based automation platform that is another AI-driven software designed to seamlessly automate PPC management across advertising and e-commerce platforms. AdScale guarantees more than 30% ROI while reducing your data management time to as much as 80%. Pretty damn awesome if you ask me. It can help manage alerts, AI insights, bid optimisation, and overall reporting.
Plans and Pricing
Similar to Adzooma, AdScale comes with free lifetime use of some of its Business Intelligence (BI) features. When you upgrade to a fee of $149/month, you’ll get full access to their Ads and SMS Management features, including the entire slate of BI tools.
The next entry in our list is a class of its own. Awarded as the Best PPC Management Software Suite in the European Search Awards, Adchieve takes pride in its world-leading PPC management and search automation tool. It's specifically designed for large scale advertising, where its effective synergy of data science, talented experts and AI automation makes it easy for advertisers to hit their marketing KPIs.
Plans and Pricing
As of press time, Adchieve does not publish its pricing information over at its website. Though you are encouraged to get in touch with them to schedule a demo.
Awarded by G2 as 2022’s leader in social media advertising, Smartly is a Finnish tech company that offers a fully AI-powered platform that automates all aspects of social advertising. With an impressive client base worth $2B in annual ad spend combined, the data that they have gathered creates an authoritative benchmark of marketing performance. Smartly takes care of the marketing cycle from planning, creating, product launching and learning so you can have more time to prioritise other aspects of your business.
Plans and Pricing
Smartly does not provide an exact pricing fee upfront but offers a fee percentage calculation based on your projected advertising expenses. You may also get in touch with them for a free demo.
Last in our list, but definitely not the least, is another award-winning AI-powered ad automation software in the form of Adext. Awarded by International Business Times as one of the top AI startups in 2021, Adext offers a best-in-class AI solution that works specifically with Google and Facebook.
Plans and Pricing
Adext offers a 14-day free trial and offers four different pricing plans: Starter Plan which is billed annually at 16.59/month; Venture Plan priced at 99/month; the Core Plan billed at 299/month; and a more customised Enterprise solution.
It comes down to the level of experience you have as a marketer, but I believe one of the best ways to learn is by watching YouTube video tutorials and signing up to free basic courses. There are a plethora of tutorials that exist to help you go from beginner to advanced. A good channel I recommend to check out is Surfside PPC. Additionally, courses are great to help get you started. A good course to look into is the Google Ads for beginners course on Skillshare.
The good news is that within the ads platform itself, you will find a tool called “keyword planner”. This feature is pretty good as it is, but for more advanced keyword analysis, I recommend looking to tools like Semrush, SpyFu, and Wordtracker.
The two top options in the market to look into are Clickcease and PPC Protect. Both platforms are feature-rich and help prevent fraud clicks, bots just randomly clicking your links, competitors who may try to click your ads multiple times, as well as prevent charges to your spend with users who are not intending to engage. If you’re spending large budgets at a startup where every cent counts, or work for an agency that manages big accounts, I would definitely look into both solutions.
There are a few ways you can manage budgets, but an efficient and automated way of doing it is using scripts and integrating it into Google Sheets. A really great platform, which I use often with clients, to help you achieve automated budget updates in sheets is Supermetrics. One of the top rated reporting tools available for marketers.
It comes down to what you’re trying to achieve, but I really like the ‘slide’ pricing options of Revealbot and Magidcx. They are both tools that are packed with amazing features and you only pay when you grow. In other words, the more you spend, the more you pay, rather than one large monthly fee.
