There are so many tools out there to help make pay-per-click (PPC) across multiple platforms easier, faster, and more effective!
Ad platforms themselves bring a wealth of useful tools and features. Third-party tools can supercharge all areas of ad performance across multiple platforms—from research, creative, and campaign creation, through to landing pages and optimising lead quality.
As a PPC agency, we’ve found there are a few standouts which we use everyday and couldn’t be without:
- SEMRush
- Wappalyzer
- Unbounce
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Microsoft Clarity
SEMRush
This is a third-party search tool. There are so many features and amazing values to take from using either the free plan or the paid version.
For PPC, we use the free plan daily to look at a competitor's organic and paid traffic estimates.
You can also get an indication of the keywords that they are bidding on. This can help to identify potential opportunities for PPC keyword research which might be missing in your strategy or give you confirmation that you have the right coverage.
The line chart is really useful to spot ‘boom and bust’ PPC activity.
This is something we see very frequently with our clients' competitors.
It’s common for a business to dabble in PPC or be on a long term decline in organic traffic, so they see paid as the solution.
Taking these insights can guide your decision making. Staying the course when a competitor is having a boom and bust on PPC, might mean some short term lower performance but will allow you to keep taking market share in the longer term.
See where they are strong, what’s their channel mix of paid and organic and how does your account or client account match up?
Wappalyzer
This is a Google Chrome browser extension that allows you to see what platform a website is hosted on, tags that fire on the page load (such as Google Ads conversion tracking), plugins, integrations and more.
This extension is completely free and I use it everyday and have done for years being a PPC consultant!
Most commonly, I use this to see which platform a competitor is on and which tags fire. This will show you which channels they are advertising on. For example, if the website has a Google and Microsoft advertising tag, it’s reasonable to assume that they are advertising on those channels.
If they don’t have a Facebook Pixel and you do, Meta might be somewhere that you are where they aren’t.
If they have a subscription plugin, you might want to investigate further what they are offering if you don’t.
I also use this to check tags are firing for my client sites. You should always check view preview mode in Google Tag Manager when deploying new tags, however, if you aren’t using Tag Manager or you just want a quick look when troubleshooting, this is very quick and efficient.
Unbounce
We shouldn’t pick favourites but if I did mine would have to be Unbounce.
This is a landing page builder tool. It enables you to use conversion tested, mobile responsive landing pages with speed and ease.
These pages, when made with the right layout and messaging can transform a companies PPC lead gen performance. The conversion rates are often so much higher than the comparable website page, it can also open up the ability to use other ad channels such as Meta.
Making changes is super quick and easy. This means the agility is given back to the advertiser, no more long winded dev timelines! You see an opportunity to clone the page and edit the messaging for another keyword, duplicate, edit, publish and away you go.
You can offset the most common issues with B2B lead gen by using Unbounce pages;
- Slow site speed
- Confusing or messy page template
- Messaging not addressing the search user’s needs
- Forms needing more or less fields to adjust lead qualification
It’s not uncommon for the right Unbounce page to double or triple conversion rate. This makes a marked impact on lead volume and cost-per-lead.
They can work for eCommerce too. If you have on-site issues, a lengthy dev timeline or other complexities, using Unbounce as a click-through page, means you can bring the ads user to a page where the bounce is significantly lower and push them through to product pages on the website to buy.
This is highly effective and again offsets common challenges such as site speed or complex templates needing to be edited.
Google Ads Keyword Planner
This is an in-platform tool which is a part of Google Ads.
You don’t have to be spending on campaigns to use it, simply make an account and you will have access.
I use this everyday for looking at market opportunities and forecasting performance.
In short, you can add targeted keywords which are related to the products or services you offer and see the monthly estimated search volume for a particular region.
This is very useful as you can start to model out with the click-through and conversion rate, the sort of returns you could see.
As it gives you click cost estimates, you can also work out what sort of budget you could and therefore should look at spending.
There’s nothing else that can get as robust and systematic in advertising. Of course a business can’t be run off of a spreadsheet, however, if you can see there’s only 100 searches per month for your service, it’s unlikely to yield 50 leads.
Equally, you can see more times than not, how huge the opportunity is for your business in your core market and internationally.
Using actual data to inform your marketing strategy is the most effective way to grow and make investment decisions.
The trendlines will give you a fairly accurate indication of any seasonal high or low points. This can help with expectations, if there’s a seasonal dip coming, you know why and can take corrective action. If you're two months away from peak, you can make sure that you maximise the opportunity.
Microsoft Clarity
My second favourite PPC tool!
Microsoft Clarity is a free website analysis tool.
Once deployed, this will allow you to see all kinds of useful user behaviour data and insights.
The main feature I use is the screen recordings part. This will show you actual user screen recordings of someone who has come to your website, where they clicked, how they engaged with the page(s) and where they left.
As a troubleshooting tool, it’s second to none. You can identify by traffic source so quickly why users are likely leaving your website. This will fast-track getting your PPC campaigns converting and returning like nothing else.
In terms of optimisations, it also has so many benefits. Seeing that users very frequently click a certain link or button and then bounce, can give you the insight to make changes and increase the throughput of your marketing traffic.
This has a compound effect as it will uplift the efficacy of all marketing channels not just PPC or paid social.
Driving more leads or sales for the same spend will reduce your acquisition costs and increase your return.
Deploy this onto the website you’re promoting before campaigns go live and if you don’t need to use it—great! If you do then you can get real answers to the questions that used to perplex us like why aren’t people buying?
Summary
We use these 5 PPC tools everyday and we think you should too!
You can improve the efficiency of all of the areas of the customer journey with these tools from research, through to execution and post-click analysis.
As a pocket-guide, here’s a reminder of the PPC research tools we’ve recommended in this blog post and what we use them for:
Top PPC tools -
SEMRush - Competitor research
Keyword Planner - Market opportunities and forecasting
Wappalyzer - Competitor research and troubleshooting your tags
Unbounce - Make better performing landing pages
Microsoft Clarity - Get answers to why people aren’t converting on your website
Use these tools in conjunction with others to ensure that you’re driving the best results via your PPC and Paid Social campaigns.
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