So now that Facebook is under fire – and what a large burning fire it is! – we can’t really know for sure what will happen with the most popular social network in the world and what all of this will mean for Facebook ads and their effectiveness. Thankfully though, we still have AdWords to work with – and in this blog post, I’m going to share the best AdWords tools to help you get better results from your ad campaigns.
Why AdWords?
For one thing, because it’s Google – and that means immense reach, in all corners of the world. In fact, it’s so popular and widespread, that it’s become a bona fide verb and how many companies can claim that?
Consumers use Google to find information about companies, to find products and services to buy – so an ad with your business under the right keyword search can make a big difference to your traffic and your conversions.
Plus, you only pay for results – every time someone actually clicks on your ad and visits your website.
Read on for a list of useful AdWords tools to help you get better results from your ad campaigns:
Use a keyword tool to start off
It all starts with the keyword, so keyword research is extremely important for your AdWords campaign.
Google’s Keyword Planner is built specifically for AdWords, so it’s a great place to start. It provides you with keyword ideas for your ad campaign, but it’s hamstrung by some pretty big restrictions around both the number of keywords it returns and the depth of the data it provides.
Using the Wordtracker tool alongside will allow you search for more keywords as it can return up to 10,000 terms in a single result, as well as giving more exact volumes rather than banded estimates.
ClickCease – for protecting against click fraud
When you place an ad that you have to pay for on a click by click basis, you might get a little nervous about fraudulent clicks – which, of course, you then have to pay for. Google does check for these types of clicks, but they can’t catch everything.
That’s where ClickCease comes in. The tool works with both Google and Bing ads and it aims to block all invalid and fraudulent clicks, thus helping you save money on your campaigns and boost your results.
And you don’t have to do a thing; ClickCease will monitor your ads to uncover any blacklisted IPs, bad host, and proxy servers and immediately hide your ads from any “attackers” they find. Plus, the tool also automatically files refund claims for AdWords credit every 2 months and you can even personalize the detection system to suit your needs.
Additionally, you’ll be able to see reports of all the clicks you get (like the keyword used, the IP addresses, and so on), and watch recordings of people or bots on your website after clicking on one of your AdWords ads.
So if you’re getting a lot of clicks on your ads but few results or paying too much for your ads, it might be worth looking into.
SpyFu
Are you curious what ads your competitors are using? What keywords they’ve bought on AdWords?
If so, you can use a tool like SpyFu to find out everything about your competitors’ online ads strategy. This can help you understand what works and what doesn’t, based on your competitors’ results.
SpyFu allow you to search for any competitor and find out everything you need about their AdWords campaigns:
- A full list of their PPC keywords which you can download and see how much they’ve paid for each of these keywords
- See exactly how many clicks they get on each of their ads and analyse the results of any ad split test they’ve run over the years
- Monitor your competitors’ PPC campaigns so you can see every change in ad spend, any strategy change, and any new competitors who are emerging
- Get recommendations for profitable keywords based on your competitors’ bidding history
- Find out whether you’re using any keywords which your competitors’ have already tried, but that haven’t yielded many results for them to help you save money on your campaigns·
Basically, a very useful tool for fine-tuning your ad campaigns and understanding what works and what doesn’t without having to test it all yourself – why do that when you can learn from others’ wins and mistakes?
Google AdWords Editor
Another useful tool from Google is the AdWords Editor, a free power tool that helps you manage large AdWords accounts and campaigns.
The tool allows you to monitor and manage all of your ad campaigns and features bulk editing tools to help you save time. Use it to make quick changes to all your different campaigns at once, search for specific text in your campaigns to replace it, change and move items in your campaigns, and see the statistics for all your campaigns. A very useful tool if you have a lot of different AdWords campaigns.
Reporting Ninja for in-depth PPC analytics and reports
It’s only fitting to end with an analytics and reporting tool – Reporting Ninja.
No matter what digital marketing strategy you’re using (or any marketing strategy, for that matter), analytics is an incredibly part of the process. That is because it’s analytics that help you optimize future campaigns, by helping you understand what works and what doesn’t.
Back to Reporting Ninja though, this tools allows you to create reports for most, if not all your online ad campaigns – not just AdWords, but also Bing Ads, social media ads, and more (including Google Analytics). And plus, you can even add all your different ad campaigns from different platforms into the same report to help give you a better idea of your ad success overall.
The reports are fully customizable and you can add all the sections and stats you want with the drag and drop report editor; there is a great selection of templates, as well as widgets to choose from, allowing you more control over the stats you want to see.
All the reports you create can be white labelled and can also be scheduled so you don’t have to do it yourself each time you need a report.
Conclusion
Google AdWords can be a waste of your time and money if it’s not done right; but, if it is done right, it can lead to a tonne of traffic and conversions to your website, so it’s definitely worth experimenting with it – especially now that the #DeleteFacebook movement is gaining so much traction and we can’t know what that will mean for Facebook ads yet.
Use the tools listed in this article to help you find better keywords to bid for, to understand what works and what doesn’t, to spy on your competitors, and to protect yourself against click fraud – and if you know any other useful AdWords tools that you use on a regular basis, please do share them!
