All companies have a tech stack or series of tools they use to complete day-to-day operations. When it comes to PPC tools, brands will have to decide whether they want single-function tools, full management tools, or to build their own.
Should you build in-house PPC tools?
Building your own tools can be expensive, but a reasonable path if you have the resources and need a more custom solution.
What types of PPC tools do you need?
These are the main family of tools PPC account managers will need:
- Reporting: the ability to beautifully visualize data and insights from ad campaigns
- Budgets: protections on ensuring budgets stay on pace and don’t over/underspend
- Creative: ad creation and preview support (usually with a shared asset library)
- Keyword/Audience/Placement Bidding: if on manual bidding adjusting the bids and if on smart bidding, adjusting the targets. Will also report on hubs (keywords, placements, audiences) of waste or profit.
We’ll break down each of these tools in depth and how much they cost to secure individually as well as what it costs on average to have them all rolled into a single solution.
Full disclosure: Optmyzr does support all these features and our price point is typically less expensive than buying all tools individually.
Additionally, rather than paying on average $1,900 per month for all the functionality, you can get Optmyzr, which covers all the above tools, for $208 per month. Choosing Optmyzr means learning one platform instead of many.
What do you need to look for in PPC reporting tools?
Reporting tools need to be able to share data in an easy-to-digest format. Typically these tools will allow for comparisons as well as insights into why a campaign may be performing the way it is.
Reporting tools at a minimum will give insights into:
- CPA
- CTR
- Conversion Rate
- Spend
- Impression Share
- Conversion type
- Impressions
- Clicks
Bonus features metrics will include:
- Competitive metrics (how you’re doing against your competitor)
- PMax channel segmentation
- Call tracking reporting
- Cross network reporting
Optmyzr goes above and beyond streamlining reporting. With Optmyzr, you can not only white label the reports to make them fully represent your brand, but you can also automate when they get sent to customers.
This means if a report only has good news to share, it can reach the customer without any action from you, and if there’s room to improve, you’ll have the chance to provide context.
Reporting tools absolutely need to enable easy sharing of data. Whether those are custom dashboard links or exportable PDFs/presentations, it’s important they look just as beautiful out of the platform as they do in the UI.
They also need to support integrations to highlight the data from valuable sources.
If we were to take the average professional account for a mid-size business we’d be looking at about $675 per month for a reporting-only tool.
What do you need to look for in budgeting tools?
Budgeting tools are chiefly responsible for pacing over a period of time: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or even custom-flighted budgets.
These tools will either take active action (pausing/enabling campaigns or adjusting budgets) or alert you to changes you may wish to make. It’s important to note that these tools tend to focus on manual bidding (i.e. don’t account for the learning period in smart bidding campaigns).
While both smart bidding campaigns and manual bidding campaigns can accommodate some fluctuations in budgets, constant changes to budgets will trigger learning periods. Google claims these learning periods will not have a negative effect on account performance, however, it’s important to keep an eagle eye on performance if you will be opting for that strategy.
Optmyzr enables brands to pace budgets based on day-of-week user behavior, as well as other rules you can set with Optmyzr’s Rule Engine.
On average a brand can expect to pay $316 for a budgeting tool.
What do you need to look for in ad creative tools?
Creative tools run the gambit of ad design, landing pages, and everything in between. It’s important the creative tool you use can connect/sync your creative to the platform you’re designing for and will not make you run afoul of any copyright permissions.
As a general rule, functionality for creative tools includes:
- Shared asset library
- Editing tools: changing the layout or format of the image/page
- Integrations with stock images that you can use as part of your subscription
Optmyzr enables faster ad creative through Open AI suggestions as well as top-performing creative in responsive search ads (RSAs).
The average a mid-sized brand can expect to pay is $50 for a simple solution and $250 for a more robust one.
What do you need to look for tools for keyword & audience targeting with placement bidding?
Account management tools typically focus on bidding. However, they will usually have targeting functions as well. These tools will sometimes include other functionality.
Minimum functionality for these tools:
- Ability to do real-time bidding through either scripts or adjusting native bidding strategies.
- Find wasteful targets (search terms/placements/audiences)
- Editing functionality
Optmyzr enables brands to create intelligent audience segments for PMax campaigns by harnessing top-performing search terms.
These tools range in functionality and complexity so it’s a little harder to come up with an average price. Many of these tools don’t include upfront pricing and require a brand to engage with a sales team.
Takeaways
Optmyzr enables advertisers by helping with all parts of the PPC marketing tech stack. With prices starting at $208 per month, it’s a lot easier to choose Optmyzr as the one tool instead of the many.
Make your PPC management less complex. Sign up for our 14-day free trial today.
