From my last post, “how to promote your website by ppc”, we know that it’s not easy to create a successful ppc campaign, there are many factors you need to take in to account. Therefore, you need a lot of assistance to accomplish this complicated task, tools are your best friends.

Today, we are going to tell you what the best tools are for your ppc campaign, and yet. The best thing is they are FREE.

Tools for keyword research

Keyword research is crucial to the success of a campaign, because a campaign will bring you revenue (or other benefits) only if you target the right keywords. You cannot judge a keyword by just looking at it and say, “oh, seems I don’t use this query often, so other people won’t either”. Tools will provide you this data, although it’s not always accurate, you should place more trust on these figures than your instinct.

The most important factors to take into account:

•    Relevant keywords
•    Search volume
•    Keyword competition
•    Synonyms
•    Misspellings
•    Negative keywords
•    Informational or transactional

Google Adwords keyword tool

It’s obvious, isn’t it? Google Adwords keyword tool uses its own search query database, it gives you an estimated search volume for every relevant keywords. You would’ve thought the search volume it carries out must be very accurate because of the data they have, but it’s NOT that accurate. Don't take my word, try comparing estimated search volume vs. impressions your campaign generates. (of course you need enough budgets to capture all the impressions) None the less, it’s still one of the best PPC tools you should rely on.

It is good at understanding these factors:

•    Relevant keywords
•    Search volume
•    Keyword competition


Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a great addition to Google adwords keyword tool, it collects data from dogpile and metacrawler. Although its data is only a small fraction of the entire search query data pool, it can give you the exact search volume on each keyword, and also many relevant long tail keywords. I would say wordtracker is often more inspirational than Adwords keyword tool, because of these highly relevant long tail keywords.

Note: wordtracker’s free version only shows US search queries, if you need UK search queries you will have to pay.

It is good at understanding these factors:

•    Relevant keywords
•    Search volume

Thesaurus

How many synonyms can you think of for word “travel”? “journey”, “tour”, “trip”…etc, I am pretty sure you can even name a few more. On thesaurus, there is a full list of synonyms for every word you type in, it gives you a wide range of keyword variations that you may never think of.

It’s good at understanding this factor

•    Synonyms


Wordstream’s Free Negative Keyword Tool

We all know the importance of negative keywords, it’s critical to quality score optimisation. But PPC managers have been struggling to find negative keywords for a long time. The most accurate way to generate negative keywords is to set up an advanced filter to track exact search queries that searchers type in. But that means you will have to monitor it day by day and add negative keywords continuously.

We really want to have a list of negative keywords at the start of a campaign. Although there is some kind of “general negative keywords” for you to download, many keywords in that list will not suit your campaign.

Wordstream’s FREE negative keyword tool gives you a great idea of what search terms you should avoid. These negative terms are not generated by common sense, but relevant searches. Take an example, “ppc tools”, it shows results such as “ppc hacking tools” and “ppc Bluetooth tools”.

It’s good at understanding these factors

•    Negative keywords
•    Relevant keywords


Microsoft Commercial Intention

Do you know if your keyword is informational or transactional? If it’s informational, visitors are likely to know more relevant information. But if it’s transactional, visitors will be more likely to put money in your pocket. But how will you determine it? Use common sense or 6th sense?

No, don’t trust your feeling, trust data. Microsoft adlab has a great tool to help you determine if a keyword is commercial or non-commercial.

It’s good at understanding this factor

•    Informative or transactional


Keyword Misspelling Tool

You cannot imagine how many searchers are typing misspelled queries every day, and they are not very interested in correcting it because Google will help them. For example, how are you going to spell “misspell”? Maybe “mispell”? The funny thing is, this keyword misspelling tool page even spelled it wrong in its title tag. (Probably on purpose)

Nobody can afford to miss this massive opportunity, and the best part of it is you will have less competition, i.e. higher click through rate and lower cost per click.

It’s good at understanding this factor

•    Misspelling

Tool for competition research

It’s important to know who you are competing with and their paid strategy. Most of the time, you can seek out some opportunities from observing their paid strategies.


Spyfu

It gives you a quick snapshot of how much your competitor is spending and what keywords they are targeting. You can also come up some new paid keywords idea from this wonderful tool, though you have to pay if you want to know all the keywords the competitor is paying.

It is good at understanding this factor:

•    Keyword Competition
•    Relevant keywords

Tool for landing page optimisation

Once you have your PPC campaigns alive, traffic will go through if keywords are well-targeted and ad copies are well-written. But will these traffics convert? You might say: I hope so! We cannot hope, instead, we need to test and improve.


Google Website Optimiser

Google website optimizer provides two options for you to optimise your landing page, A/B split test and multivariate test. A/B split test works better for landing page with low traffic, MVT normally works better for landing pages with high traffic.

You can always improve your landing page using landing page optimiser, even it’s just a tiny improvement.

Tools for web analytics

Any online marketing campaign needs to be monitored from day one, if you don’t track your web data, your campaign is dying soon.


Google Analytics

Google Analytics is no doubt the best free web analytics tool available, PPC campaign data can be easily tracked and segmented for you to further understand your campaign. If you haven’t used it yet, I strongly recommend you doing so. It’s crucial to set up  goals to track ROI, view funnel visualisation to determine where the bounces happen and  concentrate on the trends of campaign performance.

These are the best FREE PPC tools in my opinion, if you have any recommendations please leave them in the comments.