SEM Tools - Manage Paid Search Ad Campaigns

Competitive Analysis Tools

Keeping tabs on competitors is something I find myself doing quite often — and honestly, I’ve liked just about every competitive tool I’ve ever come across. I just can’t afford to keep them all in my toolbox all the time.
The tools I personally tend to use most are:
AdGooroo: I absolutely love this tool for monitoring text and display ads. It does a great job of showing how competitors jostle for position over time. Their industry insight tool is great for getting a sense for unfamiliar market segments when onboarding a new client.
SEMRush: Dollar for dollar, this is absolutely the hardest working collection of competitive tools in SEM today. I love it and rely on it heavily — especially for international SEO and SEM data.
MixRank: MixRank is great for display advertising intelligence. It catalogs the actual display ads your competitors are running, so you can see all the sizes, shapes and animation sequences they are running.
SearchMetrics: I’ve used this tool for many market potential benchmarks and competitive audits because it gives me a great sense for a competitors’ entire online strategy and strengths across all sources of inbound traffic, including paid, social, linking and organic sources. Terrific!
iSpotTV: Recently, I had a competitor jump into TV advertising for the first time and wondered how extensive their campaigns were and what impact they’d have on our own online campaigns. This great tool, iSpotTV, captured their commercials, showed us where and when the commercials aired, and gave us estimates of both ad spend and audience reach. Knowing that, we were able to observe the lift on their brand terms online, impact on our brand, and develop appropriate counter-tactics.

Campaign, Keyword & Management Reporting Tools

I’ll assume that every SEM manager already has Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (or some free MS-Office knock-off), a decent text editor, and search engine tools like AdWords and Bing Ads Editors. These are the hammers, screwdrivers and wrenches of all SEM toolkits.
Acquisio: Actually, this is not so much a tool as it is an entire campaign management platform. I initially fell in love with Acquisio for its ability to visually display data and automate reporting functions; but now, I rely on it heavily for so much more, including bidding, budgeting, keyword and ad management across Google Bing, and Facebook. By way of disclosure, I think so highly of this company and their products that I joined their technical advisory committee five years ago.
Monkeymerge: This is one of those old and rusty tools that doesn’t get used much. But when I need it, it works magic. Monkey merge lets you merge multiple spreadsheets and text documents together in a single step.
TextAnz: Another oldie, but goodie, and I thank my good friend and colleague, David Szetela, for recommending it to me. This tool analyzes keyword themes on webpages and raw analytics data to help you distill the essence of a webpage or huge keyword list into its fundamental components. We find this very helpful when optimizing GDN placements to figure out why Google is placing ads on particular sites, both good and bad, so we can figure out the best way to exclude or target the sites more precisely.
Wordle and Tag Crowd: These are great tools for visualizing large lists of search term analytics data or for dressing up your next SEM status report for management.

At a glance, this Wordle graphic shows that this article is mostly about tools, SEM, AdWords and, of course, love.

SnagIt: This may be the single most used and loved tool in my toolbox. It is as versatile as duct tape, and I have SnagIt open all the time. Techsmith, creators of SnagIt, also offer a companion product, Camtasia, for video capture and editing, too. I bought Camtasia because it is super cool, but haven’t used it much. It seems stuck on my, “I’ll get around to it one of these days” list of cool things to spend more time on.
Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator: We use the Adobe tools all the time to create and edit display ads for GDN, FB and other networks. There may be other cheaper solutions out there, but we’ve grown to love Adobe products.
Rapid Keyword and The Permutator: These are two more “oldie, but goodie” tools for building out lists of keywords. Back in the old days, these were the tools of “power” users who wanted million-keyword inventories with every iteration of every keyword phrase possible, including plurals, word reversals, and misspellings. Even though that’s not considered best practice these days, these two tools are still highly useful for constructing keyword lists from raw noun, verb and modifier components gleaned from keyword research.

The Evolution Of A New Category Of AdWords Tools

While I love my old tools, I am a total sucker for the latest and greatest new ones to add to my tool box. Lately, I’ve been licking my chops in anticipation of an emerging new category of SEM tools based on AdWords scripts.
I am willing to bet that in the next 6-12 months, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of new scripts-based tools available on the market. They are sure to become as prolific as smartphone apps and WordPress plug-ins because they are so easy to write, share and customize.
Like smartphone apps and WP plug-ins, script-based tools are also sure to vary wildly in quality, functionality and price. We’ll be seeing super-specific tools that automate a specific AdWords task, complex tools that automate entire processes, and toolsets (collection of tools). Pricing models will range from free or almost free, to monthly subscriptions for toolsets at premium prices.
The most exciting aspect of this emerging tools category is how they enable PPC experts to share the best parts of their secret sauce — their well-developed optimization processes — and package that expertise into customizable scripts. Very exciting possibilities are clearly on the horizon.
I’ve got my eyes on two companies, at the moment, that are doing wonderful things with AdWords script-based tools.
One is Optmyzr.com, the brain child of Fred Vallaeys, well-known (ex) Googler and AdWords evangelist with a deep understanding of how to optimize all aspects of AdWords accounts. He’s just announced a new, one-click optimizer and is readying a new tool to help you set mobile bids correctly within AdWords enhanced <choke> campaigns.
The other is Pat East’s Hannapin Marketing with their PPC Hero Pro Tools platform. Hannapin is home to a collection of the most active, energetic and insanely creative PPC consultants floating around this planet. They share their expertise openly and prolifically through blog posts and webinars published daily.
Take a look especially at their Ad Guardian tool. Ad Guardian “Detects when your site goes down and automatically pauses your campaigns until it goes back up.”  Brilliant. Simply brilliant.


by Matt Van Wagner
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