Best Marketing Tools to Spy on Your Competitors

There are dozens of marketing tools that you’re probably already using to monitor your own performance. These can be used to get competitive intelligence. Let’s assume you already know who the competition is. All you have to do is monitor these different areas.

Ad Monitoring Tools

Do you want to know where your competitors are advertising so you can do the same? Would you like to know which keywords they are targeting? If you want to troubleshoot your PPC and display ads, this set of tools will help you:
1. Adbeat is an enterprise tool that lets you see all of the ads that particular advertisers are using, split test their ad copy to help you with strategy, and find competitors you didn’t even know about. The introductory package starts at $99 per month, though that monitors only Google ads. There’s a 30-day free trial.
2. AdGooroo is a multifunctional tool that includes a Display Insight feature. The basic service lets you monitor ads for up to ten competitors, ranked by page views. Its Industry Insight allows you to figure out ad placements, too. Pricing is not stated.
3. AdGooroo also has an SEM Insight tool that incorporates keyword research, competitive intelligence, PPC and SEO tools, and traffic data. Pricing is not stated.
4. MixRank allows you to see the mix of ads that companies are using. You can see a snapshot of this data (without registering) that covers display ads, text ads, advertisers, and demographics, though you will have to create an account for the full report.
5. Moat provides a free ad search tool that allows you to key in your competitors’ brand names and see what ads they have shown recently. You can see the size and some of the places the ads have been seen recently, giving you a good guide for where to place your own advertising.
6. SocialAdNinja has a database of 400,000 social PPC ads. It’s a great tool for monitoring global Facebook advertising. It includes fine-grained search features so you can identify ads targeting your key demographic and find out which links they point to. There’s a single membership level at $147 per month.
7. WhatRunsWhere helps you monitor competitors to figure out their advertising strategy and where they are placing ads. As a bonus, it can help with advertising research and split testing, finding new sources of traffic, and ad buying.

Keyword Monitoring Tools

Related to ad monitoring tools are those that help you check out the keywords your competitors are targeting in their search marketing campaigns. Do this, and you can improve your own ROI by figuring out what’s working for them. Here’s a selection:
8. iSpionage looks at how your competitors are advertising with Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo search marketing tools. You can view ads and track spending. It also includes SEO competitive research and a social monitoring tool for Twitter and Facebook.
9. KeywordSpy helps with competitive keyword discovery. You can find out how much your competitors are spending on AdWords and discover which combinations of keywords and advertising copy are working for them.
10. KeywordCompetitor helps you spy on organic and paid keywords, ads, and landing pages for your competitors, with daily updates in rankings. The site also has tools for monitoring competitors and working with affiliate marketing.
11. SEMrush lets you monitor competitors’ organic keyword positions, find relevant long tail keywords, see your competitors’ PPC ads, and more. It also includes SEO tools. There’s a wealth of data available from the free search bar on the homepage, though you will have to upgrade ($69.95 per month) for more queries and results.
12. SpyFu lets you see up to six years of data on your competitors’ keywords, ranking, and ads helping you with SEO and PPC advertising. There’s a limited free tool, though you have to subscribe for access to advanced competitive intelligence.
13. The Search Monitor looks at paid and organic search and even how you look against your competition in comparison-shopping engines. This multifunctional tool also monitors affiliates and trademarks as well as who’s discussing your brand. It starts at $299 per month.

Link Popularity and Backlink Tools

All of the tools you use to check who’s linking to your site can be used to research your competitors’ backlinks. All you have to do is plug in their URL. There are dozens of backlink checkers out there, but here are three excellent ones:
14. Ahrefs provides a wealth of information on external links, referring domains and IPs, top pages, main anchor text, linked domains, and more. There’s a limited free account covering 3 reports and 10 results, but for fuller data you’ll need to upgrade to the $79 per month package.
15. Majestic Site Explorer provides a detailed link profile for any site. In addition to working with current data, you also can check its historical index to see results over time. There is a limited free version.
16. Open Site Explorer describes itself as a search engine for links. It provides information on page and domain authority, linking domains, anchor text used, and more; you also can compare link profiles for up to five sites. It is free, though signing up for Moz Analytics gives you access to (much) more data.

Web Ranking Tools

How are people interacting with your competitors’ sites? The next set of tools provides website competitive analysis on consumer data to help companies improve their targeting in different segments.
A free search gets you data on unique visitors, rank, and competitive rank, but you’ll need to sign up for more in-depth tools.
17. Alexa has been tracking global web traffic for a couple of decades and using it to provide website ranking on a global and country basis. The traffic sources and other data can help with benchmarking your site against your competitors.
18. Compete describes itself as a “digital intelligence” tool which uses online consumer behavior.
19. SimilarWeb is a competitive analytics-monitoring tool that provides data on traffic sources, top content, social mentions, and more. There’s a lot of data available for free, including referral sites, search traffic, key topics and more. Pro packages start at $99 per month.

Monitoring and Mentions

Often recommended for monitoring mentions of your own brand, social media monitoring tools work equally well for seeing what people are saying about your competitors.
20. Google Alerts saves you the trouble of visiting the site to repeatedly perform the same search. Set up an alert and have the latest news about your competitors delivered to your inbox. It monitors news, blogs, video, discussions, and books, and it is free.
21. Mention combines media and social monitoring. It tracks content published on web pages, news sites, blogs, and forums in 42 languages. It provides real time social alerts and has an excellent mobile app. There’s a free plan, with the upgrade starting at $6.99 per month.
22. Social Mention provides real time search of brand mentions on blogs, microblogs, images, videos, questions, and bookmarking sites. This free web search tool also provides a broad brush sentiment analysis.
23. Talkwalker offers a service similar to Google Alerts, giving you the choice of monitoring news, blogs, discussions, or everything. You also can monitor content in different languages. It is free.
24. Topsy allows you to search tweets from 2006 forward, looking at links, photos, videos, influencers, and more. The free online search can provide a snapshot of a competitor’s Twitter presence, but you will need the pro version for real time results and alerts, reports, and identification of key influencers.
25. You also can use Twitter’s own search tool and save your searches, though the basic search doesn’t provide the depth that Topsy has.

Social Engagement and Social Sentiment Tools

This next batch of tools will help you to see how your competitors are building engagement and how their key audiences feel about them.
26. Commun.it is best known as a free tool for building engagement on your own Twitter account. Why not plug in the URL of your top competitor to see how that company is performing online?
27. Fanpage Karma allows you to input the URL of any Facebook fan page and assess the number of fans, growth, and a range of other performance metrics. There’s a 14-day free trial of additional features, and the premium package includes Twitter monitoring, too.
28. Login with your Twitter account and you can analyze any profile’s followers for free with Followerwonk. There’s a wealth of detail available on the authority of followers, recent tweets, bios and locations, enabling you to build a comprehensive picture of your competitor’s Twitter presence.
29. Open Social Buzz provides real time search of Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Plug in your competitor’s name and see how much social prominence they have.

A Mixed Bag

There are a few tools that don’t fit in any of the categories above, which can provide additional insight into what your competitors are doing.
30. BuiltWith investigates the technology behind your competitors’ sites, covering servers, content management, underlying technology, analytics, advertising, and much more.
31. Marketing Grader is a free HubSpot tool that assesses websites in terms of blogging, social media, SEO, lead generation, and mobile, giving an overall score. It’s a good way to see what your competitors are getting right, and wrong
32. Simply Measured rolls many of the tools on our list into one, including analysis of influencers, brands, trends, traffic, conversions, competitors, and more. It covers all the main social media channels with 35 different reports. The basic plans start at $500 per month, though there are free reports available for your own accounts.
33. The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive lets you see how your competitors’ pages looked in the past. You never know, you might learn something about how website changes improved conversions.
34. Check out your competitors’ direct mail, email, and social campaigns with Who’s Mailing What. It’s a good way to keep track of trends, get ideas, and see what the competition is up to. This tool costs $747 per year.

Final Thoughts: Other Ways to Spy on the Competition

Don’t forget that there are three more ways you can find out what your competitors are doing, and they are all free.
35. Follow them on social media, add them to a list or interest group, and track what they are talking about.
36. Subscribe to their blogs so you can see what kind of content they are covering and check out announcements of forthcoming launches.
37. Sign up for their newsletter, which is hands-down the best way to see how they are targeting your ideal customers.

What other great tools have you discovered for tracking the competition?

About the Author: Chris is the CEO of TOFU Marketing, an internet marketing agency that helps startup companies hack their growth. You can request a free consultation with him here.

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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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AdWords Keyword Planner tool - How to Use

Last month, Google quietly began rolling out the AdWords Keyword Planner to select AdWords accounts last month. In typical AdWords fashion, one of the biggest overhauls of the Google Keyword Tool ever went almost unnoticed!

This new keyword tool combines elements of two existing keyword tools, the Google Keyword Tool and the AdWords Traffic Estimator, adding a more structured and integrated workflow as well as all sorts of new bells and whistles.
If you’ve ever used the Google Keyword Tool and/or AdWords Traffic Estimator in the past, take note here – the new Keyword Planner will most certainly replace both tools in the near future, and your workflow will undoubtedly change as a result.

What’s A Keyword Planner, Anyway?

The Keyword Planner is a more focused version of the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator tool, and the focus is on doing one thing only: to make it easier for advertisers to get through the process of creating new ad groups and ad campaigns, which is the key to getting your PPC accounts off to a good start.
It differs from the existing Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator tools in that the old tools were more general purpose, unstructured tools. They could be used for just about anything, including Keyword Research for SEO. This new tool, on the other hand, is more like an ultimate AdWords campaign building workshop.
The Keyword Planner has a “wizard” type interface. The first step in the process is to determine how you’re going to go about creating your ad campaigns and ad groups. You’re asked to pick one of 3 possible paths:

• Search for Keyword and Ad Group Ideas
• Enter or Upload Keywords to get Estimates
• Multiply keyword lists to get Estimates

Here’s what this looks like in AdWords:

Searching For Keyword & Ad Group Ideas

Most of the time when creating a new campaign in AdWords, you’ll need to rely on Google to provide you with keyword suggestions to pick from. Therefore, the primary flow through the Keyword Planner is to “Search for keyword and ad group ideas.”
Clicking on that option whisks you off to the next stage of the Keyword Planner, which provides a robust keyword workbench for researching and picking keywords to add to your AdWords account, illustrated below:

Using this interface, the Keyword Planner lets you brainstorm keywords using any or all of the following three methods:

• By Keyword:  you can type in a word or phrase relevant to your business
• By Landing Page: by entering a landing page on your site (or any competitor’s webpages, for that matter), the Keyword Planner will scan and infer keywords that are relevant to those pages
• By Product Category: you can select from one of thousands of pre-defined keyword categories

Filtering Keywords From Your Keyword Plan

Additionally, the Keyword Planner provides robust filtering capabilities so you can be super picky with what keywords you choose to add to your PPC account. For example, you can filter keywords based on the following ways:

• Average CPC: include or exclude keywords that fall above or below a desired Cost Per Click
• Estimated Search Volume: include or exclude keywords that fall above or below a desired monthly search volume
• Keyword Competition: you can narrow your list based on estimated advertiser competition
• Exclude Keywords Already In Your Account:  the Keyword Planner can automatically exclude keywords that are already in your own AdWords account to avoid having duplicate keywords
• Filter by Keyword: you can specify to include or exclude keywords containing specific terms

Setting Targeting Parameters

Because keyword research requires analyzing keyword statistics in order to determine whether or not a given keyword makes sense for your business, Google lets you customize the keyword stats and performance estimates so that they’re relevant to your campaigns. This means they let you specify targeting parameters such as language, country and search network.

List View Vs. Grouped View

One nice feature is the ability to view keywords in the Keyword Planner that appear either in list view or in grouped view – this is analogous to the concept of keyword niches and keyword lists.

Your “Keyword Plan”

As you discover promising terms looking at individual keywords or keyword groupings, you have the ability to add them to “Your Plan,” which is a temporary storage area for saving interesting-looking keywords and keyword groupings for later.
The Keyword Planner maintains state for the duration of your session – keywords that you add to “Your Plan” are saved while you’re in the process of looking for keywords.
This is a nice change — previously, when using the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator separately, there was a bit of a disjointed workflow where you had to save the results of the Google Keyword Tool, then open the file and copy/paste it as input to the AdWords Traffic Estimator. These two separate processes are now integrated into a single, seamless one.
When you’re done picking keywords and adding them into “Your Plan,” click on the Get Estimates and Review Plan button.

Getting Estimates & Reviewing Your Plan

The next stage of the Keyword Plan process involves setting a keyword bid and daily budget for your portfolio of keywords and keyword groupings.
Since keyword volume and CPC bid estimates are based on your budget, bid, location and other competitive factors, you’ll need to provide Google with some information in order to customize your estimates.
For example, you could enter a bid of $50 and a daily budget of $2,000.00 and click on the Get Detailed Estimates button — the Keyword Planner will then generate daily estimates for Clicks, Impressions, Average ad position and costs, as shown below:

Once finalized, you can download your detailed keyword plan in a variety of different formats, such as Excel or AdWords Editor CSV, as shown below:

Enter Or Upload Your Own Keyword List

Another way of running though the Keyword Plan process is to start using your own keyword list. Sometimes, when creating a new campaigns, you may be fortunate enough to already be sitting on a treasure trove of keyword data (for example, several years of Web analytics data, including valuable keyword referral data).
If you’re in this enviable position, it may make sense to start the campaign creation process using your own keyword list rather than the generic keyword suggestions you get from the Keyword Suggestion Tool.  Here’s what that looks like:

When you press the Get Estimates button, you’ll be taken through the rest of the Keyword Plan process as described above — the only difference is that you’ll be looking at your own keyword list rather than the generic keywords suggested via the Google Keyword Tool.

Multiplying Keyword Lists Using Keyword Planner

A third and final way to work thorough the Keyword Planner is to mash-up and multiply keyword lists. For example, you might want to multiply a bunch of names of products with colors and word modifiers to come up with every imaginable keyword permutations, as shown below:

Note that you can have up to three lists to mash up, and clicking on the Get Estimates button brings you to the next stage of the Keyword Planner. The only difference between this and the other two methods is that you’ll be looking at your own keyword list based on the mash-up of the lists you provided.
I personally don’t like this option very much because your mashed-up keyword lists may bear little or no resemblance to how people naturally search for those words, though perhaps you could use this method if you absolutely don’t want to miss any possible keyword permutation.

Summary

The new Keyword Planner tool supports various workflows for building ad groups and campaigns either starting from scratch, or based on your existing lists, and provides more cohesive user experience by integrating the keyword selection, grouping, analysis and filtering aspects of the keyword selection workflow.
If you’re lucky, you can find the Keyword Planner tool in your AdWords account today. According to my contacts at Google, as of two weeks ago, it was enabled in only 5% of accounts. At that time, it took me 67 tries to finally find an account with the Keyword Planner; but as of today, I’m finding it in roughly one out of every 5 accounts. It appears that Google is opening up Keyword Planner access to a greater number of accounts over time, so hopefully you’ll see it in your account soon!

By The Author: Larry Kim
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List of Tools for PPC Advertising

Ultimate list of PPC advertising tools

The Internet is a killer place to advertise. Since 2006, the percentage of online advertising spend has grown from 6% to 13.3% of total media expense. That’s $16.9 billion to $42 billion.

There’s good reason for that. Unlike traditional advertising channels, online advertising is less expensive, far faster to market and easy to measure. Good news for you if you’re in the hot seat for getting the boss or client results. But there’s a hitch: without the right tools, you can find yourself way over your head and way over your budget.

Here’s a peek at the tools that can help you manage a successful online advertising campaign. Today’s list is limited to PPC advertising tools. Tomorrow, we’ll have an ultimate list of social media advertising tools. And soon, we’ll circle back around with display and ad network advertising tools.

Search engine PPC tools

There are few online advertising tools that can put you in front of an audience that rivals a small nation in size. But build an effective campaign with PPC on a search engine and you’ll accomplish just that. Roll that campaign across multiple search engines and in no time you’ll be a little online ad mogul.

• Google AdWords
  With nearly 65% of search traffic, Google AdWords will get your text ads out in front of the lion’s share of search traffic. But it’s not cheap. A Sponsored Link is a coveted ad position that will drive traffic, but comes with a hefty price, too.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing
  Out of the big three search engines, Yahoo! has the smallest market share at 14%. But it’s still a percentage you don’t want to ignore: it has the highest search success rate at 81.14%.
• Bing AdCenter
  With two powerhouse search engines (Yahoo! and Bing) under one platform, you can interact with over 30% of search traffic, traffic that’s supposed to be known for buying, not just browsing. Sweet keyword tool.”If you do not diversify your paid search campaigns beyond Google AdWords, you’re not only missing the boat—but losing your company money via inaction.”—Loren Baker
• Baidu Phoenix Next
  Baidu is China’s No. 1 search engine, with 75.9% of the market share in Q2 of 2011. (In comparison, Google China had about 18% of the market share during the same period.) Its advertising models and networks are similar to Google’s, but there are significant differences. Before you jump into Baidu PPC advertising, read up from experts like Gordon Choi and those at China Internet Watch.
• Yandex.Direct
  If you want to buy PPC ads for Russian audiences, add Yandex to the list—CTR is better than Google.ru. There are some good descriptions of the tools in English, including anEnglish-language help center, but you’ll still want to read from experts like those at RussianSearchTips.com.

Google AdWords tools

Google AdWords allows you to display your ads on Google, and across its advertising network, at the moment people are searching for your product. The following tools help you leverage this powerful platform.

• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
  When you want to find out what related word searches your ad will show on, use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Free and dead simple to use.
• Google AdWords Traffic Estimator
  Google will give you rough estimates on clicks and bid prices for your ads at the top position. Helpful for planning your budget. Free.
• Conversion Optimizer
  Google dishes out yet another AdWords tool, this time to help you achieve double-digit conversions by bidding on your CPA (cost-per-acquisition). Free, but to be eligible, campaigns must have had 15 conversions in the last 30 days.
• AdWord Accelerator
  For a one-year subscription at $299, the AdWord Accelerator will give you access to tools like the keyword basket, estimates and competition tracking in one convenient suite.
• Google AdWords Manager
  Raven debuted its AdWords management and reporting tools a couple of months ago. You can create AdWords campaigns, adjust budgets, pause or start campaigns in bulk, manage multiple accounts, set extensions and more. Reporting AdWords campaigns is extremely simple. $99/month for a Pro account, which gives you access to all the SEO, social media and PPC tools in the platform.
• AdWords Wrapper
  Enter a list of keyword phrases into the Google AdWords Wrapper, click “Wrap Keywords” and bingo: you’ve got a combination of Broad, Phrase and Exact Match keywords, a combination of Phrase and Exact Match keyword, Phrase Match only keywords and Exact Match only keywords. Free.
• Keyword Wrapper Another free tool that lets you create various combinations of your keywords. @markkennedysem says this about their service. “SEOM’s keyword wrapper is a free tool for PPC campaign managers to wrap keywords in [exact], “phrase,” and +Broad +Match +Modified match types.”
• AdGrenade
  A super fast, super efficient way to expand your keyword list, write ads for each keyword and track each core keyword. In just six seconds. One time cost of $147.
• AdWords Editor
  Free Google application to download your AdWords account, update your campaigns with the editing tools and then upload your changes. A must.
• Negative Keywords Maker
  Negative keywords allow you to filter out unwanted impressions, reduce your CPC and increase ROI. But they can be a pain to create. Until now. Insert the minus sign “-” in front of keywords with one click. Free.
• AdWords Insights
  Uncover poorly performing keywords and landing pages with low Quality Scores in bulkwith this Raven tool. Fix problems to save money and increase conversions. $99/month for a Raven Pro account, which gives you access to all the SEO, social media and PPC tools in the platform.
• Keyword Niche Finder
  If you want to find profitable keyword niches that you can dominate, then use this free tool. You can start with general terms like “auto” or “sports” and refine until you find that keyword phrase or two no one knows about.

PPC budgeting tools

Pay-per-click advertising is probably the fastest way to dominate search engine rankings. But it can also be the most expensive. The following tools will help you manage, budget and succeed at the PPC game without breaking the bank.

• Pay Per Click Universe
  A free resource dedicated to provide unbiased information to the small-to-medium sized business owner interested in exploring the world of PPC advertising.
• Acquisio
  If you run multi-channel advertisements across Search, Social and Display networks, you have no shortage in the amount of data you collect. But data means nothing if you don’t turn it into action. With Acquisio, you get one integrated platform to purchase, track, manage and optimize all your marketing efforts.
• CPC ROI Calculator
  Want a tool that figures out how you can profitably pay for your ads? This cost-per-click ROI calculator from SEOBook is just the ticket. Free.
• PPC Bid Max
  Software solution that automatically manages your PPC campaigns. Perfect for the time-starved one-man shop. Standard edition starts at $96.
• PPC G-Test Calculator
  This free tool allows you to predict the winner out of two competing ads, thus allowing you to save money while you optimize your ads.
• Taguchi-based Ad Optimizer
  Want to speed up the testing process AND test up to 15 elements in your ads at a time? Then this free tool is what you need. It will blow your mind. In a good way.
• Wordstream
  Wordstream touts its new Pause Keyword Alerts, weekly updates that tell you the keywords to pause for better campaign performance. Monthly plans for its PPC tools start at $299.

Competitive PPC analysis tools

Knowing what your competitors are doing in the online advertising space is a must if you want to dominate. These tools will help you pay attention to their campaigns and respond accordingly.

• Spyfu
  The concept is simple: when you spy on your competitor’s AdWords campaigns you are bound to find AND capture profitable opportunities. Spyfu allows you to do this for $79 a month.
• PPC Web Spy
  Another competitive analysis too—this time free. Uncover the Google AdWords keywords your competitors are using with Brad Cullen’s downloadable PPC tool.
• My Ads Advertising
  In minutes you can build and customize ads, reach broad audiences or target your customers and track and monitor your ad to see how it is performing with flexible budgets and no minimum bid.
• iSpionage
  Simply enter any domain for rich results on PPC competitors. Test it for free right from the home page, or sign up for a plan starting at $59 for more tools.
• SEMRush
  SEMRush offers deep competitive intelligence for Google AdWords. Plans begin at $69 a month (or access SEMRush data from within Raven at no added cost.)

Your turn

What am I missing? Are there any online advertising tools out there that you think a website owner shouldn’t be caught dead without? Share your thoughts in the comments. Brutal and all.

By - Demian Farnworth

Ultimate list of Ultimate lists

• Ultimate list of conversion optimization tools
• Ultimate list of blogging tools for pros
• Ultimate list of social media advertising tools
• Ultimate list of online public relations tools
• Ultimate list of online content readability tests
• Ultimate list of Internet marketing humor sites
• Ultimate list of PPC bid management solutions

Source:  http://raventools.com/blog/

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