The 8 Best PPC Tools According to Agency Experts

PPC campaigns are at the heart of many agency's work for clients, but they're not always easy to manage. From finding relevant terms to target, to managing multiple ad groups and channels, to optimizing ad spend, there are a lot of moving parts. That's why there are a ton of PPC tools available to support your PPC campaign management efforts—so many, in fact, that it's hard to know which ones you really need.

We've covered all the top PPC tools on the market to help you pinpoint the ones that will be most useful for your agency. Keep reading to learn more about the options available and find the right fit for your team.

What Are PPC Tools and Why Should Agencies Use Them?

A pay-per-click (PPC) tool is a digital platform that helps users manage, optimize, and analyze pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns across multiple platforms. These tools help you create ad campaigns, select relevant keywords, set bids, and track each PPC campaign's success. Implementing a PPC tool makes a big difference in the efficiency and impact of your agency’s PPC advertising.

Some of the core features of PPC software are bulk editing, keyword suggestions, and multi-platform management, which speed up ad creation. They also provide PPC analysis tools to help you monitor key PPC performance metrics and optimize campaigns accordingly. So it's safe to say these platforms are a must-have for agencies managing several clients, platforms, and campaigns at a time.

PPC campaigns allow us to target highly specific audiences from prospecting to reconnecting with loyal customers. It is a vital touchpoint for us to deliver our marketing message.

Tim Akers, Founder, Akers Digital 

Challenges of Running PPC Campaigns for Clients

Sure, a PPC tool may offer a host of benefits for anyone running PPC marketing campaigns—but why are they especially useful for agencies? Let's dig into some of the specific challenges that come up when you're managing pay per click advertising for multiple clients:

• Managing Multiple Campaigns Across Platforms: Even running a single client’s PPC ads across Google Ads, Amazon, and social media is a complex task. Doing this for several clients while keeping messaging, targeting, visuals, and budgets straight quickly becomes a nightmare.

• Bid Optimization: Bid management is crucial for maximizing the ROI of PPC marketing. However, managing bid adjustments to stay competitive while accounting for different bidding algorithms and rules across platforms—not to mention multiple client budgets—is time consuming and tricky.

• Budgeting and Cost Control: Every client's ad budget needs to be carefully accounted for, ensuring you don't overspend or end up with wasted ad spend. Monitoring ad spending and sticking to each client's budget is essential, but it takes time and attention to detail.

• Keyword Management: Conducting keyword research, selecting the best keywords, managing negative keywords, and optimizing ad groups requires a thorough understanding of your clients' advertising strategy (and their competitors' strategies).

• Tracking and Reporting: Delivering detailed analytics and actionable insights to clients is one of the most effective ways of demonstrating your agency's value, but gathering, analyzing, and presenting that data isn't always easy.

The biggest challenge of PPC ROI reporting is ensuring the client's understanding of PPC metrics while also aligning their expectations of performance. Explaining the ROI can be challenging because it isn't as simple as equating ROI to ad spend—the agency's impact extends beyond direct advertising efforts to some factors that are immeasurable, like our expertise in branding, market research, competitor analysis, and customer journey mapping.

Steph Busia, Account Manager, Moxie Tonic, LLC 

The good news is that pay per click tools are designed to alleviate common challenges related to PPC ad management. In fact, some are even designed with the unique needs of agencies at the forefront. Curious which tools made the list? Read on to learn our top choices.

The Top 8 PPC Tools for Marketing Agencies

Clearly, implementing a PPC tool has a big impact on your agency's ability to manage client campaigns. So how do you go about picking one? With so many options on the market, it's easy to get overwhelmed by flashy features, endless integrations, and complicated pricing structures.

Don't worry, we've rounded up the best of the best and covered the most helpful details to inform your selection. Each review includes information about the tool's features, integrations, and pricing. Check out our top 8 picks, and find the best PPC tool for your agency:

1. AgencyAnalytics

You guessed it, that's us! AgencyAnalytics is a reporting platform built specifically for marketing agencies. It has tools to help you track, analyze, and report on all types of digital advertising and marketing efforts for clients, including PPC campaigns, all in a comprehensive and customizable client dashboard.

The new multi-client dashboard feature lets you track all of your PPC advertising results in a single place, making it easier for your team to spot trends, identify issues, and make adjustments across multiple clients. This is a great way to tap into the big-picture insights of your agency's work, and apply them to optimize campaign performance for several clients at once.

With over 80 integrations, including Google Ads, Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, and more, it's easy to pull data from several PPC marketing tools into a centralized platform for analysis and reporting. Automated, scheduled reports alleviate your team's reporting workload and ensure clients are updated regularly with valuable insights on their campaign's performance.

The AgencyAnalytics platform plans start at just $$59 per month. Want to take it for a test run? Try AgencyAnalytics free for 14 days!

2. Semrush

Semrush is a digital marketing and advertising research tool that focuses on SEO and PPC optimization. One of its strengths is its competitor analysis features, which let you check out competitors' PPC ad copy and landing pages. This is especially helpful if you're developing a new advertising strategy for a client and want to evaluate their competitors' strategies.

It also has a PPC keyword research tool that helps you build a list of cost-effective keywords for client advertising. The software's keyword tools also help with negative keyword optimization and sourcing new keywords in consideration of key metrics like cost per click (CPC) and search volume.

Semrush integrates with popular platforms like SurferSEO and Wix, and connects with AgencyAnalytics for your agency reporting needs. It also offers an API to build custom integrations with. The software costs $139.95 per month for the Pro plan, $249.95 per month for the Guru plan, and $499.95 per month for the Enterprise plan. A 7-day free trial available to explore its features.

3. Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Manager is a go-to ad management platform that's been around for over a decade since its initial release in 2010. It's a tried-and-true tool for managing your Google ads, including paid search and pay per click ad formats. The platform boasts ad creation, revenue management, analytics, and security features. If you're working with clients in the Google ecosystem (Google Ads, Google Analytics, etc.), it's a helpful addition to your agency's tech stack.

The platform has tools to help your team create various PPC ad formats and address your client's target audience effectively. Its advanced filters let you pinpoint a target audience by demographics, interests, and behaviors. Advertising policies, publisher controls, and ad reviews are all also available to help your agency stay within advertising privacy and safety parameters, safeguarding both your team and your clients.

We monitor Google Ads performance on a daily basis, focussing on the clients KPI's. Usually, within our pool of clients, this is conversions and/or cost per conversion.

Sam Yielder, Paid Media Manager, Squidgy

In addition to connectors with other Google products, Google Ad Manager has an API to build custom integrations as needed. Pricing is not made public, but a custom quote is available for prospective buyers.

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that helps businesses track and analyze website traffic, user behavior, and marketing performance. Its core functionality is to track user behavior across websites, offering insights into metrics like bounce rates, session duration, and conversion paths. Audience segmentation lets you dig deeper into the data to understand various user groups. These insights help your agency identify which ads and landing pages perform best, informing your PPC strategies for clients.

Another useful feature is the ability to identify which keywords drive the most valuable traffic to client websites. This allows your team to select more relevant keywords for PPC ads and optimize client ad copy and messaging. Additionally, the platform’s attribution modeling feature lets you map how different marketing channels, including PPC, contribute to conversions for your clients.

Google Analytics integrates with other Google products like Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, and Google Data Studio. An API is also available for custom integrations. The platform is free, making it accessible if your agency is on a limited budget. For larger businesses with more complex needs, Google offers Analytics 360, a premium version with advanced features and support with custom pricing.

5. Adform

Adform is an integrated advertising platform for managing and optimizing digital ad campaigns across multiple channels. The software combines data management, creative development, and ad serving capabilities. Its creative tools allow your agency to develop and deploy dynamic ads, and then customize them in real-time to improve engagement and conversion rates.

Adform also enables your agency to buy digital advertising inventory across various channels, including display, mobile, video, and native. This feature allows for precise targeting and real-time bidding, ensuring client PPC ads reach the right audience at the right time. The software's data collection and analytics capabilities help your team create more personalized PPC ads for clients.

Adform integrates with third-party platforms including Adobe Analytics and social media channels, and offers an API for building custom integrations. While pricing is not public, personalized demos and quotes are available upon request.

6. AdRoll

AdRoll is a marketing platform designed for both in-house teams and agencies to manage and optimize digital advertising campaigns. The platform has a strong focus on PPC management and retargeting, and has tools to create, manage, and measure ad campaigns across multiple channels.

What really stands out about Adroll are its retargeting capabilities, which allow your agency to re-engage users who have previously interacted with your clients’ websites or ads. This feature helps improve conversion rates by keeping your clients' brand top-of-mind for potential customers, including ones who have clicked on a PPC ad in the past.

AdRoll integrates with dozens of popular ecommerce, marketing, and social media platforms including Shopify, TikTok, HubSpot, and more. Plus, an API is available if you need to build a custom connector. Agencies need to contact Adroll directly for custom pricing.

7. Unbounce

Unbounce is a landing page builder and conversion optimization platform. It offers tools to create high-converting landing pages with a simple drag-and-drop builder, no coding skills required. These landing pages help your agency improve conversion rates of the PPC campaigns you set up for clients. And since–according to our most recent AgencyAnalytics Marketing Agency Benchmarks Survey–conversion metrics tend to be what clients care about most, Unbounce is an invaluable tool for tracking PPC success.

One of Unbounce's specialized features is Smart Traffic, an AI-powered tool that automatically directs visitors to the landing page variant most likely to convert based on their behavior. This helps your agency significantly boost PPC ad performance for your clients. Unbounce also offers A/B testing capabilities to test-run different landing page setups to see how they perform, helping to reduce wasted ad spend.

Unbounce has an API to build custom integrations with. Four pricing tiers are available ranging from $99 to $649 per month, so there are lots of options depending on your agency's needs. All plans also have a discounted rate when you opt for annual billing, and a 14-day free trial is available.

8. In-Platform PPC Management Tools

Each third-party PPC software offers its own unique value for your agency, but many advertising platforms also have their own PPC management features built in. While the features tend to be a bit more basic than what your agency might need, here’s a look at some of the most popular in-platform tools:

• Google Ads: Google’s PPC platform offers advanced keyword targeting, bidding strategies, and a wide range of ad formats, including paid search campaigns, display, shopping, and video ads. Its robust analytics tools also help optimize a Google Ads account based on real-time performance insights.

• Facebook Ads: Facebook’s PPC tools let you target specific audiences, set bid strategies, and track campaign performance across various ad formats, including video and carousel ads.

• LinkedIn Ads: LinkedIn provides tools for precise audience targeting based on job titles, industries, and company size, making it ideal for reaching professional audiences.

• TikTok Ads: TikTok’s PPC tools offer creative and engaging ad formats, including in-feed ads and branded hashtag challenges, designed to capture the attention of its highly active user base.

• YouTube Ads: YouTube's video ad campaigns (part of the Google Ad netwokr) have options to target specific demographics and interests, and to retarget viewers who have engaged with your clients’ content before.

• Snapchat Ads: Snapchat offers PPC tools that focus on immersive ad formats like Snap Ads and Sponsored Lenses, catering to a younger audience with a preference for interactive content.

• Amazon Ads: Amazon PPC campaigns are built around its marketplace, with features like Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to drive sales directly on the platform.

• Instagram Ads: Instagram, integrated with Facebook’s ad platform, provides PPC tools that allow for campaigns using photos, videos, and carousel ads to engage users in their feeds.

• Microsoft (Bing) Ads: Microsoft’s PPC tools offer keyword targeting and audience insights, letting you to run paid search ad campaigns on Bing, Yahoo, and other partner sites.

These native PPC tools are useful, but only up to a point. If your agency is working within each advertising platform, your team will still be jumping between systems and trying to make sense of multiple clients' campaigns at once. It gets complicated quickly, especially when it comes time for reporting and analyzing campaign and ad performance.

How to Track PPC Results Across Multiple Clients in AgencyAnalytics

Tracking PPC performance across multiple clients and various platforms quickly goes from tricky to treacherous. Yet, your team needs to be able to show your clients the results of their work. Reporting on performance is an essential part of the campaign management process, because it uncovers actionable insights for optimization and helps you connect your agency's efforts with your client's bottom line.

AgencyAnalytics pulls data from across your agency's tech stack, allowing you to monitor and report on all your PPC campaigns from a single, unified dashboard. A customized PPC dashboard offers a bird’s eye view to spot, identify issues, and make timely adjustments to improve the performance of PPC campaigns in real-time.

Meanwhile, the ready-made PPC report template covers all the most important metrics your clients will want to see. Create automated scheduling on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, alleviating reporting as a task for your team. Try AgencyAnalytics free for 14 days!

Know how your metrics are created. Each platform will use slightly different metrics or calculate them in different ways. For example, a Purchase in Meta is different from a Conversion in Google Ads. Which is different from All Conversions (Google Ads) and Web Purchases (Meta).

Tim Akers, Founder, Akers Digital 

The Right Toolkit Unlocks Your Agency's Success

Your clients rely on you to drive results, and the right tools make all the difference in delivering top-notch outcomes. Whether it’s streamlining your reporting process with AgencyAnalytics, digging into competitive insights with Semrush, or optimizing ad placements through Google Ad Manager, the tools you choose should align with your agency's goals and client needs. With the right toolkit in hand, your agency is not just managing campaigns—it's driving real success, one click at a time.