PPC Software & Tracking Software

Pay per click marketing requires you to pay for each click so it is important that you properly target your ads and track and measure each click.

PPC Software

• Google AdWords Editor - edit your AdWords campaigns offline
• Google Traffic Estimator - estimate the cost of traffic
• Keyword List Generator - Free tool helps you build a keyword list using various descriptive words in patters, such as:
  • big, small, fat;
  • green, red, blue;
  • widget, widgets, wid gets;
  • MicroSoft Excel also generates keyword lists using the CONCATENATE function.
• Keyword List Cleaner - clean up your keyword lists
• Microsoft Ad Intelligence - lots of cool PPC data from Microsoft
• Tracking202 - free PPC tracking software suite
• See also: our Keyword Research Tools section

Tracking Software

Google AdWords and Overture include their own pay per click tracking software inside their pay per click products. Many marketers (especially large ones) are not interested in sending their conversion data back to the search engines though.

Overture recently created a premium tracking service (by the name of Overture Search Optimizer) and has many approved third party bid management software vendors which can help you improve your ROI or profit by controlling your PPC accounts at the price per action level vice price per click level.

Log file analyzers can also help you watch your traffic patterns. ClickTracks and WebTrends are two of the more popular log file analyzers.

Rank Checking Software

I do not use rank checking software frequently other than to monitor changes in search engine algorithms by monitoring many different sites in different industries. There are a few free, quick, and interesting ranking tools I recommend and enjoy using.

• Thumbshots Ranking Tool - Tool allows you to compare the search results between different search engines for various keywords. Frequently this tool is down due to high traffic, but it is interesting and useful when it is working.
• Firefox Rank Checker Tool - This Firefox extension tracks your keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft over time.