The 6 Best PPC Tools for Your Goals, Budget, and Workflow

Running PPC campaigns is not easy. We’re always switching between dashboards, fixing ads, and handling requests from clients who want quick updates.

That’s why we don’t just need tools with features, we need tools that help us save time and work better.

In this guide, we’ve made a list of the best PPC tools used by many marketers. Each tool is listed based on what it’s best for.

What’s the goal?

To help you quickly find a tool that fits your way of working and skip the ones that don’t.

What Are the Best PPC Tools?

1. Semrush PPC Advertising Toolkit

Best for managing everything in one place

If you’re tired of jumping between different tools just to run your paid search campaigns, Semrush’s PPC Toolkit is a great choice.

It handles everything—from finding keywords to tracking your competition. It’s perfect when you’re dealing with a lot of data and need answers fast. Like when you start working with a new client or fixing a messy ad account.

Find High-Value PPC Keywords Fast

Doing keyword research shouldn’t take your whole day. Semrush makes it easier.

Start with the Keyword Magic Tool.

Just type a simple word like “indoor planters.”

In seconds, you’ll see many related keywords, along with their cost and how many people search for them.

This helps you quickly find the best keywords for your budget.

Want to know what your competitors are doing? Use the Keyword Gap tool.

Let’s say you work on ads for plantologyusa.com. Add some competitor sites—like mygardyn.com and thesill.com. Semrush shows you the keywords they use, but you don’t. It also shows where they
rank better than you.

Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ PPC Strategy

Want to see how much your competitors are spending on ads? Use the Advertising Research Tool in Semrush. Just type in their website.
For example, if you work on PPC for Toolstation, you might want to check Screwfix.

Type “screwfix.com” and you’ll instantly see:

• Their top paid keywords
• The pages those ads go to
• Other websites bidding on the same keywords
• A timeline of their ad activity

This timeline is very useful. If you see that they spend more every April, it might be because of a seasonal sale or demand. You can plan to launch your ads earlier—or use cheaper, related keywords that still get results.

See What Ads Your Competitors Are Running

You don’t need to guess what kind of ad text your competitors use. Just go to the Ads Copies tab under Advertising Research. You’ll find many old ads, the keywords that showed them, and even the ad copy.

Take a close look at what they offer. Do they talk about free shipping? Fast delivery? A limited-time discount?

You’ll start to see patterns in how they build trust and get people to click. This can help you improve your own ads. Yes, AI tools can now write ad copy. But real ads that have already worked in the market teach us even more. Especially if they’ve been running for a long time.

2. SpyFu

Best for checking your competitor. SpyFu has been around for a long time. It’s built around one simple question:“What are your competitors doing, and is it working?”

With data from up to 15 years ago, SpyFu gives us a full picture of what’s happening in paid search. This helps us see what’s working well for others—so we can plan smarter campaigns without guessing.

Get Detailed Info About Your Competitors’ Ads

SpyFu’s PPC Research Tool shows what our competitors are doing with their paid ads. All we need is their website.

Let’s say we’re watching Salesforce. Just type in their site and SpyFu will show:

• The keywords they’re using
• How many clicks they get and what they might be spending
• The different ad versions they run
• The landing pages connected to each ad

This helps us understand what’s working in our market. If Salesforce keeps running ads for “customer service apps” for a long time, it means that keyword works well.

With this info, we can build campaigns using tested keywords. We can also improve our own ad messages by seeing how they’re writing theirs.

Track Many Competitors at Once

Checking one competitor at a time can take too long. And it’s easy to miss trends.

SpyFu’s PPC Kombat tool makes it easier. Just type in a few competitor websites. SpyFu then shows a side-by-side view.

Let’s say we run ads for Monday.com.

Add salesforce.com, pipedrive.com, and zoho.com to Kombat, and you’ll see:

• A Venn diagram showing shared and unique keywords
• “Core Keywords” that all of them are using
• “Wasted Keywords” — these are ones we use but no one else does

This helps us find gaps in our keyword list. And shows where we might be spending money with little return.

It’s super helpful if we manage client accounts. This way, we can give fast, smart reports that show we really know what we’re doing.

3. Optmyzr

Best for easy PPC automation and tracking at a large scale. Optmyzr is the tool we use when we want to grow our campaigns without adding more work. It helps us manage Google, Microsoft, and

Amazon Ads using automation. If we often spend time fixing the same problems or checking budgets every day, Optmyzr can help.

It lets us set up automatic checks, alerts, and fixes. That means we can stop doing the boring, repeated tasks. And spend more time on things that really matter.

Let the Tool Do the Repeated Work

With Optmyzr, we can stop doing tasks that a machine can do faster. We can use the Rule Engine to set up simple “if this, then do that” rules. For example, we can pause ads that are not working well. We can get alerts if our ad spend goes up suddenly. We can also clean up low-performing ads or improve ad groups for better results.

The Rule Engine can do many things, but we need to set it up ourselves. If we know what rules we want, the tool can help us make smart changes quickly. This is very useful when we are managing big accounts and want to act fast to protect our budget and performance.

Understand Why Performance Dropped

When ad results go down, we always ask: “Why did this happen?” Instead of guessing or checking many reports, Optmyzr’s PPC Investigator gives us a clear view. We just choose a main goal like “Conversions” or “ROAS.” Then we pick two time periods to compare — like this month vs. last month.

The tool shows us how other numbers changed at the same time. Maybe clicks went up, but our budget went down. Now we know the full story. We can stop guessing and start fixing the real issue faster. This makes it much easier to find out what’s really going on with our ads.

4. Adalysis

Best for ready-to-use ad tracking and smart alerts. Adalysis helps us keep our PPC campaigns in good shape. It works with Google and Microsoft Ads and has over 100 checks built in. If something goes wrong, it sends alerts right away. It also tells us what to fix and how to fix it.

This is great for teams that already have working campaigns and just want a tool to help monitor them.

Get Alerts When Things Go Wrong

Adalysis checks our campaigns all the time. If something is off, it lets us know immediately.

We can get alerts for things like:

• Cost per conversion going too high
• Conversions dropping
• Budgets getting used up too early
• Campaigns losing views

That means we can catch problems early. We won’t be surprised by bad performance that we could have fixed days ago. We get the chance to act fast and save our results.

Let the Tool Handle Budgets

Changing budgets across many campaigns by hand takes a lot of time. And one small mistake can mess up the whole plan. Adalysis gives us two options to manage budgets:

• Manual control with alerts
• Full automation based on goals

With manual control, we can set spend limits and track progress on a simple dashboard. It uses colors to show if we’re spending too much, too little, or just right. We can also set alerts or pause campaigns if the spend goes past our limit. Want a hands-off approach? Use Full Automation — Adalysis will adjust budgets on its own. It works based on what matters most to us, like more conversions or lower costs.

5. Google Looker Studio

Best for showing and sharing ad reports easily. If we run ads on many platforms, reporting can take a lot of time. Google Looker Studio helps us build dashboards using data from Google Ads, GA4, Search Console, BigQuery, Google Sheets, and more.

See the Full PPC Picture

Google Looker Studio is great at turning boring numbers into clear charts and graphs. This means we don’t need to send long spreadsheets anymore. Instead, we can show reports that tell a simple story.

We can add data from Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Facebook Ads using connectors. We can also include info from Google Analytics, our CRM, online store, or email tools. So we can see everything about our ad campaigns in one place. And we can understand how ads affect the full customer journey.

Create Shareable, Client-Ready Reports in Minutes

Whether we work alone, in an agency, or in a company, people always want to “see the numbers.” Google Looker Studio helps us make nice reports from Google Ads in just a few minutes. These reports are easy to understand and look good when shared with clients or teams.

6. ChatGPT:

Best for writing ad copy and checking campaign ideas. ChatGPT is now a helpful tool for many people running ads.We can use it to come up with headlines, write ads, fix weak copy, and even review landing pages. But it only works well if we give it a good prompt. Once we learn how to talk, it becomes very useful.

Generate Creative Ad Copy Faster

Need fresh ad ideas? ChatGPT can give us many ad lines in seconds.

We can ask it to:

• Write new ad versions
• Rewrite weak ads in a better tone
• Try new CTAs or angles

It gets even better if we upload our brand info. With the Pro Plan, we can feed it our tone guide, product details, target audience, and offers.

Break Down Competitor Messaging for Strategic Insights

ChatGPT can also help us understand our competitors.

Here’s how we do it:

• Find a competitor ad or landing page
• Use a tool like WebtoPDF to save it as a PDF
• Upload the file to ChatGPT

Then, we ask smart questions like:

• What benefit is this ad showing?
• What feelings does it try to create?
• What problems is it solving for the customer?

The Best PPC Tools Are Just Step One. Here’s Step Two.

Now we know the tools and what they do best. Next, we should use them smarter. Before we start a new ad campaign or change bids, we need to check our keywords. Are they too expensive? Are they the right fit? Use the keyword cost guide to find better keywords that bring real results. This is how we get more from the PPC tools we already have.