Insider Tools: PPC Advertising Resources & Services

Written by Pete Prestipino | Feb 12, 2007 6:00:00 AM

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising shows no signs of slowing down. Advertisers use the medium to attract new users, drive brand recognition and, most importantly, make sales. Successful campaigns balance the art of ad creation with the science of measurement. While the threat of click fraud and invalid clicks looms large for many, billions are spent each year on perhaps the single greatest advertising technology ever developed. If you are a pay-per-click advertiser and concerned about your return on investment and return on advertising spend, consider these valuable tools used by insiders across the online advertising landscape.

Featured : Adisem Automated Adwords Management
Google AdWords is, without a doubt, the most popular channel for many online advertisers. However, most don't have time to monitor their campaigns on a daily basis and make the necessary adjustments to optimize and take full advantage of the program.

Adisem has set out to solve this problem with its automated (self service) keyword management and optimization service that operates within your Google Adwords account through an API. Once connected, Adisem downloads a campaign history and analyzes the data and the current competitive environment. Once that data is collected, Adisem's system adjusts campaign parameters such as keyword pricing, generates additional keywords and negative keywords, then automatically optimizes your account by adjusting bid prices over time for the highest possible return on advertising spend. Ron Drabkin, VP of Marketing for Adisem states, " Smaller advertisers can level the playing field with larger advertisers who have in-house expertise or who can hire an agency."

AdComparator : www.adcomparator.com
The free AdComparator tool enables advertisers to simultaneously perform standard A/B or split testing on up to 15 different aspects of any advertisement, website or email campaign. The tool can test more than 30,000 different combinations with just a few test ads. Choose the number of elements you want to test (3, 7, 11 or 15), run the ads as outlined, fill in the fields with your copy and response rates and find out which headline, tagline or call to action works best.

Who's Clicking Who : www.whosclickingwho.com
Pay-per-click auditing service Who's Clicking Who detects fraudulent clicks and deters repeat clickers by tracking key data. When PPC ads are clicked on a specified number of times, the ClickMinderTM window appears, telling abusers their clicks are being monitored. Messages can be customized to be as friendly or aggressive as needed. Online advertisers often use this service to approach PPC companies about refunds.

AdSupervision : www.adsupervision.com
AdSupervision currently works only with pay-per-click advertising on three search engines: Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), Google AdWords and 7Search. The service monitors your website and, if disabled for any reason, will pause your PPC ad campaigns and restart them when your website is again available for viewing. The website owner is notified when the PPC campaign is paused, when service is restored and when the PPC campaign has started again. The service uses a system of rotating IP addresses in eight locations worldwide to check the status of websites.

Microsoft adCenter Labs : adlab.microsoft.com
Microsoft has a suite of valuable tools for those involved with paid search, contextual advertising and behavioral targeting. Search Funnels help analyze and visualize user search sequences, Keyword Group and Mutation Detection finds sets of similar words and detects frequent misspellings, Keyword Forecasts predicts impression counts and demographic search terms and there is even a tool to help detect online commercial intention.

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