You've helped us with research on the new PPC campaign building tool we'll be building, and here are the results to part one of the survey.
PPC Tools Survey Results 1: Which tools are being used?
As you probably know, we at Wordtracker are always looking to expand and improve on our tools. Our latest project is to create a campaign building tool, which should become an essential in any Pay Per Click (PPC) toolkit.
So, at the beginning of this month we asked a cross-section of people who use PPC for their views on the tools they use. We thought you might be interested in the results.
One of the first questions was:
Which tools do you currently use to build and manage your campaigns?
We were really surprised with the percentage (62.7%) of respondents who are still using Excel to construct their campaigns. All that wrestling with formulae has got to be a real pain! We should also have included AdWords Editor and Wordtracker itself as tools, as they made up the most part of the "Other" section.
What is your favorite feature of all these tools?
Almost half of our respondents skipped this question. The responses were not so encouraging either. Here are the first 10:
- Don't know
- None
- Ability to check competition quickly and decide which keywords to focus for SEO and PPC
- Tracking
- Excel - pivot table
- N/A
- Excel - lower cost of use
- Do not know
- Quick and easy to use
- Wordtracker
Followed by our favorite:
14. You must be kidding ...
So from these results, it seems like not so many people really love the tools they use to build campaigns and manage PPC right now. Unsurprisingly, we got a lot more feedback when we asked:
How do you think these tools could be improved?
Of course, these answers were as wide and varied as the tools used, and the people using them. Here are two of the more interesting answers that are looking in a similar direction:
“Once the campaigns are built and uploaded there is no easy way to go back and modify them unless you want to delete all and start over. It would be nice to be able to use the tool to manage and update the campaigns that you built - kind of like an adwords editor/speedppc on steroids.”
“Would love to see a tool that utilizes the step by step process in your book Google Adwords PPC Advertising. This is an excellent guide and spells out how to build campaigns from the ground up. Just use this book as a guide and go from there.”
Another big issue thrown up was that of support. While it was mentioned a few times, this quote pretty much sums up the sentiment:
“Google has concentrated all of their AdWords decision making in Ireland using an off-shore team to do this, and their actions sometimes are inscrutable and they offer NO support. Bing is doing a much better job in this area and has very good customer support”
These results have given us some great ideas for the tool and how it will work. Do you agree with the answers above? Are you using Excel to build your campaigns, or something else? What do you think we should be building for a PPC tool? Have your say by commenting below and you could influence the way our next tool gets built!
