Many people think that to succeed with PPC they have to use only big, paid and complex suites of software including tremendous sophisticated features.

However, if you do a little research online you can find other more focused absolutely FREE tools that can help advertisers maximize the effectiveness of their paid search campaign.

Many free tools available online have a primary purpose, but they also can be used in other situations to effectively discover specific pieces of information to help fix a problem.

If you put a little of your time in experimenting of these tools, you can find that they could provide you a new and interesting ways to optimize your PPC campaigns.

In this article I’ll list seven really valuable but free tools that too often are overlooked.

Tools to help increase Quality Score

A PPC advertising system, based on “Quality score” that is looking at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query, can be so painful at times.

The process includes: organaizing of your account and choosing the correct landing page, clickthrough rate (CTR) and Google’s deliberately ambiguous “relevancy factors.”

To increase in quality score while maintaining a healthy CTR and conversion rate doesn’t necessarily mean to have keywords in ad copy. Also, sometimes it can be difficult to find other related words to substitute and still keep high quality score. These Free tools can help in you in this comlicated task.

Google Sets
Google Sets helps you to create extended lists of related words. You can come up with a one or more words and Google will suggest related keywords. Many times the suggested keywords are not a great ones, but often they are good modifiers for keywords or for making subtle changes to your ad copy.

This way if you run a set of words, and then choose a word or two that are closely related to your products and run test ad copy with the substituted words you can see how a new variations of your ad copy help increase your CTR and Quality Score.

Tilde search operator. Google search offers various advanced search operators that help you discover related words. Many tims, by using a related word in ad copy you can significantly improve the relevanc of your copy.

This trick can be especially helpful when adding keywords into your ad copy can actually reduce the ads Quality Score. And this is not uncommon for keywords that have ambiguous or multiple meanings. Here are three important points to understand that can help you figure out how this search works.

• Google’s tilde (~) command shows you words related to your query term(s).
• The negative (-) search operator allows you to remove results from search results.
• When you conduct a search on Google, your query terms are bolded in search results.

So, how you can use this effectively?

If you build a search query that uses the tilde command to find related words along with the negative search operator to remove the actual keyword searched, the result you will get will include bolded words in your search result.

By adding those as additional negative keywords you can find other bolded, related keywords. All those words can help you test your ad copy if you are receiving “non-relevant ad” messages in your Quality Score information.

Where in the world should you advertise?

Many companies instead of being everything to everybody (the right choise), and be the company in a smaller region, try to offer their services nationally, or internationally and insist on choosing every possible location to serve their ad regardless of their budget.

In a such case, it’s important to find out where are people more interested in your products, isn’t it?

So what is the easiest way to determine where people are searching for your products? One of them is analyzing with Google Trends.

Google Trends
The regional information that Google Trends display isn’t showing search volumes but it displays the trends of a total search.

A ratio of total searches in a region is compared to searches for your keyword and this is a good indication if someone in that area is conducting a search for your keyword.

The higher the interest for your products in a particular region, the better these areas are to target when you try narrowing down your geographic focus or trying test specific markets.

Ad preview tool
Many times people are using Google search engine to look their own ads instead of using the Google ad preview tool. And this is a very wrong to do.

Why? The reason is, if you search for your own ads too often and never click on them, Google may determine your ads are irrelevant for your search and as a result it’ll stop showing them to you.

This tool that Google offers to use for free will allow you to see ads in any geographic area without your account accruing impressions.

So, next time you’ll want to see your own ad, or look at ads outside of your geographic region – use the ad preview tool.

Reaching your audience

Demographic Prediction
It turns out that for the past several years the most common searchers for the word bleach are people who are not doing laundry. Seems like a college age male is the most common demographic for searching the word bleach.

Apparently, a Japanese Magna, a cartoon style also called Bleach, is popular with the college crowd and has completely changed the search results for this word.

And here goes my favot tool — Microsoft adLabs. Microsoft put together this excellent suite of tools. One of them is known as demographic prediction where you can by simply entering your keyword or URL of your website see the demographic makeup of those searching for products of your interest.

Obviously, this is a great place to start learning who is searching for your products.

Detecting Commercial Intent
If you know where your customer is within the buying cycle, this can help you target both ads and landing pages around the customer’s knowledge.

When you know intent of your visitors and you have a cleare idea how serious they are about doing business with you, this can help you keep moving them through the buying cycle, funnel, towards eventually doing business with you.

It can be a daunting task try to determine how commercial any keyword you target is. However, adLabs tool, detecting online commercial intent is here to do the task much eaiser.

If your keyword is mostly non-commercial, you have to treat the query as an information query and make sure you provide the searcher a complete information about a product or service you are promoting.

If your keyword is highly commercial, obviously you will want to use a transactional landing page. The buying cycle must be a natural progression. This is an excellent tool to help you determine where your keywords fall in the buying cycle.

And here is another great, overlooked keyword research tool…

Thesaurus.com
The AdWords keyword tool is one of the most recognized FREE tools on the market, however, its full power is not unleashed for PPC accounts.

This tool has an option to spider websites. Many marketers spider their own site in search of new keywords, but keep in mind that this can be done almost on any website. And this includes also Thesaurus.com.

So, what you have to do is:

1. Just do a search for keyword of your interest on Thesaurus.com.
2. Copy the URL and paste it into the AdWords keyword tool

Well, you’ll be presented with a list of related keywords and associated stats. That’s all!

From now and on, anytime you come across a page related to your products, take 30-40 seconds to spider the page — You’ll be amazed with the ideas for a new keyword you’ll find.

Additional reading on earning money with Adwords/Adsense:

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