Building and managing good pay per click campaigns can be a tedious and time consuming task. In today’s world of quality scores and click price penalties for poor performing campaigns, it is more important than ever to have tight adgroups with keywords, ads, and landing pages tightly focused around a single topic or phrase. The old days of finding thousands of keywords, dumping them into one large adgroup and seeing what works is officially over.
A number of PPC campaign management tools have sprung up to speed up the process of creating smaller adgroups and make the task easier and more efficient. We decided to evaluate Speed PPC and Efficient PPC, put them to the test and see which one works the best.
The basic concept behind these tools is that you take a high volume term or list of terms as your seed list, and expand your keywords by matching those terms against an expansion list of terms like City, States, etc… This might be over simplified as both tools can be used with or without expansion lists.
Efficient PPC Review (Version 1.1.0.3) from Web Monsters LTD.
Efficient PPC was easy to get up and running, the documentation provides easy step by step instructions on how to utilize the software to build campaigns on Google using the Eficcient PPC software and Google’s Adwords Editor.
The Efficient PPC software comes with 8 expansion lists pre-installed: buy-words, capital-cities, cheap-words, colors, countries, months, us-cities, and us-states. Additionally, through their member area, you can download the following 5 additional expansion lists: car-manufactures, car-models, domain-extensions-countries, domain-extensions-general, and toy-companies.
I especially like Efficient PPC’s ability to mix and match up to 5 keyword phrase lists (seed or expansion lists). Their use of insert tokens in urls and adcopy is very intuitive, and the software’s ability to set Google account settings to insure you limit your campaigns to a default 2,000 keyword Adgroups, and 50,000 keyword campaigns should come in handy.
Efficient PPC has the ability to build campaigns for both Google and Microsoft AdCenter. However, Microsoft AdCenter seems to have been added as an afterthought with little to no documentation or settings in the tool, other than a checkbox when building a campaign to create a CSV file for importing into AdCenter. Efficient PPC does not currently support Yahoo Search Marketing or other PPC search engines at this time.
Speed PPC Review (Version 3.0.11)
Speed PPC was equally easy to get up and running, and the documentation is a bit more detailed and may take a little longer to understand. That is understandable, as the Speed PPC system is a little harder to understand and has a few more features.
The Speed PPC software comes with 15 pre-installed expansion keyword lists: Action Keywords, Australia Cities, Australia Regions, Canada Cities, Canada Regions, Descriptive Keywords, Germany Cities, Germany Regions, Lead Keyword, Price Keywords, UK Cities, UK Regions, US Cities, US Cities (optimized), and US Regions.
Additionally, through their member area, Affiliate Pro members can download the following 19 additional main expansion lists: Australian Suburbs, Car Models, Cell Phone Models, Colors, Digital Cameras, Laptops, Motorcycle Models, Occupations, Perfumes, Routers, Top 1000 Actors, Top 1000 Books, Top 1000 Musicians, Top 300 PS2 Games, Top 300 PS3 Games, Top 300 Xbox Games, Top 300 Xbox360 Games, Top 500 Wii Games, and Video Cameras. Plus, there are another 184 Geographic expansion lists with Cities and Regions of just about any country you can imagine!
Speed PPC is setup into 3 different campaign building modules, Single Core, Dual Core, and Domain. The Single Core takes a single core campaign based on a seed keyword list, The Dual Core campaign takes a seed keyword list and combines it with an expansion list, and the Domain module takes a seed list of domain names and automatically generates a list of 132 typo domain variations like wwwdomain.com and ww.domain.com.
Speed PPC’s Affiliate Pro Membership also comes with 18 Landing Page template designs, easy instructions for passing and utilizing seed keywords and expansion keywords dynamically in your landing pages via PPC, and an affiliate database tool that enables you to import an affiliate advertiser’s data feed and dynamically pull product, pricing, and other data into your landing pages based on the keywords in the ad campaign. These advanced features enable you to build truly optimized ad groups, ad text, and landing pages that carry the specific terms all the way to your landing pages and the actual products displayed on those pages. Very powerful stuff!
There are a few things I really like about Speed PPC. First Speed PPC works with Google, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, and many secondary search engines. The software has a custom output file tool that will enable you to customize the output for any search engine platform. Second, the tool has advanced ad options enabling you to create variable ad templates based on keywords. Finally, SpeedPPC has the ability to create unique tracking numbers so you can choose to pass a number instead of your keywords in your urls.
Which Pay-Per-Click Campaign Building Tool should you choose?
Both Speed PPC and Efficient PPC will effectively get the job done. If you are primarily working with Google Adwords and dabbling with Microsoft AdCenter, Efficient PPC might be a good choice. It’s a little easier to use and quicker to get up and running on. If however, you are working with Yahoo, Affiliate Data feeds, or want to take advantage of some more globalization and expanded keyword lists, Speed PPC might be a better choice.
Efficient PPC starts at $156 for a quarterly subscription and goes up to $468 for a lifetime subscription.
Speed PPC comes in 2 versions, regular and Affiliate Pro. The regular version is $397 and the Affiliate Pro version is $497. Both versions come with 12 months of free upgrades.
Both come with Money-back Guarantees, with Efficient PPC offering 60 days and Speed PPC offering 30.
Honestly if you are spending any real time managing PPC campaigns, then either software package is going to save you more than enough of your time to cover the cost. Time is Money, so be sure to integrate one of these great tools into your PPC campaign building process, you won’t be sorry!
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I use speedppc. Its great! Seriously it is.
Expensive for the individual of course so more suited to marketers etc of multiple sites.
Can borrow mine if you wish to try ;-)
Posted by: Freddie | May 18, 2009 at 08:29 AM
Very good product and worth the investment.
SpeedPPC Affiliate Pro 40% off – ‘EOFY’ 3 Day Sale
If you want to puchase a copy go here,
40% off Affiliate Pro
Starts: Midnight, Monday, 22 June 2009 EST
Ends: Midnight, Wednesday, 24 June 2009 EST
Posted by: Graham | Jun 21, 2009 at 02:40 PM