Whether you are a Search Marketing Professional or a complete newbie I am sure you will find the reviews on our site really helpful in making a decision which adwords software to buy.

If you are just starting out using Adwords you have probably already used Google’s Keyword research Tool. This is a great free tool, and very good if you are starting out with no budget, however there are a number of things it does not tell you. 

So as a starting point lets have a look at what keyword metrics you do get so that we can compare other adwords software.

OK.. as with all keyword research software, you start by entering a search term and pulling back a list of related search terms – according to Google along with each keyword’s metrics. Note you can get results with or without "synonyms" and also choose the match type (broad, phrase or exact)

For each keyword you can see the following:

1. Current month’s approximate search volume
2. Avg search volume based on searches on Google.
3. Search volume trend for the last 12 months
4. The month which had the highest search volume.
5. Relative competition in terms of the number of advertisers.
6. Estimated CPC (cost per click) to appear in position 1-3.

At the top of the results there is a box to enter your maximum bid – if you leave it blank the Avg. CPC will be estimated for position 1-3. If however you are only prepared to bid say 0.20, per click, the results will show you the estimated positions your ad will appear in and the associated CPC. 

Now, remember that everyone else who uses Google Adwords has access to this very same information.

To gain a competitive edge you need a much deeper level of keyword research information. 

Over the last few years I have purchased lots of different keyword research tools, and the ones I like best are listed below. You can read what I think of them here…

PPC Web Spy

This tool allows you to SPY on your competitors and find out exactly which words they are bidding on and how much they are paying! The tool is basically a firefox plugin, which you can enable or disable. When enabled it will insert a green button beneath the paid search results….

…and when you click on a green button you get a list of keywords that the advertiser is bidding on together with the CPC.

This means you can save literally weeks of keyword research by leveraging the work of others. 

Read more here >> PPC Web Spy

Wordtracker

Wordtracker is an excellent online keyword researh tool when you want to research a large volume of keywords, find long-tail keywords, and find out how much competition there is for each word.

You will see differences from the Google results, because Wordtracker gets its data from meta search engines like Dogpile and Metacrawler in the US and from ISP data in the UK, whereas Google uses data from its own database.  

Wordtracker covers all the main search engines, not just Google searches, however it does not have non-English results. 

Read more here >> Wordtracker

Keyword Elite

The "Analyze Pay Per Click" module in Keyword Elite allows you to generate a list, then analyze the keyword list in detail. For each keyword it shows you the number of searches per month, the number of results appearing in the search engine, and then calculates a keyword effectiveness index (KEI) based on this data. 

As well as the CPC data for each word, it tells you exactly how many ad campaigns are running, the average cost per click for positions 1-3, and the estimated number of adwords clicks for these positions. As with Google Keyword tool you can enter a maximum bid amount and see which position you would be placed in. 

The advantage of this tool is that you can choose to query a number of different PPC networks including Google, Yahoo, Miva, Enhance, and also pull the data from Wordtracker.com or KeywordDiscovery.com.

Apart from the Keyword generation and Keyword analysis modules, Keyword Elite has 2 other modules which allow you to analyze the keyword competition.

One of the strongest features of Keyword Elite is its ability to spy on adwords competition over a period of time.  Say you are interested in "home solar power", you can enter this search term and enter the sites you see are advertising for this search term, then schedule the software to run over the next few days or weeks. The results will show which ads are consistently appearing, and the title and description being used. This allows you to leverage the research of other advertisers instead of experimenting with your own money. 

Read more here >> Keyword Elite

Market Samurai

Now if your main objective is niche marketing, I don’t think you will find any better tool than Market Samurai because it pulls all the Search information into one view.

The Adwords data shows you how much Adwords clicks you would get if you had the top position, the advertiser competition on a percentage scale (like Google), the CPC and the Adwords CTR (click through rate) which can be calculated because we have the number of searches for each word.

The main power of Market Samurai however comes from its ability to analyse the actual Search Volume and the likely search traffic you would get if you had #1 position.   

ADWORDS VIDEO

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