Five Free Tools for Small-Biz PPC Campaigns

Need help getting a pay-per-click campaign set up? Want to get it done as quickly and cheaply as possible? You don't have to spend a lot of money on PPC tools before you even start paying out your daily budget in AdWords and other pay-per-click platforms. Here are five free tools that will get you started on building a well-organized PPC campaign.

The Basics:

A Spreadsheet Application - OK, technically, Microsoft Excel isn't free, but you probably already have it anyway. If not, try Open Office or Google Docs, both are truly free. For many search marketers, spreadsheets are indispensible for PPC campaign organization. You can use them to store keyword lists, group keywords, track conversions and other metrics, manage bids and more. Excel was created for accountants, so there's a lot of functionality when it comes to crunching numbers.

AdWords Editor - AdWords Editor is Google's free ad campaign management application. It links up with your AdWords account so you can edit campaigns (add keywords, create ads, adjust bids and so on) "offline" and then upload your changes in bulk. Like other free Google products, AdWords Editor has a clean interface and fairly extensive online help.

Niche Tools:

Word Combiner - This simple tool is useful for merging multiple lists of keywords. You can add a word or phrase to the front or back of the results, wrap results or combine words with special characters, and make results negative or lowercase.

WordStream's Keyword Niche Finder - With this nifty new tool, you can enter a keyword or list of keywords to generate a relevant list of keyword groups. This does some of the grunt work for you in terms of creating tightly related keyword groups (which will become your PPC ad groups). You can then get the keyword groupings emailed to you in CSV format.

SEOBook's PPC Tools - SEOBook offers several free niche PPC tools: a keyword phrase generator that generates phrases by permutating the terms you enter; a keyword list cleaner that helps you strip funky characters, numbers or irrelevant keywords from a list; and a PPC keyword wrapper that wraps and exports keywords with broad, phrase, exact or negative match characters.

As your PPC campaigns grow in size and complexity, you may find it necessary to invest in paid tools for PPC keyword research and campaign management. But for most small business Search Marketing efforts, these free PPC tools are a godsend.