Best PPC Software of 2026

PPC (pay-per-click) software automates keyword research, bid setup, and data upload. The software also lets users track real-time costs, informing them in advance if costs will exceed the set budget. In short, with real-time reports, users are in better control of the costs and performance of PPC campaigns.

To help businesses select the right PPC solution, we'll cover:

What is PPC software?

Common features of PPC software

What type of buyer are you?

Benefits of PPC software

Market trends to understand

What is PPC software?

Pay-per-click (PPC) software is a tool that allows businesses to set up, manage, modify, and track the performance of PPC campaigns. The software lets users set up campaigns based on bidding amounts and budgets, and place PPC links on different channels such as Google Ads, Bing, and Facebook ads. It also provides keyword suggestions.

Common features of PPC software

The first step in selecting the right PPC solution is to understand the typical features of these products. According to our research, some common software features you should know about include:

What type of buyer are you?

The next step is to understand the types of buyers, which will help you select products that cater to your line of business.

• Marketing or advertising agency: If you own or work in a marketing agency, you need to manage a lot of targeted campaigns for different clients, making it difficult to track the performance of each. You also need to closely track campaign metrics, as your payment is based on campaign performance. For this reason, you should invest in PPC software with strong reporting- and ROI-tracking functionalities.

• Marketers: If you are a marketing manager at a small business, you may find keyword research cumbersome as it involves sifting through thousands of keywords to find the right ones for a campaign. For this reason, you should look for PPC solutions with strong keyword research tools to ease your workload in this area.

Benefits of PPC software

Understanding the benefits of PPC tools will help you present a strong business case for purchasing a PPC solution.

• Better keyword discovery: A PPC solution provides you with strong keyword research tools that sift through thousands of keywords to find the best-performing ones. Since manual searches are time-consuming and prone to error, there is always risk of missing out on important and relevant keywords. PPC software makes your keyword research more effective.

• Improved quality score: The software also lets you track the performance of different campaigns, helping you understand the best practices for creating online ads. It also helps you identify optimal keywords that you can target to improve response rates. All this helps you achieve better quality scores, thereby increasing ROI and reducing the cost of Google Ads campaigns, in particular. (Google charges lower fees if your advertisement is valuable and has a good quality score.)

• Faster decision-making: A PPC solution provides you with campaign metrics such as click-through rate, conversion rate, costs, and ROI in real time. This allows you to quickly make campaign-related decisions without having to rely on manual reports.

Market trends to understand

The last step is to understand key industry trends. This knowledge will help you select vendors that are planning to incorporate these technologies.

• Artificial intelligence to transform PPC campaigns industry: The success of PPC campaigns requires you to consider a lot of data-related parameters such as click-through rate, A/B testing results, and real-time bidding costs. Even using a PPC solution, the amount of analysis involved can be overwhelming. AI can sift through enormous amounts of data and provide you with real-time suggestions on bidding prices, keyword selection, and advertisement copy. With an increase in adoption of AI technology, we expect AI-driven suggestions to become a core software functionality by 2021.

• Auditing as the core functionality of PPC software: As more and more businesses are competing for online ad space, it is essential to update keywords and practices regularly. PPC audit solutions can review your campaign data and keywords and flag you if something needs to be updated. It also helps you compare the performance of your campaigns against that of your competitors. With frequent changes in search engine algorithms and keyword trends, we expect PPC audits to become an inherent functionality of PPC software by 2021.