The Core

I don't know of any reasonably priced PPC software.  At my current job they were using a package for $5k/month and it didn't do a very good job.  I've been using my own system for years for affiliate PPC marketing.  I ended up scrapping the commercial system and employing mine.

The trick is to take a long and a short data point, calculate EPC vs CPC, look at traffic & rank changes and then adjust bids accordingly.   I use a web script to do this and then export to a format that can be imported into Adwords using the desktop application.  I'm not really answering your question...  The only low cost tools I've seen out there have been junk that don't allow for keyword level optimization.  It has been a while though, they may have improved.

Are you going to be able to measure conversions at the keyword & adgroup level?  Is your campaign going to be on the smaller side?  You may be able to get by with using formulas and spreadsheets and still be able to manage a campaign efficiently.

When I was doing work for makemetop in the USA there were a number of good competitors.

I just looked an not a single one still exists today. SAD

Dumb question: what does PPC management software achieve that you can't already do with AdWords' own tools?

Tolls can manage 1,000,000 KWs in real time.

We did it for Yahoo! in the UK and kept track of sales per second.

When it get BIG ya new a tool.

http://www.icrossing.com/icrossing-paul-doleman

>>Doubleclick Search (Google)

I would worry that Google's tools stack the deck to make AdWords appear more impactful than other channels

>>the SEM team is pretty fond

Of course they are  It makes them look good

Wordstream and aquisio are the ones that always pop up when I search. I'm looking for some software myself but I really have no idea what the difference is between them.

I also have been wondering about how the newer 'ecommerce tags' that came online a while ago (that allow you to calculate ROI) changed the game, when I read older articles. In other words, things seem to change quite a bit over time and I'm sure some of the tools that were created, ended up losing what made them special. It seems Google doesn't really like this secondary ppc software market. I was reading somewhere where Google changed its phone number policy and all the third party companies that helped track clicks to calls by providing numbers are now SOL.

the big benefit of third party software for me is that you can track multiple channels through it - so you can optimise adwords really well, but if you're using non GDN display ads, or looking at organic traffic from Bing, or trying to find out of your affiliate traffic is goalhanging from your ppc campaignn, can you dedupe effectively across them using it?