SEM Industry Professionals - Favourite Tools

I received the latest issue of the excellent Search Marketing Standard magazine yesterday. The theme for this issue is “International Search Markets” with articles on the search industry in the UK, Italy, Germany, Russia and China.

Kalena Jordan writes about her favourite time saving tools and surveys other professionals on their favourites. It’s a useful resource with quite a few references to sites and software I haven’t come across before. Here’s what I currently use and I’ve now got a few others to check out at some point.

For Adwords Campaign Set Up:

I use a combination of excel and the keyword manager tool from revenuewire.

I use excel in the initial stages to organise keywords into themes and then I use the keyword manager to combine keywords and to wrap them with the characters for phrase and broad matching.

For Adwords Campaign Management:

I use adwords editor to filter and make changes and also to copy campaigns if I need a separate campaign with different global settings (for example I always separate the content network from search).

I use a combination of the tools in the adwords interface and Google analytics to analyse campaign performance.

I use Google Global Firefox Extension to see how the ads and search results look like as viewed from a different geographic location. This is a great tool from Dave Davis at Redfly Marketing.

For Business Planning and Management:

I use a Wordpress blog that I set up and then blocked the search engines from indexing. I use it as a content management system and a sharing / communication tool