There are many common “dos and don’ts” of self-managed PPC campaigns, which our CEO Hollis Thomases recently wrote about in her Inc. article Google AdWords: 12 Essential Rules.

But one of the most overlooked resources available to companies who are managing their own AdWords campaigns are Google’s own built-in free tools. Here’s a rundown of what these free tools are, and how they can help your campaigns:

Change History

Displays a list of all the changes made within your AdWords account, along with who made them.

Conversions

This tool shows you what happens after a customer clicks on your ad. Knowing this information will give you a better understanding of which keywords are good for your business, allowing you to invest more wisely and boost your return on investment. There is no limit to the number of conversions you can track.

Google Analytics

Syncing your Google Analytics up with your AdWords account will give you important additional data and insights about your PPC campaigns.

Website Optimizer

This is Google’s free resource for optimizing landing pages and conversions.

Keyword Tool

This is probably the most well-known and most used tool on this list. When you enter words or phrases that are related to your product or service in Google’s Keyword Tool, you’ll get a list of keyword and ad group ideas that are related and/or similar to your terms. It will also show you performance statistics for your keyword and ad group ideas, and enable you to export the list of keywords or add them to an existing campaign.

Traffic Estimator

This is a tool designed to help you estimate costs per click and predict traffic for various keywords before you’ve actually run a campaign.

Placement Tool

This works similar to Google’s Keyword Tool except instead of returning a list of related keywords, it returns a list of relevant websites-very useful for identifying placements that may be relevant to your display campaigns.

Contextual Targeting Tool

This tool helps you to build tightly-themed keyword lists for displaying network campaigns.

AdWords Editor

A powerful, free AdWords interface designed to help you manage your account offline and easily make a large number of changes at once.

Search Term Report

See how your ads performed when triggered by actual searches within the Search Network. Identify new search terms with high potential that you want to add as keywords and weed out any terms that aren’t as relevant to your business.

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