Summary: Paid search marketing solutions offer a broad range of functionality to make your online advertising campaigns easier to manage and much more effective. This article highlights the key features you'll want in your paid search marketing solution.

Features to Look for in Your Paid Search Marketing Software Package

Paid search marketing software helps you get the greatest value out of your pay-per-click campaigns (PPC).

Marketers that use search marketing software can more easily manage campaigns across multiple search engines, optimize bidding on every keyword, and implement sophisticated bidding strategies. Search marketing software offers a broad range of functionality that supports a wide-range of advertiser's goals. Identify your requirements and find a package that most closely matches your needs.

Most paid search marketing solutions provide the following features as part of the standard package:

Automatic Bid Management
Bid management software simplifies the keyword bidding process, enabling you to get the best results possible from your paid search campaign. It can help you minimize mistakes and ensure that you stay in the bidding range you want without exceeding your marketing budget.

There are a variety of strategies for bid optimization, and sophisticated paid search marketing software packages will let you pick the ones that best suite your needs. These programs let you set up rules for each keyword or ad group that guide the bidding using sophisticated algorithms. Some common bid management features include:

Consolidated Control
The search engines supply you with a number of tools to manage and optimize your campaigns on their networks, but if you want to expand to another search engine, you work with another system.

One of the main features of paid search marketing software is consolidated control over campaigns that span multiple search engines. For example, you would be able to manage your Google and Yahoo campaigns from the same interface. Not all packages support all search engines. While they all cover the major engines, you need to carefully check to see if your favorite second-tier search engine is covered.

Centralized performance reports at the keyword, campaign, and search engine level help you measure your performance.

Conversion tracking
Most PPC advertisers track their conversions from within the search engine interface. Not all paid search marketing software packages allow this. Double-check that the package you purchase also allows conversion tracking (not just bidding and click-through rates).

While tracking click-through rates helps you improve your ad copy, it is conversion tracking that determines your campaign profitability. You're able to see exactly which keywords result in sales.

Ad Creation and Editing
Most packages contain some type of ad creation and editing, although not all packages have everything. If you change you ads frequently, make sure you find a package that supports your requirements. Ad creation and editing features can include: Ad text copy, landing page optimization, bulk sheet updates, and banner ad optimization.