PPC Tools for Google Ads: Research, Automation, Testing and AI

By the MarketingStackHub team · Research-based, from vendors’ own pricing pages and documentation · How we research

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On this page

• PPC tools at a glance
• Keyword and competitor research
• Automating keyword and ad copy work
• A/B testing ads and landing pages
• Claude and ChatGPT: four example prompts
• Open-source tools and AI skills
• Measuring the results
• Frequently asked questions

PPC tools at a glance

Nine PPC tools, sorted by the job they do in a Google Ads account rather than by brand. Four of them cost nothing.

Prices checked on each vendor’s own pricing page in October 2026, in US dollars, with annual and monthly billing shown separately. Optmyzr and Adalysis set the price by your monthly ad spend, so neither has a single starting figure.

PPC tools for keyword and competitor research

Research is where most teams overspend on PPC tools. Google gives away the two things a new campaign needs most — demand by keyword, and the ads competitors are actually running — and a paid suite adds competitors’ keyword data on top.

Google Keyword Planner: free, and where to start

Keyword Planner sits inside every Google Ads account, and you don’t need a live campaign to use it. Give it a few seed keywords or a competitor’s URL and it returns related ideas with monthly searches, competition and a top-of-page bid range. Those bids are the closest thing to a real auction price you will get before spending money, because they come from Google’s own data.

The catch: accounts with little or no spend see search volumes as broad ranges (“1K–10K”) rather than exact numbers. That is still enough to rank ideas against each other and to decide which ad groups to build first.

Google Ads Transparency Center: competitors’ ads, free

The Ads Transparency Center shows the ads a verified advertiser has run on Google, and you can filter them by country, format and date. No sign-in is needed. For ad copy research it is the most honest source there is: the exact headlines and descriptions a competitor is paying to show, not a tool’s reconstruction of them. Meta’s Ad Library does the same job for Facebook and Instagram ads.

What neither shows is the keyword behind an ad, or how it performs. That gap is what the paid research PPC tools sell.

Semrush: keyword and advertising research in one suite

Semrush is a large marketing suite sold in separate toolkits. Its keyword research covers paid search data such as cost per click and competition, and its advertising research shows the keywords a domain appears to bid on and the ad texts recorded for them. It has a free plan with limits; paid toolkits are priced separately on its pricing page.

One caution for all third-party research PPC tools: traffic, spend and click figures are modelled estimates. Use them to compare competitors with each other and to find keyword ideas, never as a forecast of what you will pay.

PPC tools for automating keyword and ad copy work

The repetitive part of running Google Ads is reading: search terms, placements, budgets, ad performance. The PPC tools below take that reading off your plate and leave the decision to you. For the wider category, see our guide to the best automation tools for marketing teams.

Google Ads scripts: free automation inside the account

Scripts are JavaScript that Google runs for you, at no extra cost, from an editor inside Google Ads. They can change bids, budgets and statuses, pull reports with Google Ads Query Language, and write to Google Sheets or send an email. You can schedule them hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. A single-account script can run for up to 30 minutes.

You don’t need to write them from scratch. Google publishes ready-made solutions you can paste in and configure, including an account anomaly detector that emails you when performance or spend jumps, a link checker for broken landing pages, and a common negative keyword list applied across campaigns. Its library of code snippets covers reports, keywords, budgets and Google Sheets, and AI assistants are good at adapting any of them to your account when you describe what you want. For bulk edits you make by hand, Google Ads Editor, the free desktop app, is still the fastest way to work.

Make, Zapier and n8n: connecting Google Ads to everything else

The three general automation tools differ a lot in how much of Google Ads they reach:

• Make has the deepest Google Ads app of the three. It can watch and search campaigns, ad groups and keywords, update their status, add a negative keyword to a shared negative keyword list, add placement exclusions, and run any other API call. Pair it with an AI model and a Google Sheet and you have the search-term workflow described below. Free plan: 1,000 credits a month; paid from $9 a month billed annually for 10,000 credits.
• Zapier is built around leads and conversions: new lead form entries, customer lists, offline conversions, campaign status and reports. It is a simple way to send form leads from Google Ads into a CRM, but it does not manage keywords.
• n8n‘s Google Ads node only reads campaigns. Everything else goes through its HTTP Request node with the same Google credential, which works well if someone on the team is comfortable with the Google Ads API.

We have compared the first two side by side, so if you are choosing between them, take a look at our Zapier vs Make comparison for pricing and limits.

Optmyzr: a full PPC management platform

Optmyzr is what agencies use when scripts and spreadsheets stop scaling. It bundles a rule engine for automated changes, a negative keyword finder, budget pacing alerts, script setup without code, AI suggestions for responsive search ad text, and an AI assistant called Sidekick that answers questions about your accounts. It covers Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok ads. The price depends on your monthly ad spend, annual prepayment saves 30%, and there is a 14-day free trial with no card required.

Three workflows worth automating

1. Weekly search-term triage. A Google Ads script writes last week’s search terms with cost and conversions to a sheet. Make sends them in batches to Claude or ChatGPT with a short description of the business, which labels each term “irrelevant”, “relevant, not converting yet” or “converting”. You review the irrelevant ones in the sheet, tick the ones to block, and Make adds them to a shared negative keyword list. The AI suggests; a person approves.
2. A competitor ad digest. Once a month, copy competitors’ current ads from the Ads Transparency Center into a sheet. An AI model groups them by angle (price, speed, proof, guarantee) and points out the angles nobody uses. That gap is often your best next headline.
3. Responsive search ad drafts with a length check. An AI model drafts headlines and descriptions from your landing page. A sheet formula or script checks every line against Google’s limits (30 characters per headline, 90 per description) and your banned words before anything goes into Google Ads Editor.

PPC tools for A/B testing ads and landing pages

PPC tools for testing work in two places: inside the ad account (bids, keywords, ad text) and on the landing page. Google closed Google Optimize, its free landing page testing tool, in September 2023, so the second now needs a separate tool.

Google Ads experiments: free, and built in

A custom experiment copies a campaign, lets you change one thing in the copy, and splits the original campaign’s traffic and budget between the two. Google suggests a 50/50 split. Search campaigns can split by cookie, so each person only sees one version, or by individual search. Custom experiments work for Search, Display, Video and Hotel campaigns, not for App or Shopping. You can schedule up to five per campaign but run one at a time, and there is no extra charge: the test spends the original campaign’s budget.

Use them for anything that changes the auction: a new bid strategy, broad match, a different landing page. For ad text across many campaigns at once, Google’s ad variations do the same job with less setup.

Adalysis: ad testing on autopilot

Adalysis calls itself a fully automated ad testing platform. It tests ads in every ad group automatically, alerts you when a test has finished, judges ads on six metrics rather than click-through rate alone, and can pause the losers. It works with Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, includes every feature and unlimited users on all plans, and is priced by maximum monthly ad spend (15% off on annual billing). The free trial is 30 days.

Convert: testing the page your ad sends to

Ad tests tell you which promise gets the click; landing page tests tell you whether the page keeps it. Convert runs A/B and multivariate tests on your own site. Its Growth plan is $299 a month billed annually or $399 monthly for 100,000 tested users a month, with a 15-day free trial and no card required. Below a few thousand clicks a month, a landing page test rarely reaches a clear result, so smaller accounts are better off testing the ad and improving the page by judgement.

Whichever tool runs the test, the rules are the same: change one thing, run whole weeks so weekdays and weekends both count, and wait for enough conversions before you call a winner.

Claude and ChatGPT as PPC tools: four example prompts

General AI assistants have become everyday PPC tools, but they are good at different things than people expect. They are strong at drafting, grouping and explaining. They are weak at arithmetic, character counts and anything they can’t see, which includes your account unless you paste the data in. The four prompts below work in Claude or ChatGPT; replace the brackets with your own details.

Creative: drafting responsive search ads

Write Google Ads responsive search ads for [business], which sells [product] to [audience] in [country]. Here are the landing page’s main points: [paste]. Write 15 headlines of at most 30 characters and 4 descriptions of at most 90 characters, counting spaces. Cover the main keyword, the offer or price, proof, speed and a call to action. No claims we can’t prove and no competitor brand names. Return a table with each line and its character count.

Then check the counts yourself, with =LEN() in a sheet or a short script. Models still miscount characters, and a headline one character over the limit is rejected.

Strategy: a first-draft campaign plan

Act as a senior PPC strategist. Business: [what you sell, average order or deal value, gross margin, sales cycle]. Goal: [leads or sales] at a target cost per acquisition of [amount]. Monthly budget: [amount]. Markets: [countries and languages]. Draft a Google Ads plan: campaign types and why, campaign and ad group structure, the first 20 keyword themes with match types, negative keyword themes, which conversions to track, and what to test in the first 60 days. List every assumption you made so I can correct it.

The last sentence is the useful one. The plan is only as good as the margin and conversion numbers behind it, and the assumptions list shows you where the model guessed.

Optimisation: reading a search terms report

Attached is a search terms report for the last 30 days (search term, match type, campaign, ad group, clicks, cost, conversions). We sell [one line] and we do not offer [list]. Sort the terms into three groups: clearly irrelevant (negative keyword candidates), relevant but not converting yet, and converting (candidates to add as keywords). For each negative, suggest the shortest phrase that blocks it without blocking good traffic, and whether to add it to the campaign or a shared list. Use only the figures in the file.

Budgeting: reallocation and pacing

Here are last month’s results by campaign: spend, conversions, conversion value, cost per conversion, and search impression share lost to budget and to rank. Our target cost per conversion is [amount] and next month’s total budget is [amount]. Propose how to split it: move money toward campaigns that lose impression share to budget while beating the target, and away from campaigns above it. Show the new daily budget for each campaign, the reasoning, and the risks.

When you turn a monthly figure into daily budgets, divide by 30.4. Google can spend up to twice the daily budget on a busy day, but over a month it won’t charge more than the daily budget times 30.4, which is the average number of days in a month.

Two rules apply to all four. Before pasting account data into an assistant, check what your plan does with your inputs and whether your client agreements allow it. And treat every output as a draft for a person to approve; none of these prompts should change an account on their own.

Open-source PPC tools and AI skills

A newer layer of free PPC tools sits on GitHub and in AI skill directories: code that connects an AI assistant to Google Ads, or packages a PPC routine as a reusable skill. Star and install counts below were read on 18 October 2026, and they move weekly.

On GitHub

The google-ads-automation topic held only seven repositories at our check, most of them small. The wider google-ads topic is where the useful projects are:

• googleads/google-ads-mcp (about 1,000 stars, Apache 2.0): an MCP server from Google’s googleads organisation that lets an AI assistant query a Google Ads account with Google Ads Query Language. Its tools read data and list accounts; it has none for changing campaigns, which makes it a sensible first connection.
• AgriciDaniel/claude-ads (about 10,000 stars, MIT): a free Claude Code skill that audits ad accounts on twelve platforms from the exports you give it, then plans budgets and drafts creative briefs. It reports and suggests; it doesn’t change accounts on its own.
• eliasdabbas/advertools (about 1,500 stars, MIT): a Python library for marketers that generates keyword combinations for search campaigns and creates text ads at scale.
• google-marketing-solutions/copycat (87 stars, Apache 2.0): uses Google’s Gemini models to learn the style of your best responsive search ads and write new ones for new keywords. Its own page says it is not an official Google product.
• langchain-ai/paid-media-agent (about 100 stars, Apache 2.0): LangChain’s agent for cross-channel analysis and reports in Slack or the terminal. It prepares campaign changes for review, and live account changes are off by default.
• FGRibreau/mcp-google-ads (64 stars, MIT): the most-starred project under the google-ads-automation topic, an MCP server for full campaign management with built-in safety guardrails.

On skills.sh

Skills are instruction packs an AI agent loads for a specific task. A search for “google ads” on skills.sh returns dozens; these are the most installed or most useful for PPC:

• google/skills: Google’s own repository takes three of the top four results with Google Ads API skills, for setting up the Google Ads MCP server (6.4K installs), a first API request (6.3K) and account performance diagnostics through the MCP server (5.4K).
• coreyhaines31/marketingskills: ad-creative (129.6K installs) writes and iterates ad copy for Google responsive search ads and social platforms within each platform’s character limits; paid-ads (54.7K) covers campaign structure, bidding and optimisation across platforms.
• claude-office-skills/skills: google-ads-manager (6.1K installs) puts campaign setup, keyword research, responsive search ad copy, bidding and reporting in one skill.
• agricidaniel/claude-ads: ads-google (4.3K installs) is the Google Ads audit procedure from the claude-ads project above.
• eliasmalmsandberg/google-ads-skills: about 20 narrow skills, one per routine — search-term mining, negative keywords, quality score, bidding, budget management, experiments. Few installs yet (about 100–200 each), but the closest to how PPC work is actually split up.

Every skill page on skills.sh shows three security scans. Several popular Google Ads skills carried a warning from one of them at our check, so read the skill’s instructions before you install it. For anything that connects to a live account, start read-only and require approval for every change.

Measuring what your PPC tools change

Every one of the PPC tools on this page optimises toward the conversions it can see, so measurement decides whether any of them works. Google Ads sees its own clicks well, but it can’t tell you what your Meta or LinkedIn spend contributed, and GA4 alone can’t either.

Our guide to marketing analytics tools covers that layer. In short: get every channel’s spend next to its conversions first, with a data pipeline such as Windsor.ai, Coupler.io or OWOX, and pay for attribution or incrementality testing (Rockerbox and others) only once that data is clean. It also explains exactly where free GA4 and the paid GA360 stop.

Frequently asked questions

What are the best free PPC tools?

Google’s own: Keyword Planner for keyword ideas and bids, the Ads Transparency Center for competitors’ ads, scripts for automation, experiments for A/B tests and Google Ads Editor for bulk changes. Together they cover most of what a single account needs.

Do small accounts need paid PPC tools?

Usually not at first. A paid research tool earns its cost when you need competitors’ keyword history, and a management platform when you run several accounts or too many ad groups to review by hand. Below that, scripts and a spreadsheet do the job.

Can ChatGPT or Claude manage a Google Ads account?

As PPC tools, they can analyse exports, draft ads and plans, and, connected through an MCP server, query an account directly. They shouldn’t make changes unattended. Keep a person approving every change, and check every number they quote against the account.

Are AI skills and MCP servers for Google Ads safe to install?

Treat them like any code that touches a paid account. Read what the skill instructs the agent to do, prefer read-only connections, and keep write access behind approval. Google’s own MCP server is read-only, which makes it a sensible starting point.

Which PPC tools also work for Microsoft Ads?

Of the paid PPC tools here, Optmyzr and Adalysis both support Microsoft Ads alongside Google Ads. Microsoft Ads also has its own free Keyword Planner and its own experiments feature.

Related comparisons

• Best Automation Tools for Marketing Teams — where Zapier, Make, Pabbly and n8n actually differ
• Zapier vs Make — the two most common ways to connect Google Ads to other apps
• Marketing Analytics Tools — what to use beyond GA4 to measure paid media
• Trending Marketing Courses — including a paid course on planning and scaling PPC campaigns
• Marketing Conferences Calendar — SMX and Hero Conf dates for paid search teams