Five Indispensable Tools I Use

Online ad management is a deep and challenging specialty. Much deeper than most people realize. Sometimes I compare it to playing tennis: Anybody can play tennis. But to play very well is a different thing. When money is being invested on a regular basis, every percentage point of ROI adds up. Like tennis, being able to fight for every point is what matters.

My journey to becoming an ads specialist started with Google Ads (FKA “AdWords”) in 2012. Since then, I have managed thousands of campaigns for hundreds of clients. I’ve continuously improved my abilities through both training and experience in those years and am still improving. I’ve learned many big lessons and lots of small ones, too. I wrote a blog post to list the twenty-five best lessons I’ve learned. To see that click here.

This post, however, is about tools and tricks. There are common tasks related to ad creation and management that help if done with efficiency. Here are some of the tools and tricks that help me get the job done and keep an efficient workflow.

Keyword Concatenation Tool

Keyword concatenation tools are a big time saver if you create Google search ad campaigns often. They help you generate multiple keyword combinations quickly by merging lists of words. They eliminate the manual work involved in creating every combination. For example, you might have the keyword “pest removal service” but also want versions that replace the word “service” with “company,” “business,” “experts,” etc. They also have options for churning out the keywords in various match types, such as broad match, phrase match, and exact match. It’s a very simple type of tool and process but I’d be lost without it. Besides being a timesaver, keyword catenation tools can also help ensure that no important keyword versions are left out of search ad targeting.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a free tool Google offers to manage tracking codes on a website. It is very robust and offers a multitude of sophisticated applications. It’s not only for Google-related codes, such as Google Analytics and Google Ads tags. It’s for any type of code a webmaster or marketer wants to be fired after a particular user action, including the Meta Pixel and Meta event codes.

Although it is packed with features, the two most basic benefits it offers are (1) the ability to manage code firings in a remote interface without needing to log in to the website’s back end and (2) the selection of action triggers that can fire a code, such as a page view, form submission, video view, or a custom scroll percentage event.

I use Google Tag Manager for the simplicity, speed, and convenience it offers. Rather than needing a variety of codes/tags added to various places on a client’s website, I only really need the GTM “container” code added. Once that’s done, I have all the access I need (through the GTM interface) to manage how and when tags fire.

​Meta Lead Ads Testing Tool

The Meta Lead Ads Testing Tool is indispensable for checking the flow of leads from instant forms to CRMs and other destinations, such as email. Instant forms are a feature offered in Meta Ads for the purpose of lead generation. If a viewer taps on a Facebook or Instagram ad from their smartphone, a form opens that can collect contact information and other info to be sent to the advertiser. If you are using instant forms, extra software is required to send the new leads to email or a CRM system. Once this is done, it’s important to check that the flow is working correctly. That’s why the Meta Lead Testing Tool is so important. It will put a test lead through the whole conduit of connections from instant form to final destination, such as CRM or email.

LeadsBridge

As I explained above, in relation to the Meta Lead Ads Testing Tool, special connector software is required to push the leads from Meta instant forms to CRMs, emails, or other outside systems. Zapier is probably the most popular tool for this purpose, but I use LeadsBridge. In LeadsBridge, you create “bridges” to send the leads where you want them to go. It normally doesn’t take long to create a bridge, and it can be a simple process. But there is a lot going on under the hood, and it is very frustrating when things aren’t working right. Any type of glitch in the flow can prevent the bridge from working. I check my bridges every day just to keep an eye on them and keep lookout for problems.

To begin creating a bridge, you first need to choose the source and destination. There are over four hundred apps to choose from for the source and destination, including Meta instant forms, email notifications, Tik-Tok lead generation, LinkedIn lead gen forms, JotForms, Gravity Forms, WooCommerce, Constant Contact, MailChimp, Zoho CRM, Google Sheets, and many more.

Chrome Bookmarks

Chrome is my browser of choice, and I don’t know what I would do without my constant use of bookmarks. Being able to navigate quickly to the right places is a huge timesaver in my daily work, and there are a lot of pages I watch on a daily and weekly basis. I have around one hundred bookmarks. The key to having so many and being able to access them quickly is to put them in folders. Also, to save space, I often give the folders names with only one or two letters. I also have some with no name, so it’s just the folder icon. You can also nest folders, which is wonderful for quickly accessing a large number of bookmarks. Now, what’s better than being able to get to individual web pages fast from bookmarks? Being able to open a whole bunch of them with only one click. If you hold down Ctrl (on Windows) and click on a bookmarks folder, it will open up all of the bookmarks in that folder in different tabs. This is an indispensable feature for me. I start most days by quickly opening and checking about 15 bookmarked web pages, which include various email inboxes, my Meta Business Suite inbox, ad campaign reports, news pages, my CRM, and more.

In Closing

These days, so much business is done through software tools and toolsets. And there is an overwhelming supply of incredible tools available, which grows every day. A big part of my work is knowing my tools and toolsets well. Sometimes, I even do a practice regimen to increase my comfort and familiarity with a new tool – such as 5 – 10 minutes per day. The big game-changer with tools lately is that many of them are incorporating AI features. This is leading to extraordinary advancements and huge potential for increased productivity.