What performance marketing and SEO tools do you use?

The launch of a new website is certainly something to celebrate, but it isn’t the finish line. In fact, it’s the starting gun for our performance marketing team. Between ads, analytics, and SEO, they work continuously to keep our clients in a state of marketing momentum.

Handling and interpreting high volumes of data is a complex task, so we have an arsenal of tools we turn to when helping our customers improve their website presence.

Digital advertising tools we prefer

Search and Social Ads

Our motto is “if you can run ads there, we’ve done it.” We help clients identify the right advertising channel for their business and its goals. For a comprehensive list of the platforms we commonly run ads on, check out our digital advertising page.

StackAdapt

We are partnered with StackAdapt for their high-quality programmatic advertising placements and impressive targeting capabilities.

SEO & analytics tools we prefer

Semrush

Semrush is an all-encompassing SEO tool belt for monitoring website health and researching new opportunities.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider helps us to keep a vigilant eye on a website's SEO health by crawling the website and allowing us to see it as a search engine would.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is overwhelmingly the industry standard for website analytics. It is by far the best platform for measuring and reporting on website traffic. That being said, we haven't been in love with GA4 since its launch in 2023.

Google Looker Studio

Google's Looker Studio enables us to utilize data from Google Analytics, BigQuery, and various other data sources to create custom reports that can be shared with clients and their stakeholders. We will admit, it isn't the most user-friendly product on the market, but its powerful features and direct integration with GA4 make it our preferred choice for reporting.

Improvado + Google Big Query

Impravado is a powerful data connector that gives us the ability to capture data from our ad campaigns on various platforms and import it into Google Big Query, which is Google’s tool for managing and interpreting data.

Advertising and SEO tools we avoid

Google Display Network

Google has done a lot of things right in terms of advertising, but in our opinion, its display network is not one of them. We have found StackAdapt’s display placements to be significantly better than Google’s and therefore avoid using it for display advertising.

Google Search Partners

While Google Search Partners may promise to grow your reach beyond the Google platform, our experience has found that it is a waste of money. Check out our blog on Google Ads mistakes for more information.

LocaliQ

LocaliQ is an advertising platform that in our experience mostly brings in traffic from bots. We have made it our policy to avoid it so as to not waste our clients’ ad spend on bad traffic.

Full AI content creation

AI can be very helpful for improving a website’s SEO, but we avoid turning it loose for unsupervised content creation. The human touch is still necessary for creating content that is ideal for both human readers and algorithms.

For more information on how we use AI, view our running AI log.

We are always finding and testing new platforms to help our clients grow their visibility online. This list has our top choices, but that doesn’t mean that it's exhaustive. If you have a preferred technology that you would like us to try out, reach out to our ads team and we are happy to explore it.