10 best PPC monitoring tools for tracking Google Ads performance

Monitoring is the part of Google Ads nobody budgets time for. Setting up a campaign is a project with an end; keeping an eye on it is forever. Most small businesses look at the account when the bill arrives, which is the one moment it is too late to do anything about the month that just happened.

The tools below split into three kinds: things already inside Google's products that cost nothing, dashboards that show you more than the Google Ads interface does, and software that watches the account and tells you when something needs attention. Pick from each group rather than buying one of everything.

1. Google Ads notifications and alerts

Free, built in, and mostly switched off by default. Google Ads can email you when a campaign is limited by budget, when an ad is disapproved, when a payment fails, and when it notices a sharp change in spend or conversions. Turn the lot on. It costs nothing and catches the failures that quietly stop ads running.

2. Google Ads change history

Also free. Every change in the account is logged with who made it and when. If performance fell off a cliff on a Tuesday, change history tells you what was touched on Monday. Check it before you check anything else.

3. Google Analytics 4

Ads tells you what happened in the ad; Analytics tells you what happened on your website after the click. Linked properly, it shows which campaigns bring visitors who actually enquire or buy, and which bring visitors who leave in four seconds. If the two tools disagree about how many enquiries you got, your tracking needs fixing before your ads do.

4. Looker Studio

Google's free dashboard builder. It pulls Google Ads and Analytics data into one page you can read on a phone, and it refreshes itself. The set-up takes an afternoon or a template, and after that it is the easiest way to glance at the week without logging into Google Ads.

5. Insyt

Our own product, so weigh the placement. Insyt checks the whole account every week rather than waiting for you to look: ads, budgets, search terms, tracking and the counting behind it. It sends instant alerts when something breaks and a short weekly note saying what changed and what it saved. The difference from a dashboard is that it also fixes what it finds, with your approval on Core or automatically on Autopilot.

6. Opteo

A paid monitoring and optimisation tool for Google Ads. It watches performance continuously, flags anomalies, and lines up improvements for one-click approval. Google Ads only; nothing on the Analytics side.

7. Optmyzr

An agency-grade tool whose monitoring features include budget pacing, account audits and rule-based alerts across many accounts. More than one small account needs, and priced for teams.

8. Adalysis

A practitioner tool known for its alerting: it tells you when Quality Score drops, when an ad test has a winner, when an account has drifted. Assumes you know what to do with the alert.

9. Supermetrics

Not a monitor by itself, but the plumbing that feeds ad data into spreadsheets and dashboards. If you want your Google Ads numbers in a sheet every morning, or in Looker Studio with less fuss, this is the connector most people use.

10. Microsoft Clarity

Free session recordings and heatmaps for your website. It does not monitor the ads, but it shows you what the people the ads bring actually do on the page: where they stop, what they tap, where they leave. Half of "the ads aren't working" turns out to be a landing page problem, and this is how you see it.

What to monitor, whatever you use

Four things, every week: spend against budget, the search terms your money went on, how many enquiries were counted and whether that number matches reality, and whether every ad is still approved and running. A tool that checks those four and tells you when one is wrong is doing the job. Everything else is reporting.

If you would rather the checking were done for you, start with the free check below. It reads your website and shows what would be fixed first, with no sign-up and no card.