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We take a dive into comparing Adpulse to Adalysis to help you choose which one is better suited to your agency
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When managing multiple accounts (or being a part of a team that manages multiple accounts), having instant visibility across the budgets and performance of those accounts and teams is crucial. It provides direction to prioritize work based on account performance across a portfolio of accounts, removes a significant amount of time spent on analysis, and provides those on the tools with a focused approach to their day.
Similar to TrueClicks, Adalysis has its own ‘Audit Score’ that it uses as a barometer of performance. This is similar to the TrueClicks score in that it’s based on the number of built-in Audit Checks the account has passed.
Out of interest, I compared the TrueClicks, Adalysis, and Optmyzr scores for two randomly chosen accounts to see how they would differ – it demonstrates quite clearly how differently each platform measures ‘success’.
Adalysis does provide a nice report based on the audit score, which is pretty comprehensive and quite transparent around what goes into it.
The Adalysis Dashboard includes Budget pacing on its dashboard, which is sortable, so you could sort these to work out which accounts are under or over-pacing, which is good. There is also custom tagging, so an Ad Account can be tagged by anything and then filtered using these – very similar to how Adpulse does it – so you can filter the Ad Account list by segment, great if you have a large team or a number of teams.
One thing that did strike me as odd was that to view a Microsoft Account you have to open a Microsoft-specific version of the platform in a new tab, so you’re not able to view all of your accounts on the single dashboard. Google Ads = app.adalysis.com/, while Microsoft ads = bing.adalysis.com/ – they are completely separated.
Adpulse’s Dashboard is more focused on being able to review portfolios of clients at a glance to instantly identify which are not performing to expectation and/or not budget pacing correctly, and therefore where the manager’s effort should be focussed. This provides instant insight into the performance of client segments, teams, or even specific team members and clients.
Also, with Adpulse you can manage Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon all in one interface – you can even create cross-platform budgets, something that is impossible to do in Adalysis.
Maximizing PPC budgets is a cornerstone of PPC management and most of the similar platforms have an offering here. The difference is how advanced it is and what value it provides the agency – is it just a reporting view or can it take action automatically?
Budget Alerts are critical to avoid potentially costly overspending on client accounts, or to be alerted when the campaigns are not spending and pacing has dropped below a certain threshold. This is the stuff that can ruin a client relationship, so accurate and timely checks/alerts are crucial.
The budget management capabilities within Adalysis are not as advanced as say, Adpulse or Shape.io, but do offer a decent amount of data with which to track the spend to date and projected spend. From an automated action point of view, you can pause the campaigns when an account hits a certain threshold, and can also create an alert when a threshold is met.
What is missing is the ability to create multiple budgets per ad account, ie. Brand, Display, etc, with pacing and KPIs for each of these. There also is no automatic pacing (Autopacing in Adpusle and CruiseControl in Shape.io). Finally, in Adalysis, budgets are only on a per-account, per-platform basis (with Microsoft having its own UI), so no cross-platform budgets or inclusion of other platforms like Facebook and Amazon Ads. All of which Adpulse does natively.
Managing spend is great, but that is only a part of successfully managing PPC accounts. Identifying and actioning optimizations is often the bulk of the time spent when working on a PPC account, so making the best use of your time is critical (aka reducing the amount of time creating and analyzing pivot tables)
Adalysis has very comprehensive performance data reporting, with some very cool visualizations, unfortunately, one limitation of how Adalysis presents its data is that it’s either at the Account level, Campaign Type Level, or specific campaign level – this means you can’t get analysis on groups of campaigns – ie, show me the performance of my Top of Funnel campaigns as a segment.
Within each account, you can then review data split into the various levers of optimization; Campaigns, Keywords, Search Terms, etc, with each of these having actions that can be done without leaving the platform; add negatives, adjust bids, etc. This is very similar to how Adpulse does it, but we pre-categorize each section. Rather than providing a lot of data for you to interpret, we automatically assign these important leavers of optimization, like Campaigns, Keywords, Devices, Search Terms, Asset Groups, and Products, into categories such as ‘Good Performance’ or ‘High Spend’. This means you can view all of your accounts, sort your Device performance by ‘Poor Performance’, and then – from within Adpulse – update Bid Adjustments for different devices and campaigns. Or you could view all of the Search Terms within your accounts, sort by ‘High Spend’, and add these as Negatives within each account – all within a few clicks.
One very cool feature that Adalysis has is the Performance Analyzer – this is a tool that lets you compare metrics across two time frames and gain insight into what are the key metrics that are causing the performance to improve or dip – it displays like an attribution tree so you can quickly see what drove the changes and identify major contributors. This is something we are scoping to add into Adpulse, so great to see that other platforms are doing similar.
Insights and Alerts generally fall into two categories when managing PPC campaigns: Alerts for when things have gone wrong and you need to know asap, and Insights (aka recommendations) that if actioned would improve the performance of the account.
These are the things that can prevent client churn or at the least mitigate some awkward client conversations.
What we refer to as Alerts and Insights in Adpulse, are the basis of an ‘audit’ in Adalysis, with the output of the audit being the ‘Audit Score’. Essentially this is a list of checks done against the account to look for things that need attention or improvement. Adalysis’ list of checks is pretty comprehensive, and some have actions you can do without leaving the platform, which is great. These checks are categorized, similar to Adpulse into Critical, High Priority, Optimization, and Custom.
Adalysis has custom ‘Performance Alerts’ (similar to ‘Performance Monitors’ in TrueClicks) which allow you to configure alerts based on metric thresholds and then receive notifications when one triggers – there are even pre-defined monitors for the basic stuff. This is great and pretty comprehensive, but we’d like to see it built out a bit more to include actions as opposed to just sending a notification, ie. when this happens, do this. (something we’re developing in our Rules Engine for Adpulse)
However, you can only access this data by clicking through to each account – there is no ability to view it at a portfolio level, which you can do in Adpulse. Also, you need to load a different UI to view Microsoft accounts.
Adpulse has baked-in checks that run automatically across your accounts, providing you with Critical Alerts – for when things go wrong – and Insights to help improve performance.
Critical Alerts cover things like ‘sending traffic to a 404’, or ‘Account had zero impressions yesterday’ (great when there is an issue with a client Credit Card and you catch it quickly) and you can configure the notifications to be sent via email or a chat app, like Slack or Teams.
Insights are more optimization-focused, with checks like ‘unexpected spend in location’, ‘Adgroups with high CPA’ and are categorized into ‘Opportunities’, ‘Best Practice’, and ‘Wasted Spend’.
Most clients have a diversified strategy with activity across multiple platforms, so being able to manage all of these in one interface is externally valuable.
Similar to TrueClicks, Adalysis only offers management of Google and Microsoft Ads, which will not appeal to most agencies and larger advertisers.
Adpulse offers Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta Ads, Amazon Ads, and in Q12024 LinkedIn.
While It’s typical for platforms in this space to have a sliding scale of price based on ad spend, Shape.io offers only one price for ‘up to US$250k/mth’ with everything above that being Price On Application (POA).
It does, however, have a free plan for one Client which could be good for a single advertiser, but not helpful for an agency.
| Pricing Tier (Ad Spend up to) | Adpulse (per month) | Adalysis (per month) |
| $3k | $30 | $149 (minimum) |
| $10k | $75 | $149 (minimum) |
| $50k | $150 | $149 (minimum) |
| $150k | $250 | $249 |
| $250k | $350 | $349 |
| $500k | $500 | $599 |
| $750k | $675 | POA |
| $1M | $850 | POA |
| >$1M | POA | POA |
Adalysis has a lot of data and you can see it’s been around for a while, so if you want to get super deep into a single Google Ads account it’s great. Outside the ‘Audit Score’ there’s no portfolio view to help prioritize which activity or optimizations will have the highest impact across your portfolio of accounts, something Adpulse has been built to have at its core. You really need to click into each account and analyze the data yourself to see which ones have poor-performing keywords, or high-spending device types, which is not a great use of time if you have lots of accounts to manage.
It has some great features, like the Performance Analyzer and you can do lots of actions from within the platform, but it’s a shame that Microsoft isn’t integrated into the same UI, as comparing performance across the two platforms is not easy. No Facebook support will be a negative for most integrated agencies as, like TrueClicks, Adalysis only supports Google and Microsoft, one better than Opteo which only supports Google.
Implementation of Adpulse at Yellow NZ has seen significant performance improvement across our accounts, delivering a much better ROI for our clients and a much more efficient management process for us
