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We take a dive into comparing Adpulse to Shape.io 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.
This is one of the unique features of Adpulse – being able to review portfolios of clients at a glance and 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.
Shape.io has a dashboard where you can see a list of budgets you have created and identifiers for spending ‘trend’ (which seems to be similar to budget pacing) that can be sorted. You can also filter this list by tags to segment the data, which helps when having multiple team members.
This will provide insight into budgets that are potentially over or under-spending, but it doesn’t have the additional metric of performance, therefore making it harder to prioritize where to focus your efforts.
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. It removes the hunt for ‘where to start’ and promotes a team that spends its time where it’s needed most.
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.
Of all the similar platforms, Shape.io has the closest offering to Adpulse with regard to Budget Management, with both offering more advanced capabilities needed to efficiently manage a large number of accounts.
Shape.io is primarily a budget management tool, with its homepage headline stating it’s a “PPC Budget Management Software Suite”, so naturally it’s feature-heavy when it comes to managing budgets.
Overspend protection is offered via its ‘AutoPilot’ feature, much the same way ‘AutoProtect’ works in Adpulse. It does however offer daily spend protection, which is something that, while not currently available in Adpulse, is on the roadmap.
Automatic daily budget adjustments are handled via ‘CruiseControl’ within Shape, a feature similar to ‘AutoPacing’ in Adpulse, where Budgets can be automatically increased or decreased to keep pacing as close to 100% as possible. There are a couple of differences between CruiseControl and AutoPacing:
As Shape.io is purely a Budget Management tool, it does have Budget Alerts that can be set to differing thresholds for each budget, which is great, but lacks any checks or insights that go beyond that. These alerts do have to be set on each budget, one by one, which can make managing and maintaining them complex – in Adpulse you set alerts across a portfolio of accounts, using a dynamic selector like tags, account name ‘contains’, etc, which makes it much easier to manage.
In addition to budget spend alerts, Adpulse also offers custom budget pacing alerts – great to apply to a portfolio of accounts to get notified if pacing gets too low, or too high.
Additionally, all Budget Alerts are applied to portfolios of accounts, so one team member could have Budget Spend alerts trigger at 90% for their accounts, while another more cautious team member might want theirs at 70% and 80%. This makes managing alerts across a large number of accounts much easier – instead of setting them at a per budget level
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)
This one is a bit one-sided as Shape.io doesn’t offer any optimizations, it is purely a budget management platform, whereas Adpulse is a more complete PPC Management Platform.
Adpulse automatically assigns the 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.
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.
As Shape.io is purely a Budget Management tool, it lacks any checks or insights that go beyond managing budgets.
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.
Shape.io excels in the number of platforms available, with most of the commonly used platforms. Adpulse has a slightly more limited selection (Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon) with additional platforms on the roadmap for 2024.
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).
On 31 March 2024, Shape.io removed their free tier and now pricing is only available via a call with a salesperson. The below pricing is reflective of what their pricing was prior to this change.
| Pricing Tier (Ad Spend up to) | Adpulse (per month) | Shape.io (per month) |
| $3k | $30 | $499 |
| $10k | $75 | |
| $50k | $150 | |
| $150k | $250 | |
| $250k | $350 | |
| $500k | $500 | POA |
| $750k | $675 | POA |
| $1M | $850 | POA |
| >$1M | POA | POA |
Shape.io is great if you need to manage budget management across a large number of platforms, but falls short once you want to go beyond that. It lacks performance and optimization features that all the other PPC Management platforms include, plus its lack of pricing tiers means it could get quite expensive.
Adpulse’s budget management is so powerful it’s worth the fee alone. No other PPC management tool tool I’ve seen comes even close.
