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We take a dive into comparing Adpulse and TrueClicks 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.
TrueClicks has a proprietary ‘TrueClicks Score’ which is a percentage out of 100 assigned to each imported account, with a higher score being better. This is a ‘custom-weighted score to express how well the account is following best practices, based on the most recent audit of that account.” – which provides a level of prioritization and portfolio visibility as lower scores would mean the account has not been audited well against their best practice checks, and therefore probably needs some love.
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’.
The Adpulse Account Performance Dashboard also highlights which accounts to prioritize across a portfolio of clients, however, Adpulse uses performance metrics rather than best practice checks like TrueClicks. This means that an account that’s not performing well or is not budget pacing as it should be is easily identified in Adpulse, whereas in TrueClicks it could be receiving a good score just because it follows best practice.
Both TrueClicks and Adpulse use Tags to enable users to group accounts into teams or portfolios that make sense, however in TrueClicks those tags need to be applied per page which could get a little cumbersome. By comparison, the Tags in Adpulse persist throughout the entire app, so the entire experience is filtered by how to set up your tagging – user, team, vertical, important, etc.
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.
TrueClicks does have a dedicated Budget Pacing page where you can create budgets for one or more Google Ad Accounts. You can then choose the campaigns to include within the budget using several filters; All, Campaigns Labels, Name contains, Name doesn’t contain, and Campaign type – which is great, but it’s a shame they can currently only manage budget pacing for Google Ads.
Adpulse has the same functionality, and in addition, you can also create cross-platform budgets, ie. Google and Facebook or Google, Microsoft, and Amazon within a single budget. Great if you have a single budget for say, awareness across multiple platforms.
For Budget Alerts, TrueClicks will email you when your budgets exceed the thresholds you specify for each budget. You do need to indicate that ‘you’ own the budget for it to send you an email – TrueClicks has a concept of ‘My Account’ so you can flag certain Ad Accounts as ‘yours’ – you can then filter the pages to only show ‘your’ account, similar to how tags work in Adpulse.
TrueClicks is missing automatic budget pacing (AutoPacing in Adpulse, CuriseControl in Shape.io) which is a massive time saver if you’re managing a lot of accounts and pacing is important to you.
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)
TrueClicks has a new feature called Performance Monitoring where you can create custom fluctuation or threshold monitors to, erm… monitor various metrics of your accounts. It’s like a spikes/drops alert where you can specify the accounts, the metrics (CTR, Conversions, etc), and then a spike/drop threshold. When an account triggers one of the monitors you can configure it to email a group of email addresses.
This is a pretty cool way to keep across important metrics and be alerted when something has had a big spike or drop that would impact the performance of your accounts. It’d be great if they had actions that could be applied as a result.
Adpulse approaches this a slightly different way by automatically assigning the important levers of optimization, like the performance of individual Campaigns, Keywords, Devices, Search Terms, Asset Groups, and Products, into categories such as ‘Good Performance’ or ‘High Spend’. You could, for example, view all Device performances across all clients by ‘Poor Performance’, and then – from within Adpulse – update Bid Adjustments instantly to drive better results. Or – if you need to slow down spend – 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. Essentially Adpulse allows you to find and fix performance issues in bulk, whereas TrueClicks gives you a simple (but flexible) alert system that works one alert at a time.
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.
TrueClicks has Budget Spend alerts that can be configured with multiple thresholds and it’s Performance Monitoring, which is kinda like a customizable alert engine – which means it scores pretty highly for alerts.
When you click into an Ad Account you can view the checks that TrueClicks automatically runs against your accounts. These are split into Monitoring and Auditing, and then into more broken-down checks and recommendations which are to be expected in PPC Management Software such as this. Quite a few include actions that would perform an action in Google Ads – meaning you don’t have to leave the platform to ‘fix’ it.
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’.
Plus, coming soon in Adpulse is a Rules Engine, where you can configure automations based on metrics or keywords and search terms that can send an alert or complete an action based on custom criteria. This will, of course, be cross-platform and we’re pretty excited about getting out there.
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.
True Clicks offers Google and Microsoft support only (Google Ads only for Budget Pacing), so while slightly better than Opteo (which only offers Google Ads), they are not as comprehensive as Adpulse, Shape, or Optmyzr.
TrueClicks has a generous free plan for customers with less than $50k/mth, which could suit some small agencies. After that, their pricing per tier is similar to Adpulse, but you get slightly less spend per tier.
| Pricing Tier (Ad Spend up to) | Adpulse (per month) | True Clicks (per month) |
| $3k | $30 | Free |
| $10k | $75 | Free |
| $50k | $150 | Free |
| $150k | $250 | $249 (up to $100k) |
| $250k | $350 | $349 (up to $200k) |
| $500k | $500 | $549 |
| $750k | $675 | $699 |
| $1M | $850 | POA |
| >$1M | POA | POA |
TrueClicks has a great offering and goes deep in its auditing and monitoring – meaning you can get great insights for each Ad Account. Its budget management is not as advanced as the likes of Adpulse, Shape.io, or Optmyzr but it does offer basic pacing for Google Ads.
Its custom performance monitoring is probably the highlight for me and it’s nicely executed but it lacks the ability to do an action from the output of the monitor – something common in the other platforms.
Its free plan for spend under $50k a month is very generous and will work out perfectly for smaller agencies, but the limitation of only being able to do Budget Management for Google Ads Accounts will limit those agencies that work across more platforms.
The smart budget management capability is a game changer for our agency – no other software provider does what Adpulse does!
