Regardless of the size and characteristics of the agency, we’ve distinguished five categories of top advertising agency tools to help with optimizing the performance of the business from the inside as well as the outside.

Performance Marketing Agency Tools for Advertising

Marketing agencies who have a lot of aces up their sleeve are more likely to surprise clients with creative ways of finding new audiences and converting them into paying customers. While most consumers hate advertising, without it brands don’t stand a chance of survival. That’s why advertising agency software for smoother and more efficient audience outreach is the first position on this list.

NewProgrammatic

NewProgrammatic is a performance marketing platform that allows for acquiring customers before they complete entering their search query. NewProgrammatic ad formats rely on contextual targeting without involving cookies or other personal identifiers. In addition to meeting the highest standard of brand safety, they seamlessly connect potential customers with a brand in the right place at the right time –  in the search bar.

NewProgrammatic can be a great addition to other forms of advertising but as an underutilized search ad format, it can carry a successful campaign as a standalone advertising strategy. 

As a provider of advertising solutions, NewProgrammatic gives your agency access to hundreds of thousand users daily at an ad display price starting from $0.01. You can learn more about NewProgrammatic by booking a call with an expert or reading one of the case studies. 

Socital 

Socital provides a set of tools for data collection, email database segmentation, conversion optimization, targeting, and personalization. It’s an ad agency software aimed at e-commerce businesses. Socital helps in managing user journeys from start to finish by collecting data in a GDPR-friendly manner and providing personalized pop-up messages which, in turn, can help reduce cart abandonment.

Socital offers different types of campaigns, depending on the needs of the brand. Naturally, pop-ups and contact forms are fully editable with a variety of ready-made templates to streamline the process of creating campaigns. For the more demanding ad agencies, Socital integrated with the majority of popular email marketing platforms.

The pricing of Socital depends on the website’s pageviews and it ranges from a free version to an Enterprise plan for $157 per month (billed annually).

Drip

Drip is an ad agency software for managing and segmenting mailing lists. The functionality of Drip focuses mainly on running email and SMS marketing campaigns based on precise audience segmentation and 1st party data. The complementary form templates and automation workflows are what makes Drip one of the best advertising agency tools for growing e-commerce businesses.

To make project management easier, Drip integrates with a wide range of e-commerce tools including such popular solutions as Shopify and WooCommerce, and reaching far more specific tools such as Podia (for creating online courses) or Wishlist Member (for gating websites behind membership tiers).

Drip membership depends on the number of customers on your mailing list. Small mailing lists of up to 500 members have pricing of $19 while lists with over 130,000 contacts will require a plan for $1.499 per month or higher. There are additional costs depending on how many SMS messages are planned to be sent out each month.

SendPulse

SendPulse is a tool for creating chatbots for Facebook, Instagram, Viber, Telegram, and WhatsApp as well as for sending emails, SMS, and push notifications. The cloud-based ad agency software operates in more than 200 countries and allows for full automation of a message-dispatch schedule. What’s more, the suite of marketing tools has a drag and drop editor as well as a system for nurturing leads that can be automatically triggered by events.

Chatbots, however, might be SendPulse’s most important feature. The interactive flows are not only a form of providing efficient customer support. They can also serve as a means of streamlining the shopping experience or engaging with customers mentioning the brand on social media.

SendPulse has varied pricing strategies depending on what features are needed. There is a free plan providing up to 3 chatbots with limited variables. The plans are made to grow alongside the business and a plan with a subscriber count of 50,000 costs €143.20 per month (billed annually).

Pitchbox

Pitchbox is an advertising agency software that helps with connecting with influencers and promoting content across various channels. It’s aimed at agencies with extensive outreach programs – not only does it automate the outreach process, but it also has a reliable keyword search feature that makes finding bloggers, publishers, and influencers easier than ever.

What’s more, Pitchbox has many integrations and its functionality grows beyond outreach to the general area of content and email marketing. Accordingly, the campaign dashboard, white-label reports, and pipeline provide the necessary project management tools.

While the pricing is only available on request, there are case studies, a knowledge base, and an attentive support team to answer any questions regarding the product. 

Project management and agency management software

Planning and management software is the basis of any business, not just ad agencies. While there is a large number of popular solutions on the market, their functionality is often similar with minor differences in workflow management. Here are ten tried and tested contenders for the best advertising agency tools for management.

Monday

Monday is a project management platform offering task management, resource management, and time-tracking features that can make team collaboration as smooth as possible. What’s more, users have access to a timeline, dependencies, and unlimited boards all contained in a user-friendly dashboard.

The Monday marketing software is aimed at a variety of businesses from marketing to IT and HR. The pricing depends on the plan and on the number of team members. Individual plan for up to two users is free while the Pro plan with more extensive functionality costs $16 per seat. 

Productive

Productive is an ad agency management platform with tools and features that check all the boxes for managing each project from start to finish. Apart from basic functionality such as time-tracking and project management, it focuses most heavily on financial reporting. While task management lies at its core, Productive is an agency software ideal for budgeting and keeping track of salaries, profit margins, rates, and revenue.

Productive offers a 14-day free trial period and after that pricing depends on the number of users and on the plan tier. The standard plan starts at $12.50, and an advanced Enterprise plan starts at 100+ users and has custom pricing.

Forecast

Forecast is an all-in-one advertising agency software for task management, team collaboration, and business intelligence. What makes it unique are the capable AI features for project automation and resource management. While Forecast is a capable marketing tool it’s most suitable for web development and IT-leaning businesses due to the built-in cooperative features for Agile, Scrum, or Kanban business processes.

Forecast offers a free trial and three plans which differ in features such as the available integrations. The simplest Lite plan starts at 27€ per seat a month for a minimum of 10 seats. The Plus plan offers full customization.

Wrike 

Wrike is an all-around project management software with supreme organization features. It’s suitable for both small and large marketing agencies and the available integrations (Salesforce, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) make collaboration and file sharing a breeze, especially for creative teams. Wrike makes it easy to assign tasks and manage real-time collaboration while remaining user-friendly and intuitive.

Wrike has both a free plan for teams that are only getting started and a free trial for any of their available plans. The cheapest plan comes at $9.80 per user, billed monthly. More advanced plans offer many customization options and are priced individually.

Mavenlink

Mavenlink is an ad agency software with a holistic approach to running a marketing business. The tool specializes in resource management and project management and offers extensive reporting tools and integrations with the most popular business suits. While it’s project managers who gain the most by picking Mavenlink, this task management program has capabilities to help a wide range of specialists as well as clients. 

Mavenlink doesn’t publicly disclose its prices and before reaching out to them, you have to specify the type, size, and geolocation of your company.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a popular project management tool suitable not only for advertising agencies but for a variety of other industries as well. Thanks to the versatility of ClickUp, it provides some unique capabilities such as a widget notepad or easy video recording and sharing. Both internal and external communication is a big focus of the tool, which makes it suitable for advertising agencies of all sizes.

ClickUp has a free plan for personal use and a variety of tiers for teams. The prices start at $5 per person and reach upwards of $19 per person for larger agencies with multiple teams. 

AirTable

AirTable is a cloud-based marketing project management tool that’s based on spreadsheets. It’s aimed at midsize businesses or marketing teams within larger organizations. This ad agency software has the power and functionality of a database but the intuitive interface and easiness of use make it useful for the entire team (not only members with database expertise). Integrations with Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive as well as specialized plans make useful additions for departments from and beyond advertising.

Airtable offers a free plan for individuals and small teams offering basic functionality and a limit of records and attachments. The lowest-paid plan starts at $10 per person monthly (billed yearly) and the enterprise plan with higher limits has custom pricing depending on the needs of the ad agency.

SmartSheet

SmartSheet can be an ad agency management software but it can also help manage projects from all types of industries. Just as the option described above (AitTable), this tool bears many similarities with a spreadsheet with additional features and functionality. The customizable dashboards provide a solid foundation for task management and collaboration, workflow, and reports. The equally potent automation features make it an ideal solution for all kinds of professional service businesses. 

The pricing starts at $7 per user a month (billed yearly) for the Pro plan and $25 per user a month (billed yearly) for the Business plan. There are custom pricing options with advanced functionality for larger businesses.

Float

Float is one of the best advertising agency software due to its simplicity. It has everything that’s needed in an agency management system and what makes it unique is the user-friendliness and clarity in reading data such as time-tracking and workload management. Team members can also use the iOS or Android apps for easier access and Slack or email notifications can keep them up to date in real-time.

Float has a 30-day free trial and after that, there are two options – Resource planning for $6 per person per month (billed annually), or Resource Planning + Time Tracking for $10 per person per month (billed annually).

Hygger

Hygger is said to be the perfect project management option between a simple board such as Trello, and a complex solution such as Jira. It can be used by digital marketing agencies but it’s limited to creative teams when it comes to features for collaboration. In addition to standard project management functionality, the software has extensive options for prioritization, product strategy, and client communication.

Hygger has a free version with unlimited users, boards, projects, and 100MB of storage. The Standard paid version costs $7 per user per month (billed annually) and the Enterprise plan starts at $14 per user per month and includes such advanced features as unlimited API access.

Data and reporting marketing agency tools

While agency management program is essential to team collaboration and task management, in order to track the performance of marketing campaigns, additional reporting software might be required. Here is a list of useful tools for tracking and gathering data on your marketing and business operations. 

Improvado

Improvado is a marketing data aggregation tool used to create dashboards and reports for both internal and external use. It’s cloud-hosted but has an option for on-premise hosting which makes it perfect for both big and small advertising agencies. 

Improvado is integrated with many advertising channels including Facebook ads, Google Ads, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. The available integrations provide superior insights into a wide range of campaigns and the flexibility of data aggregation and reporting meet the requirements of the most unique advertising agency needs.

Although the pricing is not publicly available, there is a contact form with some basic information that needs to be filled out to receive the pricing. There is also a free trial version available, however, as Improvado is not a self-service platform, it’s necessary to schedule a demo in order to set up a test account.

Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a cloud-based advertising agency tool that helps in creating and automating marketing reports using predefined templates and various data sources. What Whatagraph does especially well is establishing brand identity by allowing businesses to white-label the reports by dressing data in elements of branded design. 

Reports can be automated and notifications can be sent out on a scheduled basis. What’s more, there is a report-building feature that can make creating client reports a quick and painless process. Additionally, the extensive integrations cover just about any tool or traffic source that might be needed by an agency. Overall, this is a solid choice for small to medium-sized agencies with regular needs.

Whatagraph offers three plans. The lowest, professional plan with very limited integrations starts at $119 per month, the premium plan with limited integrations costs $279 and the growth plan with all integrations and public API access costs $699 per month (billed annually). 

AgencyAnalytics

AgencyAnalytics is an all-around tool for gathering and analyzing insights from multiple client accounts and clients’ marketing channels in a single dashboard. It provides an advertising agency with the possibility to connect and monitor the top SEO tools, PPC platforms, social media, email marketing services, and call tracking providers in one place.

AgencyAnalytics focuses on providing a holistic view of all advertising agency operations. The possibility to deliver client reports seamlessly and based on an automated schedule makes working with numerous users on multiple projects a specialty of this advertising agency software. There are some white-labeling options available as well.

Pricing depends on the number of clients and the professional services offered by the agency. For basic functionality, AgencyAnalytics charges $10 per client campaign. For additional functions and a larger client base, it’s $15 per month per client campaign (billed monthly).

Hubspot CRM Suite

Hubspot CRM Suite might be one of the best advertising agency software when it comes to nurturing leads and analyzing business metrics. It’s a solution that focuses most heavily on customer relationship management and collaboration. The Hubspot platform, however, has much more to offer in each of the plans that are aimed at particular functions of a business. 

The Hubspot CRM Suite is a relatively expensive but extremely powerful tool that every big advertising agency will grow to need. However, it is possible to purchase any of the more specialized plans, e.g. designed for sales or customer service, or marketing. Each option contains tools necessary to gain insight into existing processes, be it email automation, sales funnel creation or lead management.

The pricing depends on the CRM Suite starting at €41 per month but additional charges are counted for more than 2 users or a larger contact base than 1000 users. The enterprise solution aimed at big agencies starts at €3,680 and again, additional charges need to be taken into account based on the size of the staff and the customers. 

Tableau

Tableau can help a marketing agency collect data from multiple source points, not only strictly related to marketing. Integrations with SQL databases, spreadsheets, cloud apps like Google Analytics and Salesforce make Tableau the ideal solution for dissecting all data in one place. 

This advertising agency software has extensive capabilities for creating professional reports in visual or interactive ways. What’s more, there is a fully functional app, to make accessing data much easier. Of course, the features of Tableau also include presenting data in a clean illustrative format – making sure it’s understood by the least data-savvy team members. 

Tableau has a role-based licensing format which means that the advertising agency can pay less for team members that are only viewing, vs. team members that are creating. There are three options: creator, explorer, and viewer. What’s more, the pricing depends on whether Tableau is hosted locally or in the cloud. 

Search Engine Optimization ad agency tools

Another type of advertising agency software that is optional but highly recommended is an SEO tool. Depending on the responsibility of a business, the SEO tools can carry the weight of keeping a business site relevant and discoverable or simply help with brand building and content creation. Here are the best advertising agency tool picks for a variety of purposes. 

Semrush

Semrush is a multipurpose SEO tool that doesn’t need an introduction. Its capabilities cover deep insights into Google searches as well as Google PPC advertising. Apart from that, it offers a content marketing toolkit for keyword research and competitor analysis and unique back-link analysis features that are not available on other platforms.

Agencies that deal with both SEO and paid advertising might find Semrush to be the perfect tool. The size of the databases, high limits for daily reporting, and exhaustive insights into CPC competition data (including campaign planning tools) are only some of the tools that make it worth the investment. 

Semrush has a variety of plans starting from a Pro option with limited functionality at $119.95 per month and ending at a Business plan for $449.95 with high limits and a wholly functional marketing platform. There can be additional charges e.g. for an increased number of users, white-labeling SEO reports, or specific advanced features, however, before deciding on the tool there is a free 7-day trial of the two lower plan tiers.

SimilarWeb

Similarweb is a website analytics & competitive traffic intelligence platform. It’s a tool that offers the most in terms of market intelligence and web measurement. The data is gathered by Similarweb’s browser extensions and provides the best insights into any website of interest for your advertising agency.

While gathering intelligence on the competitors is the first step to creating a successful business, SimilarWeb is a powerful tool for delving deeper into their strategies. Other features, including ad creative research or keyword research, makes SimilarWeb an ideal solution for agencies who look to outdo their competition in terms of quality website traffic.

SimilarWeb offers three plans for marketing agencies. The plans have the same functionality but differ in limits and granularity of insights. The simplest, Essential plan starts at $249 billed monthly, the advanced plan comes at $449 and the unlimited plan with no restrictions and available add-ons has custom pricing.

Ahrefs 

Ahrefs is an all-around SEO tool with the most powerful backlinking capabilities that provides insights into various search engines such as Google, Amazon, YouTube, Yahoo, or Bing. This ad agency software can also be especially useful when gaining intelligence on the most popular content on a given topic. 

While most SEO tools cover similar topics and have the same most crucial functions, Ahrefs especially excels at finding new backlinking opportunities and monitoring the performance of the currently active backlinks. What’s more, Ahrefs gives agencies more control of internal linking with a function to automatically generate link ideas. 

Let’s not forget that on top of the powerful linking capabilities, Ahrefs is one of the two most capable SEO software on the market. The pricing starts at $99 with a single-seat, billed monthly, and ends at $999 with 5 seats. For the two lowest plans, there is a week-long trial for $7. 

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is an SEO ad agency software with broad functionality but specializing in keyword research. It provides robust reporting capabilities and offers unique features of website, issue, and digital asset management. 

Moz Pro is intuitive and easy to use which makes it accessible and pleasant to interact with. It’s a capable tool allowing for deep keyword research and it manages to provide unique insights while remaining comparably cheap. 

The pricing starts at $99 billed monthly for the lowest plan and ends at $599 billed monthly for the premium plan. Purchasing a yearly subscription comes with a 20% discount and there is a free trial for the medium plan ($179) that lasts 30 days.

Majestic

Majestic is the best advertising agency software for backlink management. While other tools mentioned in this section provide an array of SEO functionality, Majestic focuses on two things only – backlinking and indexing. 

For an ad agency that needs to focus more heavily on backlinking, Majestic can provide the perfect set of laser-focused tools. With a backlink history function and insights into competitor site information, the reports generated by this tool will provide a holistic view of the site’s connections and influences. 

The pricing for the LITE plan starts at $49.99, however, the functionality offered by this plan is rather limited. The PRO plan for $99.99 per month has more comfortable limits and functionality. For more demanding agencies, there is an API plan with considerable limits and full Majestic API access. 

Design advertising agency software

Last but not least, digital marketing software for design tasks is an integral part of every agency. That type of program might focus on team collaboration, file sharing, time tracking, or simply on creating visual assets. Either way, design and web development are agency branches that require their own software and these are our top pics.

Asana

Asana is a digital workspace for project management that can be especially useful in orchestrating collaboration between teams working on visual assets. The extensive features for workflow management along with goals, dependencies, reporting, to-do lists, and progress tracking make it suitable not only for design work but also for the whole marketing campaign creation process.

What’s more, Asana has detailed organizational capabilities all contained within a clean and user-friendly UI. There is also a high level of customization – custom templates and fields allow for creating the exact kind of custom workflows that are needed by an organization.

Asana has a free basic plan that has unlimited essentials and basic reporting. More advanced plans such as Business for €10.99 per month, or Business for €24.99 per month (billed annually) are options with more advanced features for reporting and workflows. There is also a custom Enterprise plan available.

Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a different kind of ad agency software as it’s a tool for creating vector graphics and animation. While Adobe Illustrator is not suited for managing projects from start to finish, its core features take into account team collaboration on design files and projects. 

Every ad agency needs software for creating digital assets, be it logos, animations, or banners. Adobe Illustrator is just the right tool for that. It allows for endless possibilities in creating and manipulating vector graphics all within a single platform with additional access from mobile devices.

Adobe Illustrator can be purchased separately for $20.99 per month, billed annually. It can also be purchased as a part of a yearly subscription to Creative Cloud for $52.99 per month.

FileStage

FileStage is a content review platform that puts the most emphasis on a smooth approval workflow. The platform allows users to bring all files, versions, and comments into one platform where both team members and external stakeholders can review and approve tasks. 

For agencies handling repetitive tasks, FileStage offers structured and automated workflows that can be shared across all clients. The file-sharing options and integrations with popular business suites (such as Google, Asana, or Basecamp) make collaboration on designs, videos, websites, articles, and community outreach easier.

FileStage has different pricing tiers depending on the size of the ad agency. The Essential plan starts at €9 per month per seat, however, it allows for only one active project at a time. The Advanced plan with more capabilities comes out at €19 per month per seat and the Professional plan starts at €39 with a limit of 25 active projects and significantly more storage space.

Ceros

Ceros is a digital experience platform where ad agencies can create interactive landing pages, graphical eBooks, lead generation forms, and infographics without any coding. However, the simple-sounding drag and drop program has a lot more to offer.

Ceros offers creative agencies the possibility of creating white label web designs without having a dedicated web development team. No HTML knowledge is required to operate Ceros and the capabilities are not lacking. Team collaboration and design features make it possible to create professional web assets and the numerous integrations help in tracking, automation, and analytics.

Ceros does not have publicly available pricing.

BugHerd

BugHerd is an issue tracking and project management software for web developers and designers. The most crucial feature of BugHerd is the ability to leave comments on a staged website which allows for the highest precision in team collaboration.

Ad agencies and marketing teams working heavily on website development can not only receive visual feedback and precisely positioned comments but can also access extra information in the form of metadata straight from the staged site. What’s more, the feedback is sent directly to a task management board where it can be picked up and reworked accordingly.

BugHerd has a 14-day free trial. After that, the standard plan for 5 members costs $39 per month, the premium plan for 25 members costs $129, and the Deluxe plan for 50 members costs $229, with additional users for each plan available for $8 per user (billed monthly). There is a custom plan available for agencies with a high number of members.

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