5 underrated tools to boost your B2B PPC performance in 2027

Third-party tools are all the rage going into 2027 — across marketing. Your PPC toolkit can include established products and fast-rising options, including AI tools.

There are plenty of low-cost and even free tools available. If you’re considering a paid alternative to a free tool from Google or Meta, consider a vendor that doesn’t have a vested interest in convincing you to keep increasing your ad spend.

1. LLM: Claude

ChatGPT leads the pack when it comes to LLM user volume, but for marketing-related tasks like analyzing raw datasets and customer information, organizing agendas and quarterly reports, and surfacing trends, Claude is easily the most effective of the major LLM tools our team has tested.

We recommend a paid subscription if your team is eager to take full advantage of Claude’s capabilities, which improve by the week.

2. Multichannel attribution tool: Northbeam

Multichannel marketing attribution tools abound these days, whether they’re third-party martech tools or open-source tools from major platforms (including Meta’s Robyn and Google’s Meridian). 

While Northbeam is better known for its work helping B2C and ecommerce brands understand attribution, we like it for B2B brands for a few reasons:

• Its analysis covers the entire marketing mix, which helps brands understand cross-platform performance and interplay.
• It features customizable attribution models — critical because attribution models aren’t set-and-forget solutions, and no single model works for every brand. Some testing and tweaking is required, and attribution models should always align with business goals.
• Like other third-party attribution tools, Northbeam is an independent measurement tool. It ingests in-platform data but uses its own technology for attribution, meaning it doesn’t have inherent biases that affect holistic analysis.

Dig deeper: The top 10 tools for PPC management in 2027

3. Creative analytics tool: Motion

Motion is highly valuable for surfacing trends and insights from creative assets across ad platforms. With creative’s increasing influence as a growth lever as other campaign controls become automated, this is a big deal.

Motion was an excellent B2B campaign asset even before it raised the bar with Runneth, its new tool that connects to data sources and produces winning angles, static ad creatives, and more. Runneth is especially handy for moving insights out of individual LLM accounts and into a centralized resource where teams can collaborate more easily.

4. Creator sourcing tool: Billo

There are many creator/UGC marketplaces available, but Billo adds a performance data layer and handy ad variation functionality. It has a track record of B2B/SaaS success that can be seen in client results.

5. Google Ads Editor

Google Ads Editor has been around for years. Someone on your team is likely already well-versed in it.

A few features make Google Ads Editor a must-use tool. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of them:

• Bulk edits: Easily make large-scale changes across multiple campaigns and ads.
• Offline access: Work offline and upload changes later, allowing you to stay productive even without Wi-Fi.
• Enhanced custom rules: The last few versions of Google Ads Editor have introduced updates to custom rules that can alert advertisers to less-than-ideal settings in their campaigns. (They can also be ignored or turned off, if preferred.) Make sure you keep up on the range of rules and understand the benefits of each, as they could save you unforced campaign errors.

Dig deeper: The 6 best PPC keyword tools to elevate your ad campaigns

Tools on the watch list

These are a few tools our team is interested in but hasn’t yet fully adopted. It’s not a comprehensive list.

• Percuity, an AI ad agent, is a chat-based marketing assistant that connects to ad platforms. You can ask it to build campaigns or explain why performance is dropping. It understands ad concepts such as conversions better than other tools, but it works best on one platform at a time rather than with cross-channel incrementality. 
• Some members of our team use n8n for workflow automation, but I haven’t found a great use case for it yet. 
• Synter is an agent builder with a Google Tag Manager specialty. It has promise, but our team has yet to use it extensively.

Dive into any of the tools on this list and see what they can do for you. A new tool must be very easy to use and reliably good at its job, or it’s neither worth adopting nor investing in. One bad result can be enough for marketers getting flooded with tool offers to move on to the next option.

Good marketing teams need good tools

This list will undoubtedly change by the end of 2027 — possibly even midway through the year, given the current rate of change and innovation.

So, if you’re part of a robust team with bandwidth for testing (whether by individual or by committee), use that capacity for tool exploration and optimization. Good tool use will be one of the biggest performance marketing differentiators in the year ahead.