Acquisio vs. Basis DSP vs. Constant Contact

Acquisio is a really good platform to manage search and display campaigns, but it is probably not the best if you want to manage social advertising. If you are really savvy with reporting I would strongly recommend the use of Acquisio. You can make custom reports and send them automatically to your customers. That gives you more time to focus on optimization instead of reporting.

Basis DSP is well suited to every type of campaign imaginable. My firm specializes in outreach and education campaigns and we use Basis DSP in order to turn people out to events and to take specific actions. Basis has changed how we do business for the better. The hyperlocal campaigns, native campaigns, and audio campaigns have all added excellent additional capabilities to our tool box and have allowed us to complete very compelling campaigns for our clients.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is great when trying to target specific market segments. We typically like to segment our master list by region, but also have product segments, as well. They do provide pre-made segments to start you off too. We don't usually use their email builder, we find others to be more flexible, intuitive, and have more variety. We do prefer emailing from Constant Contact, however.

• Easy to create reports for digital campaigns
• Easy to make bulk changes to paid search campaigns
• Easy to ensure consistency of paid search campaigns across Google and Bing
• Ability to automate reports and email them to specific users on a scheduled basis
• Bid and budget automation for paid search campaigns is successful at hitting CPA targets

Incentivized

• Customer Service and Support is fantastic. Always willing to educate our team and help us get the most value out of the platform.
• The ad fraud features are great. Through DV360 we need to use a third-party which comes with additional costs.
• Easy to use platform.

Incentivized

• Constant Contact allows the users to send unlimited emails and just pay per list size.
• The software does welcome emails pretty well and allows you to set up all sorts of automation.
• The branded templates and starter templates are very useful and look good.

Incentivized

• Support isn't horrible, but it could be better.
• Report template creation could be a little easier. Right now, when you create a component, it goes to the bottom and you have to drag it up to where you want it to be. This feels inefficient.

Incentivized

• Managed service is a little pricey and tends to have slightly lower performance
• interface is very 90's, could use a real facelift purely from an aesthetic perspective
• Reports are continually being updated but could use some refinement in output for client-facing reports

Incentivized

• Sometimes some software provides outdated and useless features and functions, but this email marketing tool gives advanced kinds of functionalities with modern features.
• I like the ease of use of this platform also appreciate its professional customer support team.
• I am no longer desperate after getting this tool at my work.

Incentivized

I think the platform, with the latest release updates has a lot of great potential. The main decision, currently, is price and how that gets passed on to our clients. There has to be a conscious decision made on platform cost vs client spend and overall budget vs revenue.

Incentivized

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

It's solid but definitely a bit gliche and I feel could be easier to navigate

Incentivized

It's pretty basic, nothing is hidden and nothing ever moves so you can count on finding what you are looking for each day

Incentivized

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

Incentivized

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

Within the interface there is an instant chat support feature that you can use to get help right away without having to pick up the phone or look for an email address. We have have an account manager who responds to emails quickly and is always helpful. Anytime issues require further tech support we are kept up to date on the progress of the issue and they are usually resolved the same day.

We have a dedicated account rep. She makes it seem like we are her only client, she is very responsive, helps each time we have a question and understands our campaign goals. Anytime we need support, our rep is available either email or call and if she is not going to be available, she will let us know ahead of time to provide back up and inform them of our current campaigns so they can better assist us.

Incentivized

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

They handled it well.

Incentivized

There are a ton of tactics and strategy to implement in the DSP platform. There isn't really a selection of the different types of campaigns or tactics to choose from, you just have to learn as you go. Once you figure out the strategy and goal of the campaign it is very easy to implement the tactic and to achieve its goals.

Incentivized

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

Although Kenshoo might be a good fit for some agencies, Acquisio is an infinitely better fit for ours. Acquisio has allowed us to automate and scale in a way that simply would not have been possible with Kenshoo. Also, in my opinion, Acquisio offers a far superior bid optimization and budget management system.

Incentivized

Basis [DSP] has much better fraud control than SmartyAds DSP. Even though they do not have the amount of supply inventory as Smarty, they have much more controls for invalid traffic and bots which is very important to minimize discrepancies and issues with clients. Compared to other DSPs though, it lags on performance solutions.

Incentivized

We selected Constant Contact due to pricing constraints. However, if the pricing were to increase, we may look at alternative products that offer more features. We are looking for a product that will allow us to stand out from other organizations like ours that are appealing to the same customers—a product that will set our company apart from the others.

Incentivized

Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

• Acquisio has helped us to improve relationships with our PPC clients.
• The customizable reports have helped our consultants gain better insight into how to help their clients as well.
• The standards we were able to reach using this platform have enabled us to be the top provider in our market.

• Basis DSP allows us to reach users in many different places while controlling costs - access to major exchanges at a competitive bid rate allows us to provide a lot of added-value to clients without dramatically increasing the cost they incur.
• The team is friendly, helpful, and responsive, so we don't have a lot of situations where we're locked in campaign downtime due to a customer service issue with negative downstream impacts to the bottom line.
• Periodic reporting outages have resulted in campaigns that overpace and incur needless costs (however, this is certainly an exception, not the rule).

Incentivized

• I can't report hard numbers, however, being able to execute sales and marketing campaigns led to a noticeable increase in brand awareness in our industry.
• We were able to offer white-labeled email communication services to clients, which is not something that other administrators typically offer. This helped us win and retain business.