Acquisio is a performance marketing solution that enables digital marketers to manage, report, and optimize on all digital advertising initiatives in one easy-to-use dashboard, across search, social, and display. According to the vendor, this solution provides the most powerful optimization algorithm on the market which enables users to set more accurate bids and deliver more clicks at a lower cost per click. The vendor’s value proposition is that this unique high frequency, predictive…
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Marin Software
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Marin Software is a cloud-based cross-channel advertising campaign management platform which integrates many tools and functions, and it is the name of the company in San Francisco that issues the software. Marin touts cross-display (including mobile-optimized) advertisement retargeting, social marketing management, and many other tools to manage complex marketing and paid-advertising (PPC) efforts.
A free trial of this extensive platform is available. Marin Software maintains a client list…
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Pricing
Acquisio
Marin Software
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acquisio
Marin Software
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Acquisio
Marin Software
Considered Both Products
Acquisio
Verified User
Strategist
Chose Acquisio
Marin and Acquisio both have their advantages. Marin has an easier editor platform to make quick bid and budget changes along with a reporting system that has the ability to do web queries for excel reporting, but the platform lacks intuitive or helpful automation. Whereas, …
Marin is great for smaller teams, but lacks in the sexy reporting. Kenshoo is the closest rival and a little more difficult to set up, but once you get it running it's great.
We looked at other players like Marin and Kenshoo but found them to be overpriced and service to be lacking. Acquisio is very customer responsive, and the product is priced right.
Marin Software stacks the highest against all the above listed products. It provides significant amounts of data for the account all in an easy to use user interface. While Acquisio provides a better KPI tool Marin provides more details at a faster rate. When using multiple …
Verified User
Program Manager
Chose Marin Software
I evaluated Kenshoo, Acquisio, and Efficient Frontier at the same time as Marin Software. While all platforms had unique capabilities and areas where their functionality purportedly outperformed the others - Marin seemed to achieve the right balance for all of our needs (i.e. …
Acquisio is ideal for marketing agencies, especially those that focus on serving a specific market. If your Agency has access to client data, depending on the data, Acquisio's software could be a powerful way to deliver that data in the form of online ads. Acquisio might be too powerful for a small business looking to manage campaigns in-house.
It's well suited when you have to integrate it with another data source, like an FTP for example. The dimensions you can assign to campaigns or ad group levels help for easier performance management and reporting. What makes it difficult is that everytime you need to update anything on the account, you can't use the publisher but have to do it through Marin. This makes the whole process very time consuming and causes more mistakes. Also if you have paused anything on the publisher and you don't remember to sync marin after, all changes on the publisher will get lost if you make new changes on marin
Provides multiple methods of viewing and sharing campaign data. It is definitely an upgrade from the basic PPC reports. Fully customizable and new features are being added regularly.
Acquisio now provides support for the importation of the video campaign data. This saves her company lots of time as we used to have to do this process manually.
Aquisio now has instant chat support in the platform which saves a lot of time as you can get quick answers to any problems you may be having.
Marin is a self-serve platform. You can tailor your campaigns per your preference/convenience/needs. You can customize your view, see % changes, create custom columns depending on your Key Performance Indicators, and set any sort of dimensions and labels that will help you filter for your campaigns on a daily basis.
Bidding and changes to destination URLs can be done through mass edits within the UI, without having to upload bulk-sheets. You push any changes from Marin to the Engines, and can also pull in your changes from Bing/AdWords engines by syncing your campaigns as well. The system will not publish anything you do not manually post until Midnight PST. You can copy paste straight from your excel bulksheet into the uploading tool (or upload the document through unicode text).
The Administrative log keeps track of all changes, and keeps users (through their logins) accountable for any edits. This way, you can filter for your name, and find the edits that you made, just to double check your work, or to make sure you are publishing the correct changes. There is a keyword- group- and campaign-level history/settings log, where you can see the name of the user who created, edited, published, paused, activated, deleted, etc. any item.
You can set up alerts that will help you manage accounts: anything from active campaigns with 0 ad copy, to finding keywords in low ad positions.
If you push duplicate keywords, the system will reject them, keeping our accounts from getting clouded due to human error. There is no need to download existing keywords or groups and use their keyword or group IDs to make any edits--instead, editing is a breeze because the system detects the new changes automatically. The only need for IDs is when making edits to creative.
Support. They are addressing this currently, and things seem to have improved lately, but we were experiencing long delays in getting support tickets addressed.
New Google Shopping campaigns will not even show in the tool. Old PLA campaigns are fine however.
Random missing data. Typically this happens after an update, but we've seen data missing in various clients. Usually logging a support ticket and having Marin Support rerun a backend process resolves the issue.
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.
I've used Marin Software now at three separate companies where I evaluated the platform along with several other internal partners. In each case, we did make the decision to renew based on our positive experience with the app and the customer support we received at the Enterprise level. Especially when we had complex integration questions or faced the change to Google's enhanced campaigns - Marin worked closely with us to make the transition seamless.
Marin Software's usability is bar none in the paid search world. All that said, I think Marin Software only appears superior because all the tools in the space provide extremely subpar support. Kenshoo is so complex that I don’t know think half the people that work there know how to use it.
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.
The times that I have had to contact Marin support, they have been very helpful. When I spoke with them on the phone, they walked me through the process to be able to resolve the issue that I had, The gentleman walked me through all the steps and easily helped me resolve the issue that I had.
Interactive helpful videos, summaries, and quizzes help a user learn the platform in demo-mode. The only challenge was that once you clicked certain buttons per instructions, you couldn't necessarily go back to retake notes without redoing the entire module.
As I said previously I would just highly recommend everyone being hands on during implementation to make sure everyone knows how to use the product. Marin Software does an excellent job with training and answering questions so this is not a significant insight however it makes the process easier in the long run
We have started using Domo since we began using Acquisio and are extremely happy with Domo. We will continue to use Acquisio though because of the ability to directly manage paid search ads and the ability to create simple reports quickly. Also considering the cost of Domo, unless you specifically need reports with more sources of data, Acquisio is all you really need.
Marin is a must have for any enterprise-level PPC account. The time savings from task automation and the very sophisticated bidding platform can help any advertiser or agency effectively scale any account. In both AdWords and Bing, the bulk editing and automated bidding features are less reliable and prone to error. The interfaces are also unnecessarily complicated and outdated. While Google Analytics is a great tool, there are no features that tie true revenue data into these interfaces, limiting the amount you can really optimize around ROI.
Acquisio let us create reports on the fly, saving us lots of time; time that was better spend optimizing client campaigns.
Acqusio's Bid and Budget Management tool (BBM) helped a struggling client achieve desired traffic and conversion results with little to no work from our agency.
Acquisio's quick customer service responsiveness let us get our questions answered quickly.
It has definitely increased employee efficiency because we run on Yahoo Gemini, Bing, and Google. If we had to optimize/report per engine, it would take hours and hours each week.
I think it's made optimizations less of a daunting task in my daily routine. I've been able to pinpoint where our ROI suffers and work from there in a matter of minutes.
The customer service has gotten better and could still be improved. Our Marin rep used to be horrible at returning messages but once he got support, we were able to implement a ton more pixels and betas.
