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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Microsoft Advertising
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) contains Microsoft's advertising solutions. Advertising formats include search (Microsoft Search ads), Display and Native ads, Retail Media, and Video and Connected TV (CTV) ads. Services include Performance Max, the company's conversion optimization AI assistant and guide.
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WordStream
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Wordstream, the eponymous offering from the company in Boston, MA, provides a free tool for analyzing performance "grading" an Adwords campaign, beyond which, Wordstream Advisor provides (for a fee, though a free trial is available) recommendations to optimize a paid advertising campaign on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines, and place ads. Beyond the platform, Wordstream also offers full account management services, for outsourcing one's campaign, and white labeling for…
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 …
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.
Despite using our account for advertising with every other social media company, Microsoft flagged ours as fraudulent. After dealing with them for weeks, we finally got to a manager, who said that they didn’t know anything, couldn’t provide any information, and was unable to do anything about it. It seems odd, but it would flagger account every time we try to upload the campaigns from Google directly into their ad manager. I would suggest if you try and use their platform, don’t tell them you’re using Google cause they seem to have a thing against it. Once your account is flagged, they have no reasonable way of resolving it, nor they are able to offer any support. You’re better off to just try a different way. Ultimately, just don’t use Microsoft advertising if you can possibly avoid it. Hopefully soon DuckDuckGo will have their own advertising platform and we can eliminate Microsoft given the terrible time we have working with this one of many, social media platforms.
Do you currently use Google AdWords to drive new business for your website? Then you need WordStream. The best scenario where it has helped me is time. I used to spend easily 20 hours a week analyzing data, making minor changes, adjusting budgets, trying to just master Google AdWords! But now I'm able to spend maybe 2-3 hours a week on Google AdWords and put the rest of my attention on other responsibilities. WordStream has mastered making my time more efficient.
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.
Definitely go with a consultant. It amazed me how quickly our consultant was able to understand our business and what we sell. He was the best resource for our newly-digitized marketing team.
The negative keywords section was a hugely helpful tool. It saved us from so much unnecessary spend while making it easy to add negatives.
How quickly changes implemented were updated on AdWords was amazing. It's live, so no lag and unnecessary spend.
Bing's ad platform could definitely use some improvements - it hasn't been updated in a long time, and it feels very outdated.
We feel that the optimization algorithms don't always perform as well for Bing Ads as they do in Google Ads (optimize for conversions, etc.).
It would be great to have even more integrations with LinkedIn audience targeting offered - right now, you can just make some bid optimizations in a couple of areas; we'd really like to get more robust options there, and maybe even things like cross-platform tracking.
While the basic tools are pretty simple to use, the platform is actually pretty expansive and I don't feel like I've taken advantage of it (yet) as much as I could. It does require some training to get up to speed.
Support for Display ad campaigns is limited - this is mainly used as a way to optimize Search campaigns.
Reporting. I find the reporting setup to be a bit confusing and still rely on other sources for building out reports on our Adwords performance (Adwords itself and Google Analytics).
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.
It's very easy to use overall. It has an import from Google Ads to make things simpler. Overall, I would say you can get up and running very quickly. It's similar to other platforms, so if you have used them, it's intuitive.
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.
Our Bing Ads reps are very good and attentive. They've offered good recommendations and are quick to resolve unexpected issues and problems. Occasionally they have roped in technical support folks that have been friendly and helpful too. The general helpline for Bing Ads is also very good, especially when compared to Google's customer support.
I have not had any experience with the customer support team for platform issues, but the account representative checks in with us often and is always available to answer questions. We will usually get on quarterly review calls so that she can share any new updates to the platform and answer questions.
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.
Obviously Google is a huge competitor. Typically Google is top of the game for many advertising solutions including search. Microsoft ads has a lower scale and reach compared to Google. However, Microsoft ads audience does not overlap much with Googles, providing incremental reach. Although Microsoft ads lags a bit behind in adapting the new updates that Google comes out with, their customer service is very good and they are likely to go out of their way to adapt their platform to your needs whereas their competitor does not
WordStream is a little different from the competition. There are much more expensive solutions that manage the account for you with more features (Kenshoo, Marin, etc) and there are cheaper solutions out there that offer some of the features that WordStream provides; however, if a marketer wants to personally manage an account with some aided help than WordStream provides a great, cost-effective solution
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.
We've had a very hard time spending our budgets on Bing which has caused us a lot of extra work on our end. We've essentially had to move that money back to Google or other platforms.
It does have an easy import from Google so you're not doubling efforts.
The CPCs tend to be less expensive than Google - which is always good for business owners.
I've already noted the time savings that WordStream has provided - at leats 5 hours a week (and I like to think that my time is pretty expensive/worth it).
Wordstream has paid for itself already, simply in removing junk from our AdWords account - junk keywords, junk AdWords groups, junk matching.
I think we'll find, over more time, that Wordstream will continue to provide outstanding value in dropping our CPA - once Google register sthe lack of junk, our CPC will continue to go down.
