AdRoll vs. Google Ads vs. NinjaCat

Adroll is perfect for companies and situations in which you are trying to retarget customers with specific products. Their platform is perfect for dynamic content on their web and social ads. Also, if you are running multiple campaigns at once then the Adroll platform is perfect when organizing many different campaigns at once. If you are just running one or two social campaigns I feel it is easier to go directly to the source and you can probably leave Adroll out of the mix

Incentivized

Google Ads is a useful advertising tool to build brand exposure and generate lead volumes for your chosen product. Whilst it can be costly at times due to competitor bidding strategies and requires constant monitoring to ensure campaigns perform as expected, it typically provides the desired quality and quantity of leads for custom budgets.

Incentivized

NinjaCat has been great for getting clients quickly connected to popular advertising platforms like Snapchat, Facebook, and Google. It can blend data together easily to make overall data easy to access. The template designer is easy to use (though careful there is no auto save or undo button) and you can have a client ready report done easily with one of their premade templates or customize it for your needs. The fact that I can build any metric or pull in about any information with the Google Sheet data feature makes the product far and away one of the best products I've had the pleasure of using.

Incentivized

• A customer service rep can help us out with any campaign questions, any time during the work week.
• The platform has a very transparent platform that provides great detail about analytics of the ads.
• The platform shows what digital advertising mediums are working the best for your website, not just the ads that you run through them.

• Automated targeting via Smart Shopping campaign. It's one of the best campaign types in Google Ads. In the beginning, you may see lower revenue and ROAS, but once you give some meaningful time to your campaign, it is most likely to perform well.
• Smart bidding strategies: Google Ads has developed some really great bidding strategies such as maximizing conversion and maximizing conversion with ROAS settings. Based on one's requirement and their goal with revenue and target ROAS, they can choose the appropriate bidding strategy.
• Reporting: A business owner and advertising must know about their audiences, how their campaigns have been performing, what's working and what's not, and for that reason, powerful, effective reporting is needed, and Google Ads provides rich details reporting that covers almost every aspect of a business.

Incentivized

• It automates Client Reporting for Digital Advertising -- it's time-consuming to set up, but once it is, you don't have to do very much after that.
• Adding Data Sources to your reporting. NinjaCat integrates with most digital advertising platforms, in particular, Google Ads and Google Analytics.
• It Manages Client Reporting in one place -- there's no need to send reports from different platforms and stitch the information together. NinjaCat pulls all the data and allows you to customize reports for your clients and send them concise data in an appealing format.

Incentivized

• Improved level of support during the technical setup process would really improve the onboarding process
• Consistent, proactive account management is key with organizations like AdRoll. A dedicated rep goes such a long way.
• More granular reporting would help with back-end optimization and client recommendations

Incentivized

• If you don't know what you're doing, it will be a costly mistake. You need to target ads, and it is difficult the first time to do that.
• There isn't a feature to run an add for a couple set date spans, just hours you want to run them or a single date span.

Incentivized

• The tool does struggle with handling data from tools that aren't particularly clean.
• Many of the tools are designed to help agencies, so publishers have to jump through a few hoops or ignore certain areas.
• Portions of the tool don't work as expected but there are work-arounds in almost all situations.

We like AdRoll as it's filling a hole in our advertising right now, but it's not our favorite platform for running our online ads. Google and Facebook especially are our favorites, as we can do much more with them than we can with AdRoll, hence the 7 out of 10 rating.

Incentivized

I think Google Ads is good for getting your company out there and becoming more visible to potential customers in general. However, for specific product launches, social media advertising might be a better fit. Also, our user base is younger so social media is a better channel for our target audience.

Incentivized

Once tags are given and things are set up, it is fairly easy to utilize the reporting dashboard and check in on your ongoing campaigns. Metrics are simple to follow and can be toggled for specific dates or other qualifiers

Incentivized

This is more of a subjective rating, because I think it can be increased with how much our ad spend is. The more of an ad spend, the more visibility we can get, and therefore all features can climb. With an overall larger presence the usability is that where we can get messages out quick, and that's the main thing we try to do with our campaigns.

Incentivized

We don't use AdRoll support much, but when we have it's been fine, in line with other advertising platforms where it takes a few days maximum to resolve an issue that you have with them. In general though, the platform is very self sufficient and we do not have to use their support much, which is a good thing.

Incentivized

We have not yet had an account rep who hasn't tried to bully me or other employees to raise our budgets. At the same time, several years ago, one attempted to help refine our ads and ended up changing the ads to be something we were not affiliated with

Incentivized

The platform is in-depth and thorough. The support team is amazing. The ability to do automations and data visualizations are fantastic. However, it does lack integrations fore taking data to the next step. Other platforms let you integrate Python and R scripts for organizing data or even forecasting. If NinjaCat were to add this, I think it would be a 10/10 and best product on the market

Incentivized

Daily use with advanced account structures. Familiarity with reporting/api and complex setups.

Implementation was easy, as all we needed to do was use Google Tag Manager's built in AdRoll tag type and input our client ID and we were up and running. If you're not using Google Tag Manager, I imagine the implementation would be relatively easy as well, as all that's needed is a basic pixel.

Incentivized

AdRoll is better than Taboola in that the ad creation process. I like how the ads have better retargeting than Taboola. Also, I can make the ads look more elegant and fit our brand more than Taboola. Adroll's analytics are also better than Taboola in my experience. Lastly, Tabool is relatively the same price as Taboola.

Incentivized

Our agency invests heavily in Google Ads (particularly paid search advertising) on behalf of our clients relative to competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo because Google is the top search engine in the world. Google collects the most search data which enables the company to improve its AI to drive better performance for agencies and brands. As such, our paid search and app install campaigns always start with Google. If a client has a large budget, we will allocate media dollars to other search engines, but in some cases, the entire search budget goes to Google because we see the best returns.

Incentivized

Google Analytics is raw data. Reporting has improved, but it is limited to the data available in Google Analytics Only. NinjaCat combines data across all the digital platforms you use. Acquisio and Kenshoo have similar capabilities on the reporting side but are cost prohibitive due to their pricing structure. You can't just us the reporting features of either of these 2 platforms as a stand-alone feature. NinjaCat does one thing and does it well -- Automated Client Reporting of digital marketing and advertising.

Incentivized

• Mixed - while the tool provides an invaluable productivity gain the actual ROI it provides is less certain. We found if used in combination with other revenue analytics it was useful to determine the impact it had on revenue from returning visitors. If data is used on its own the impact on revenue is less quantifiable.

Incentivized

• Google Ads is often one of our highest ROI channels, especially when you factor in branded ads.
• Depending on the stage your business is in, search ads can be really powerful from an ROI perspective, providing an investment with a very high spend cap.
• If you do not manage the campaigns well though, you can quickly spend a lot of money on nothing. So make sure someone is keeping an eye on your account.

Incentivized

• Improved perception of business by improving reporting
• Much quicker optimization for clients
• Stands out ahead of competitors