ChannelAdvisor is a provider of cloud-based e-commerce solutions that enable retailers and manufacturers to integrate, manage and optimize their merchandise sales across hundreds of online channels including Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook and more.
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Google Marketing Platform
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Google Marketing Platform (a combination of former DoubleClick advertiser tools and Google Analytics 360 Suite) is a set of tools for marketers to manage their advertising campaigns. DoubleClick was acquired by Google in 2008. It focuses on uploading ads and reporting their performance and also provides forecasting tools to help predict future campaign needs. Bid optimization tools help manage pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns across search engines (e.g. Bing, Google, Yahoo!).
Excellent for marketplace sellers with a lot of products - or those with a high turnover of SKUs. Not well suited to the small seller with only a few SKUs to promote. Also probably not suited to someone who only cares about a single marketplace. The real strength of it comes from managing multiple marketplaces through a single system.
I feel pretty neutral about Google Marketing Platform. For the longest time, my company wasn't using it because each of the features (Data Studio, Analytics, etc.) could be accessed separately. In fact, most of the time, I don't even go into Google Marketing Platform because it's easier to directly navigate to the individual platforms. There are very few features about GMP that can only be accessed from the GMP UI. The Integrations Center is probably the main feature I utilize from the GMP UI, which allows me to see a summary of the integrations I have in place across all my client properties and accounts.
Complex, Yet Simple Navigational Interface: ChannelAdvisor is a beast, but navigating through their platform is relatively straightforward. The overall heirarchy is very well put together.
One Feed to Rule Them All: With ChannelAdvisor, all we have to do is connect our inventory to their system once. Instead of having to construct and connect dozens of different product feeds to our internal inventory system, we simply connect to ChannelAdvisor and use the same single feed to build out all others' website templates.
Product Mapping Made Easy: Mapping product attribute data across a multitude of unique online marketplaces and digital marketing sites can seem like a daunting task. ChannelAdvisor does a great job of simplifying this process, providing easy-to-understand and manage feed templates containing helpful descriptions and categorization.
Business Rules and Lookup Lists: I use these all the time when "transforming" our raw inventory data to the specifications of any given feed. They are extremely helpful and super easy to build.
Efficient Product Optimization: Instead of having to deal with the time-consuming task of making minute changes to thousands and thousands of skus, ChannelAdvisor allows you to automate these changes in a matter of minutes. It's much more scalable for our business.
Bringing together data from multiple channels and engines and allows you to visualize the data in an easy to use platform. This saves time from using multiple logins for the different platforms.
Auto bidding tools save time from manual bidding, as it allows you to set the specific terms around what levels you want to cap your CPCs at. You then let DoubleClick adjust your bids to gain the most conversions from the cheapest CPCs. This frees up time to do other in-depth analysis and strategy.
DoubleClick also has the ability to track conversions and clicks on any page using their floodlight tags. This is good for tracking certain actions on yours or a client's site and is especially good if they do not use any other tools, such as Google Analytics or Adobe, to track conversions and user actions on site. You can also use these in conjunction with the auto bidding tools.
Lack of customization, documentation, tutorials, support for the premium webstore
Lack of innovation. My client was told that the basic web store was being replace by the premium web store so they needed to upgrade. In my opinion the basic web store was actually much more flexible and robust than the premium web store. Now (it has been less than 2 years) they are making my client switch from the premium web store to "Shopify" and they are charging more money for this. My client was charged to upgrade each time and the process to upgrade was expensive, time consuming, and very convoluted. ChannelAdvisor needs to invest in their technology and migrate data for ChannelAdvisor changes technology. But the experience as an end user is very frustrating since the way of doing things keep changing and not always for the better result for the customer.
Channel Advisor needs better support. Help Desk, knowledge base, etc. there are a lot of things you can do with ChannelAdvisor but it is my experience that nothing is very straight forward and there are many different potential problems you will run into and ChannelAdvisor points the finger at "Google" or "Amazon" or "Ebay" instead of helping solve a problem from end to end.
It is quite expensive for what it does. I would not have advised my customer to use their product but they were so entrenched that they had no other choice.
The process for on-boarding new users can be difficult if they do not already have a Gmail or Gmail-linked account.
Difficult to troubleshoot technical issues (with the platform, with tags, etc.) because of the lack of customer support. Unclear if the agency has a dedicated team or individual to assist, and often have to deal with out-sourced support teams.
Without ChannelAdvisor, our business wouldn't be where it is today so the idea of NOT renewing is out of the question. By not renewing we would have to hire more employees and have more of a workload for existing employees. By keeping costs low and employees effecient we have been able to grow exponentially.
Due to its adapting behavior with industry ad formats and seamless integration with publishers and DSP's, I don't see myself moving away from DCM. As we see the display advertising is getting more programatic and automated due to the rise of DSP and concept of RTB, Double Click has evolved with new advanced best practices
The Doubleclick interface is easy and simple to get a hang of. The options are slightly limited compared to other DSPs. But, for a simple campaign, this is a great DSP to move forward with. They have a ton of data and can plug into a lot of different partners
They do not have strong support team. It is tough to get answer when I need it. They always refer you to an online guide and not an actual person. If so, the person is based out of an offshore team in India and does not know the specific client goals .
Our brand is growing online at a rapid clip, and we wanted a platform that would scale accordingly. The feature that really sold us was the automatic workflows. If we want a certain type of product that's going to a customer in a certain state to ship a certain way, we could make that happen automatically without any human touch! Wow!
Marin takes a lot more time for everything, mainly for the campaigns setup. This also leads to many mistakes, which impact the performance. I've used Marin on a couple of previous clients and we've had many problems with it, mainly with correct conversion tracking and account optimizations. Besides, Marin is behind all the new features available on AdWords, which makes the tracking also not very flexible.
DS3 has improved ROI considerably due to its ability to make the work of a team of digital marketers to go further and improving internal efficiency.
There is a notable improvement in account performance for those integrated with DoubleClick as opposed to not, with better tracking, new bid strategy options, and a more responsive interface.
The additional fee on top of media spend is a considerable expense for a large advertiser, but the necessity of a product/solution such as this means that there is always likely to be some comparative cost.
