Marketing Solutions by Criteo vs Marin Software

• You are able to access to their data pool, to build audiences with just an email list (encrypted and hashed)
• Easy to use platform and easy way to analyze data from the dashboard. Everyone could manage the dashboard easily enough to surf through the data and understand the performance. Also you have the help of your account manager.
• The powerful algorithm drives good results for your company, without too much effort. And they are continuously improving with new features (design types, campaigns, platform, mobile / app products ...)
• Support for testing all of the integration of the events to check if data is well received. Google Chrome extension, testing mode inside the dashboard with error detection and also the help of your account manager + technical stuff.

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• 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.

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• Tags and feed implementation : difficult and hard to understand for project and dev teams.
• The budget part is not clear, especially when the account manager does stuff on his own. It should be possible to change the budget from a period and not month to month.
• Now we have no information about the creative parts. It will be better to have a vision of which ad is working better than another and on which website.

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• 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.

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• More Impressions/Exposure - We wanted additional branding, and Criteo provided plenty of exposure to a relevant audience for us.
• Benchmark for CPA - We tested several different retargeting providers, and Criteo provided a benchmark amount we should pay per CPA, when compared to other providers.

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• 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.

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