Google Ads Manager is great if you need major visibility on a large ad network rather than targeting one specific website, app or platform. Let's be real here if you have any business that is done online (sell products, generate leads, etc) you pretty much have to be on Google. I've tried other advertising solutions including competitor search engines, sponsored content solutions, social media advertising, and none really compare to the traffic you can get that is keyword-driven, meaning a user is actually demonstrating interest in whatever you sell or offer.
The vendor needs to fit the client so the reason I worked with them was that they were not too big or too small for our organization. Also, they were more likely to adapt to our workflow which is great as some vendors in this space wanted us to conform to their processes, which was not wanted.
Interface. You can understand how to build the ads very easily. When you first begin, and throughout the process, there are little help icons which explain what you need to understand.
Pricing. By this, I mean the ability to change it at any time. You can select a variable rate, or you can preset it. Either way, you can change how much you spend every second if you'd like. This makes it easier to control your budget if you need to make emergency purchases and don't have much space in your budget.
Always growing. They are always announcing something new. Always growing and always trying to update.
Campaign set up in our ad server at the time, 27/7 Real Media's OAS platform.
Post-campaign reporting.
Our main point of contact, I believe her name was Nafisa, was extremely friendly and became an extension of the team. She really was fun to work with and professional.
Bumper Machine - While this is still in beta, there is a lot of room for improvement for the machine to pick proper clips. I'm sure that will come in time though.
Inclusion of a Home Page Button - This is a simple request, truly, but one that bothers me everyday. I have a campaign home button, but it's not accessible unless you go back to the beginning of the platform. If the 'home' button was static, I'd be able to go to my preferred view with one click instead of having to loop around, as there isn't a trustworthy 'back button' option either.
Display - This is a big one. I have a love/hate relationship with display campaigns and algorithms. I have seen where they can perform [strongly] but also be massive budget bleeds with little ROI. It's not very industry specific either so I'm hoping to gain more consistency and trust with the future of the display algorithm.
They had their own ad server and there were regular efforts to get us to move to that ad server which was not industry standard at the time. We already an agreement in place with OAS and also used DFP via agency access but they pushed to use this server and it was not something I really needed to keep discussing with them.
I think it's useful for our team and we rely on it to improve our business. It is within our budget also. Although we still will need an approval from the upper-level management team, I don't see any problem with that
As I have said, if you want all the Google functionality and can use all of the features that Google offers on a dashboard, it's a great choice. But, I'm not a fan because I think the interface could be redesigned to be more user-friendly - make it color-coded with different options - it just feels now like you can get all, but make it easier for the end designer to use.
I could say a lot about this topic. As an agency, we get a new [representative] to talk to almost every quarter to go over select accounts and the campaigns within. Most of the time, these [educated representatives], don't provide any new feedback, or I just simply [disagree] with their approach. This is not all the time however. I have learned a lot from a rare few, [individuals] that have given me new strategies and access to betas early on. The other side of support, is the [overseas support platform]. [It] is usually not very helpful, but you can [emphasize] issues and they can research [them]. The Google Tag Implementation team is pristine though. When you need them, you need to set an appointment, which is usually 2 weeks out; they are so over-my-head intelligent, I've never had a bad experience with them and whenever I needed them for a fix, they solved it [within] the first call.
I personally liked it because of the complex features available. Knowing that this comes from Google, I did not have second thoughts - Comes from an Top tier brand. There were other products in the market, however, I chose to stick to this due to the following reasons, Customer support Self help articles
I worked with a company called Asentech whose core competence at the time was not campaign management. Zedo replaced them and did a great job. I have since evaluated Theorem, OAO and YourBow and Zedo offers as much if not more than those companies.
At the beginning of the month, we had a crush of new campaigns to launch and they stepped up their game to get this accomplished. Also, reporting was done very quickly with a lot of insight into campaign optimization.