Google Ads vs. Marin Software (discontinued)

Clients who are selling products such as dresses, clothes, jewelry, beauty products, etc., generally work well. Also, in some cases, it doesn't fetch a good ROAS for very small business owners. If a client is already doing well in SEO, the probability for it to perform well over Google Ads is always enhanced, and if it doesn't have a good organic reach, Google Ads also suffers.

Incentivized

Marin is most effective when search campaigns carry a large budget, have more complex conversion goals, or operate across multiple publishers. As a rule of thumb, Marin and other bid management softwares are best suited for situations where editing with tools like AdWords Editor is no longer time-efficient or where changes need to be made cross-publisher.

• Keyword Research - Google Ads has a handy built in tool that helps determine important keywords to target both for Ads & SEO
• Intuitive Analytics Dashboad - Google Ads makes it fairly simple to see and analyze important metrics on how your ads are running week after week
• Intuitive Setup - Google Ads makes it easy to figure out how to run ads with little to no training (although training is highly recommended to run effective ads), as their interface is clean and easy to figure out (unlike competing products).

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Google's heavy dependence on AI makes many of the campaign behavior inscrutable and, often, it performs poorly as a result.
• Their responsive ads, for example, which are heavily recommended by them, often perform significantly worse than normal text ads.
• Their support, while relatively quick, becomes useless if you need any deep insight/help.

Incentivized

• We have a lot of issues with syncing data from Omniture with our Marin clients. Often times, data will be missing for certain days.
• Sitelinks are not the easiest to upload and view in Marin.
• Better download speeds for reporting would help us get more done in a day.

Incentivized

As of today Google AdWords leads approximately 90% of paid searches globally. There is practically is no other network that can offer such a relevant and engaging audience at the price. The PPC model is also unique in that no media dollars are wasted, since PPC models ensure brand interaction versus traditional media which has heavy ad avoidance and clutter but still charges a hefty amount for ads.

Since contract is month-to-month, there is little risk associated with contract renewal. I also enjoyed customer service and the fact that our CRM was integrated to better target our end user and deliver a higher profit to the company, to meet business goals. I believe Marin is one of the leading bid management software tools available on the market.

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

Marin Software's usability is bar none in the paid search world. All that said, I think Marin Software only appears superior because all the tools in the space provide extremely subpar support. Kenshoo is so complex that I don’t know think half the people that work there know how to use it.

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

I have had mostly successful support from Marin Software with the exception of one individual who I am assuming was new due to their lack of knowledge about the product. I do not hold this against Marin Software significantly because any time I have ever called/emailed with questions I have received help fast and accurately.

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

Interactive helpful videos, summaries, and quizzes help a user learn the platform in demo-mode. The only challenge was that once you clicked certain buttons per instructions, you couldn't necessarily go back to retake notes without redoing the entire module.

Incentivized

Not too much comes to mind for key insights regarding the implementation. Marin made the process as smooth as they could with the large account that we were working on. Once we had everything into the account, they walked us through the basic processes of the system and made sure everything was working properly.

Google Ads remains at the top advertising channel within our business for both lead volume and revenue generation, whilst maintaining a reasonable cost per lead (CPL). Both Meta Ads and Microsoft Ads have a much lower CPL, those channels don't contribute as much revenue and lead generation.

Incentivized

Double click is easier to use as it offers a couple of clicks syncing with Adwords, while the process with Marin is longer. Besides, you can do any changes in both DoubleClick and Adwords, it doesn't really matter, while it maters with Marin. Speed of Marin is also an issue sometimes. Mainly these are the things that Marin is worse at.

Incentivized

• Once we got the hang of it and had everything setup, it was a great monthly expense that we could count on ROI from. Either by obtaining new customers or literally staying above our competition in search rankings.
• We also started consulting on ads for customers and helping them set things up, which created a new revenue stream for us.

Incentivized

• The improvements to CPA the bidding has made on the clients' accounts, made them comfortable and confident enough to incrementally keep raising budget from 100K to 400K/month over the course of the year.
• As an agency, the ROI is great. Being able to automate many of the more time consuming tasks makes it far easier to remain within monthly budgeted hours per client.
• The support could be a little better, there were instances where tags would break and would compromise the quality of data and it was difficult for us to diagnose the root of the problem.

Incentivized