GroundTruth vs. Marin Software

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
GroundTruth
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
GroundTruth (formerly xAd) headquartered in New York offers location-based mobile advertising technology.N/A
Marin Software
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Marin Software is a cloud-based cross-channel advertising campaign management platform which integrates many tools and functions, and it is the name of the company in San Francisco that issues the software. Marin touts cross-display (including mobile-optimized) advertisement retargeting, social marketing management, and many other tools to manage complex marketing and paid-advertising (PPC) efforts. A free trial of this extensive platform is available. Marin Software maintains a client list…N/A
Pricing
GroundTruthMarin Software
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GroundTruthMarin Software
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GroundTruthMarin Software
Top Pros
Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Best Alternatives
GroundTruthMarin Software
Small Businesses
Google AdMob
Google AdMob
Score 8.9 out of 10
Mautic
Mautic
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Yahoo Native
Yahoo Native
Score 6.6 out of 10
The Trade Desk
The Trade Desk
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Marin Software
Marin Software
Score 9.1 out of 10
Iterable
Iterable
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GroundTruthMarin Software
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(3 ratings)
10.0
(32 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.6
(23 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(6 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(5 ratings)
User Testimonials
GroundTruthMarin Software
Likelihood to Recommend
xAd
It's fantastic for targeting an audience when you know where they will be for a very low CPM. However, it's hard if you are a brick-and-mortar and want to truly measure the results. You need to get creative in ways to attribute site visits and purchases back to the campaign (unique coupon codes, etc.)
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Marin Software
It's well suited when you have to integrate it with another data source, like an FTP for example. The dimensions you can assign to campaigns or ad group levels help for easier performance management and reporting. What makes it difficult is that everytime you need to update anything on the account, you can't use the publisher but have to do it through Marin. This makes the whole process very time consuming and causes more mistakes. Also if you have paused anything on the publisher and you don't remember to sync marin after, all changes on the publisher will get lost if you make new changes on marin
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Pros
xAd
  • Launch digital ads campaigns
  • Change creatives and rollout campaigns in minutes
  • Target specific user personas for great conversions
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Marin Software
  • 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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Cons
xAd
  • Adding a save option sometimes when you don’t hit next the work you are using is lost.
  • Adding in app recommendations
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Marin Software
  • 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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Likelihood to Renew
xAd
No answers on this topic
Marin Software
I've used Marin Software now at three separate companies where I evaluated the platform along with several other internal partners. In each case, we did make the decision to renew based on our positive experience with the app and the customer support we received at the Enterprise level. Especially when we had complex integration questions or faced the change to Google's enhanced campaigns - Marin worked closely with us to make the transition seamless.
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Usability
xAd
No answers on this topic
Marin Software
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.
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Support Rating
xAd
No answers on this topic
Marin Software
The times that I have had to contact Marin support, they have been very helpful. When I spoke with them on the phone, they walked me through the process to be able to resolve the issue that I had, The gentleman walked me through all the steps and easily helped me resolve the issue that I had.
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Online Training
xAd
No answers on this topic
Marin Software
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.
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Implementation Rating
xAd
No answers on this topic
Marin Software
As I said previously I would just highly recommend everyone being hands on during implementation to make sure everyone knows how to use the product. Marin Software does an excellent job with training and answering questions so this is not a significant insight however it makes the process easier in the long run
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Alternatives Considered
xAd
GroundTruth was recommended to us by a vendor and was the only product we evaluated
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Marin Software
Marin is a must have for any enterprise-level PPC account. The time savings from task automation and the very sophisticated bidding platform can help any advertiser or agency effectively scale any account. In both AdWords and Bing, the bulk editing and automated bidding features are less reliable and prone to error. The interfaces are also unnecessarily complicated and outdated. While Google Analytics is a great tool, there are no features that tie true revenue data into these interfaces, limiting the amount you can really optimize around ROI.
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Return on Investment
xAd
  • Helps improve conversion by 20%
  • Time to create and rollout campaigns is reduced by half
  • Help optimise and rationalise the operational overheads and costs
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Marin Software
  • 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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ScreenShots