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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Ion Interactive

    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools.N/A

    Microsoft Advertising

    Score7.7 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) contains Microsoft's advertising solutions. Advertising formats include search (Microsoft Search ads), Display and Native ads, Retail Media, and Video and Connected TV (CTV) ads. Services include Performance Max, the company's conversion optimization AI assistant and guide.N/A
    Pricing
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Advertising
    Editions & Modules
    Managed Services + SaaS
    Custom
    per year
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Advertising
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup Fee$5,500 per customerNo setup fee
    Additional Detailsion’s Build Anything SaaS platform provides organizations with an entirely new and agile interactive content marketing capability. It enables non-technical marketers and designers to create, test and measure an unlimited number of all types of interactive content marketing experiences. It includes unlimited seats, experiences, tests, customization, phone and email support, analytics and more.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Advertising
    Considered Both Products
    Ion Interactive LLC
    Chose Ion Interactive
    It works well for A/B testing and data collection. Additionally, our Salesforce integration is critical for our team. With Ion Interactive, we are able to reliably retain all lead information, and pass it into Salesforce. This includes UTM information as well as proprietary ID …
    Incentivized
    Chose Ion Interactive
    I have not used other landing page creation tool, but have compared ION to Optimizely and Adobe Test and Target.
    ION is a much more flexible solution than Adobe Test and Target, and is more affordable and comes with free customer support.
    Incentivized
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    68%
    Would buy again
    21 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    70%
    Delivers good value for the price
    21 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    65%
    Happy with the feature set
    20 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    59%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    17 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    67%
    Implementation went as expected
    20 Answers
    Features
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Advertising
    Content Creation
    Comparison of Content Creation features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Advertising
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    7.5
    105 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Microsoft Advertising
    -
    Ratings
    Ideation10.099 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content collaboration5.094 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Publishing
    Comparison of Content Publishing features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Advertising
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    8.7
    120 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Microsoft Advertising
    -
    Ratings
    Content hub10.0104 Ratings00 Ratings
    Forms / Gated content10.0107 Ratings00 Ratings
    Embedded CTAs10.0108 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content distribution8.093 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content promotion8.086 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content automation6.090 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Content Reporting & Analytics features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Advertising
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    8.5
    118 Ratings
    14% above category average
    Microsoft Advertising
    -
    Ratings
    Audience profiling and targeting6.091 Ratings00 Ratings
    Closed-loop tracking and reporting8.095 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content performance analytics10.0116 Ratings00 Ratings
    Campaign optimization dashboard10.0107 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ad Campaigns
    Comparison of Ad Campaigns features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Advertising
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Advertising
    6.5
    6 Ratings
    0% above category average
    Ad campaign creation00 Ratings8.06 Ratings
    Ad deployment00 Ratings8.36 Ratings
    Display advertising00 Ratings6.46 Ratings
    Ad display and retargeting segmentation00 Ratings6.46 Ratings
    Sequence targeting00 Ratings5.95 Ratings
    Contextual advertising00 Ratings5.56 Ratings
    Social advertising00 Ratings4.95 Ratings
    Ad Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Ad Reporting & Analytics features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Advertising
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Advertising
    6.6
    8 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Ad dashboards00 Ratings6.28 Ratings
    Ad performance reports00 Ratings6.87 Ratings
    Ad conversion tracking00 Ratings7.36 Ratings
    Ad attribution reporting00 Ratings7.06 Ratings
    Ad forecasting and optimization00 Ratings5.85 Ratings
    Ad Auctions
    Comparison of Ad Auctions features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Advertising
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    -
    Ratings
    Microsoft Advertising
    7.3
    7 Ratings
    14% below category average
    Ad bidding00 Ratings7.37 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Advertising
    Small Businesses
    Contently
    Score9.9 out of 10
    WordStream
    Score6.9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    CoSchedule Marketing Suite
    Score10 out of 10
    WordStream
    Score6.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    PathFactory
    Score8.3 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Advertising
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (135 ratings)
    7.4
    (70 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.0
    (22 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    7.4
    (17 ratings)
    7.9
    (4 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (18 ratings)
    9.1
    (11 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (6 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Advertising
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Ion Interactive LLC
    If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Despite using our account for advertising with every other social media company, Microsoft flagged ours as fraudulent. After dealing with them for weeks, we finally got to a manager, who said that they didn’t know anything, couldn’t provide any information, and was unable to do anything about it. It seems odd, but it would flagger account every time we try to upload the campaigns from Google directly into their ad manager. I would suggest if you try and use their platform, don’t tell them you’re using Google cause they seem to have a thing against it. Once your account is flagged, they have no reasonable way of resolving it, nor they are able to offer any support. You’re better off to just try a different way. Ultimately, just don’t use Microsoft advertising if you can possibly avoid it. Hopefully soon DuckDuckGo will have their own advertising platform and we can eliminate Microsoft given the terrible time we have working with this one of many, social media platforms.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Ion Interactive LLC
    • Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
    • Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
    • The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
    • Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
    • The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Familiar interface, offers editor for bulk changes, adding negative keywords is much easier than in Google Ads
    • Nice reporting tools within the interface, detailed reports can be made fairly easily
    • Had very nice tools to help import/export ads directly from Google Ads, which saves a ton of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Ion Interactive LLC
    • Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
    • Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
    • I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • Bing's ad platform could definitely use some improvements - it hasn't been updated in a long time, and it feels very outdated.
    • We feel that the optimization algorithms don't always perform as well for Bing Ads as they do in Google Ads (optimize for conversions, etc.).
    • It would be great to have even more integrations with LinkedIn audience targeting offered - right now, you can just make some bid optimizations in a couple of areas; we'd really like to get more robust options there, and maybe even things like cross-platform tracking.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Ion Interactive LLC
    We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    We have had good success with it over all of our clients. We continually recommend bing to reach "the rest of the searchers".
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Ion Interactive LLC
    Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    It's very easy to use overall. It has an import from Google Ads to make things simpler. Overall, I would say you can get up and running very quickly. It's similar to other platforms, so if you have used them, it's intuitive.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Ion Interactive LLC
    Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Ion Interactive LLC
    The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Our Bing Ads reps are very good and attentive. They've offered good recommendations and are quick to resolve unexpected issues and problems. Occasionally they have roped in technical support folks that have been friendly and helpful too. The general helpline for Bing Ads is also very good, especially when compared to Google's customer support.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Ion Interactive LLC
    They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Ion Interactive LLC
    There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Ion Interactive LLC
    I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Obviously Google is a huge competitor. Typically Google is top of the game for many advertising solutions including search. Microsoft ads has a lower scale and reach compared to Google. However, Microsoft ads audience does not overlap much with Googles, providing incremental reach. Although Microsoft ads lags a bit behind in adapting the new updates that Google comes out with, their customer service is very good and they are likely to go out of their way to adapt their platform to your needs whereas their competitor does not
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Ion Interactive LLC
    Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    Ion Interactive LLC
    • Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
    • The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
    • It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    • We've had a very hard time spending our budgets on Bing which has caused us a lot of extra work on our end. We've essentially had to move that money back to Google or other platforms.
    • It does have an easy import from Google so you're not doubling efforts.
    • The CPCs tend to be less expensive than Google - which is always good for business owners.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Ion Interactive Screenshots

    Screenshot of ion empowers your other marketing technologies to deliver higher fidelity, data-driven scoring, targeting, segmentation and personalization.Screenshot of The types of interactive experiences the ion platform can create is near-endless. These are the most common types used by our customers: Assessments, Calculators, eBooks, Interactive Infographics, Interactive White Papers, Landing Pages, Lookbooks, Quizzes, Resource Library, Solution Finder.Screenshot of See what our customers are saying about our platform and services!Screenshot of Starting at $2,000 per month, you get an unlimited, scalable interactive content platform with our full feature set. Including: Unlimited experiences, unlimited use of Quick Starts, Unlimited Seats/Users, Unlimited A/B/n Testing, Unlimited Sell-Side Experiences, Unlimited Phone, email & chat support, unlimited analytics... PLUS a FREE custom-branded theme that can be applied to all of your experiences.Screenshot of You have the option to start from a template or entirely from scratch. Our Quick Start template library includes more than 100 fully tested, responsive and flexible interactive experiences you can brand, customize and launch.Screenshot of ion is the only interactive content platform that provides the scalable foundation to grow from one interactive experience to one thousand interactive experiences. With ion, interactive content development complexity, long timelines, high costs and maintenance problems are replaced with freedom and agility.