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…
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Ortto
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Ortto is presented as a product-led growth engine that helps businesses acquire and retain customers. Since 2015, Ortto has supported over 10,000 companies with their software. Ortto allows online businesses to unify their customer data with their CDP, segment key audiences across the customer lifecycle; activate these audiences with personalized, omnichannel experiences, and analyze their business for growth with a suite of BI tools. The vendor states teams at Microsoft, Bltly, Typeform,…
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
Autopilot has a friendly and bright appeal offering a code-free automation experience that makes it easy to build complex automated workflows. Anyone can start creating workflows using the drag-and-drop builder even without technical knowledge. Teams utilize the notes and graphics feature to collaborate on automation workflows providing a much easier way to understand workflows created by someone else.
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.
Very easy to use automation builder with many great options and integrations. Lets us tailor incredibly precise campaigns through use of Autopilot's own features, plus its tight integrations with data from sources like Segment.
Easy and powerful email editing and creation built-in. No need for email template coding.
Autopilot allows marketers to have full control and implement new web forms to capture leads quickly with its automatic form detection. No need to save custom form data to our own backend saves our development team time.
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.
Limited Design Customization: If you're an experienced marketer and are used to the unlimited customization capabilities of larger platforms (or coding your own templates), you might find Autopilot's options to be limiting. It's great for a beginner user who shouldn't be encumbered with those options, but I could see if being frustrating for others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
How would I say this, for me Autopilot is a whole other tool then the other MA tools I use. Most other MA tools focus on a lot of options and things you can do with it. But Autopilot seems to mainly focus on the visual builder to make automations, and they do that really well! The other tools are also great but more a "complete package solution" with a lot of options. And that can be overwhelming. So if you want a great easy-to-use workflow/automation builder and less of all the other options Autopilot is a great start.
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.
Not sure. I cannot put a $ on it for ROI as I was the administrator and not part of the team that procured it. Time-wise I would say I spent less time using it than I previously had used in CloudPortal Services Manager.
