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
SourceForge
Score 9.8 out of 10
N/A
SourceForge is a B2B software discovery platform, featuring 4000+ categories in its comparison engine that potential buyers can use to compare software by user reviews, features, pricing, integrations, operating system, and deployment.
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
I recommend SourceForge to anyone or business that needs both commercial and open source software. This platform has a wide variety of software with many categories that allow easy search for any project, in addition to the fact that searches can be done separately (commercial and open source software) so as not to have mixed results which go with different purpose. In addition to the fact that the community of this platform is quite active and that there are always times to discover new projects that can be useful for a company or individual person.
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.
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.
The overall design that SourceForge has really leaves a lot to be desired, although the entire platform works perfectly, I think that the design should be much more attractive.
There is currently no feature to save your progress on a review you are writing, so if you are writing a review and the browser is closed for some reason, all progress of the written review will be lost.
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.
Souceforge was very straightforward and easy to manage. The leads worked for us so there is not a lot else to say about why I'd use it again. This isn't some complicated software product, it is a simple inbound marketing channel that is meant to generate leads and help us with brand awareness and it did exactly that.
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.
SourceForge is super easy to use and very intuitive. And their support team and campaign managers help whenever we need it. Using SourceForge as a user is easy, and administrating a business software listing is easy as well. They also have great documentation.
We've never had any issues or downtime with SourceForge. Since we've been a user, the platform has never been down. Or at least never that I've noticed.
SourceForge loads extremely quickly whether you're using the front end or administrating your product listing on the back end. All pages are snappy to load--no issues with page speed whatsoever.
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.
I hardly ever use the support on SourceForge, as I have not needed it. Their product works well for me. One time I had to email them and they got back to me the same day, but that's my only experience.
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.
When we first signed up, they pair you with a campaign manager who trained us on how to use the product properly. The product is simple so the training was only about 30 minutes and after that we understood all the features and how to make the most of it. Most of the work came with making a custom landing page and building a follow up process for our sales team.
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.
G2 has a larger commitment time upfront and for a more expensive rate, which wasn't the best option for our team as we were just exploring the resources that existed out there at the time. We preferred Sourceforge as well due to its subscription service, making it easier to commit from the start.
SourceForge has been plenty scalable for us. Our marketing department is able to edit listings and our executives can also log in to the platform if need be for leads and reporting information. SourceForge offers multiple user access and role permissions, so it's pretty scalable and easy to use for our entire team.
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.
