Marin Software (discontinued) vs. Twilio

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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I have tried other competitors. But I always end up going back to Twilio because I feel like it is dependable, easy to use, and, has competitive pricing. The only time I wouldn't recommend Twilio to someone as if they are completely inexperienced about using webhooks or APIs. Because you can't really just sign up and start using Twilio without connecting it to another platform first.

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• 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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• Easy to see my team in one place, when they log in and out and what call status they are in.
• Twilio is a simple, user friendly way to log in and out of work activities.
• Excellent services and support.
• The omnichannel feature which allows agents to get request from all channels.

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• 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.

• Control panel. Often, navigating through lists is challenging. I want endless scrolling, not pagination.
• Conversational intelligence service require a Language. I would like it to detect it.
• We would like to have some credit on clients that chose to use their own Twilio account.

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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.

Unless we can get this handled quickly -- less than 1 week -- we will likely switch to another provider who, in my opinion, we'll have to spend close to $3,000 in development time to build a new integration for texting. Our clients need texting and I feel Twilio has failed us miserably.

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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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Twilio has well documented APIs and examples. There are several tutorials, videos and Q&As regarding their services. So, usability is very good. I must say that advanced knowledge of telephony, API/Programming and error-handling is essential to make good use of Twilio. It's not just plug-and-play unless you are integrated with a system that has all of the programming built for it.

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Twilio executes what it is designed to do: send SMS messages at scale while providing very good deliverability. I believe that Twilio is very good at what we use for adding SMS messages to our comms strategy. We can see those messages get opened and replied to, which is exactly what we are looking to achieve.

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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 have not had to communicate with Twilio support in the last 3 years but my past experience with them has been very positive. They replied to my previous requests promptly and kept me well informed to resolve my inquiries. With their documentation that's available, I hardly imagine why anyone would need to contact support since it's all there in a concise and easy to understand format. It would probably take you longer to type out a support ticket than to just open their doc websites.

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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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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

The developer APIs and SDKs are super easy to follow.

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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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We evaluated many fundraising-based text-to-give programs and found the subscriptions prohibitively expensive for our small scale and uncertain first few years of development. While we may be willing to invest that kind of money after discovering how things work, we're happy with Twilio now and have no desire to start over.

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Being in South Africa, direct local currency support would be nice

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• 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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• We found that associates who had the opportunity to respond to a survey about their assigned job were 37% more likely to return to a job site
• We were able to reduce the number of resources required to manually respond to associates using Twilio Studio, so those resources could have more time to complete other tasks
• We were able to scale the number of associates who received survey messages at least by a factor of 8 without increasing our resource demand

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