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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WordStream Advisor
Score 7.0 out of 10
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Wordstream, the eponymous offering from the company in Boston, MA, provides a free tool for analyzing performance "grading" an Adwords campaign, beyond which, Wordstream Advisor provides (for a fee, though a free trial is available) recommendations to optimize a paid advertising campaign on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines, and place ads. Beyond the platform, Wordstream also offers full account management services, for outsourcing one's campaign, and white labeling for…
For our needs, WordStream was the most cost-effective AdWords management solution (as compared to Marin). Our real alternative was to continue using AdWords only; we felt that the added benefit of time-saving tools and personal consulting made the added management cost …
WordStream is a little different from the competition. There are much more expensive solutions that manage the account for you with more features (Kenshoo, Marin, etc) and there are cheaper solutions out there that offer some of the features that WordStream provides; however, …
I prefer WordStream because it leaves the important decisions us. I've heard horror stories of companies that use fully-automated platforms that created HUGE messes for them. WordStream is also much easier to use than other similar platforms that I've used.
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
Do you currently use Google AdWords to drive new business for your website? Then you need WordStream. The best scenario where it has helped me is time. I used to spend easily 20 hours a week analyzing data, making minor changes, adjusting budgets, trying to just master Google AdWords! But now I'm able to spend maybe 2-3 hours a week on Google AdWords and put the rest of my attention on other responsibilities. WordStream has mastered making my time more efficient.
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.
Definitely go with a consultant. It amazed me how quickly our consultant was able to understand our business and what we sell. He was the best resource for our newly-digitized marketing team.
The negative keywords section was a hugely helpful tool. It saved us from so much unnecessary spend while making it easy to add negatives.
How quickly changes implemented were updated on AdWords was amazing. It's live, so no lag and unnecessary spend.
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.
While the basic tools are pretty simple to use, the platform is actually pretty expansive and I don't feel like I've taken advantage of it (yet) as much as I could. It does require some training to get up to speed.
Support for Display ad campaigns is limited - this is mainly used as a way to optimize Search campaigns.
Reporting. I find the reporting setup to be a bit confusing and still rely on other sources for building out reports on our Adwords performance (Adwords itself and Google Analytics).
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.
I have not had any experience with the customer support team for platform issues, but the account representative checks in with us often and is always available to answer questions. We will usually get on quarterly review calls so that she can share any new updates to the platform and answer questions.
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.
WordStream is a little different from the competition. There are much more expensive solutions that manage the account for you with more features (Kenshoo, Marin, etc) and there are cheaper solutions out there that offer some of the features that WordStream provides; however, if a marketer wants to personally manage an account with some aided help than WordStream provides a great, cost-effective solution
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.
I've already noted the time savings that WordStream has provided - at leats 5 hours a week (and I like to think that my time is pretty expensive/worth it).
Wordstream has paid for itself already, simply in removing junk from our AdWords account - junk keywords, junk AdWords groups, junk matching.
I think we'll find, over more time, that Wordstream will continue to provide outstanding value in dropping our CPA - once Google register sthe lack of junk, our CPC will continue to go down.
