MatchCraft Advantage is a search engine marketing (SEM) platform for managing many paid advertising campaigns at once, ideally for agencies managing campaigns for a number of small to midsize businesses with their local marketing efforts. To that end it automates many elements of running Google Adwords and Bing Ads campaigns and offers bidding suggestions via Matchcraft's proprietary algorithms. AdVantage Display is a built in set of tools for targeted display ads, and AdVantage Remarketing…
N/A
The Trade Desk
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
The Trade Desk is the eponymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Ventura California, a demand-side / data management hybrid platform (DSP / DMP).
If you have multiple campaigns running at the same time, you need your campaign setups to be quick and easy, or you have multiple users managing campaigns, then MatchCraft Advantage is right for you. It also performs well with both small and large budgets. If you want to do re-targeting but don't want/know how to implement the tag, MatchCraft has built-in features for that. However if you want to run video campaigns and campaigns in specific mobile apps, then for now MatchCraft will not work for you
After extensive research of DSP and DMP platforms in the market, our agency made the wise decision to license TTD's platform and develop a long-term partnership. TTD continues to innovate and offer cutting-edge media buying solutions, access to more audience data segments, and access to new and emerging media channels like CTV/OTT and digital-out-of-home. We couldn't be happier with TTD's technology and is one of the most advanced agency users of TTD is a key differentiator for our agency.
Automated bid adjustments for PPC campaigns. Manual bid strategies can be tedious to manage. MatchCraft's bidding system helps improve click throughs while keeping the click costs pretty low.
The report generation features of the platform MatchCraft platform are easy to use and provide actionable data from campaigns. PDF reports require only a few clicks and there is also an interactive dashboard that gives all the key metrics in a graphical format. Both features are customizable.
User management is a breeze in the MatchCraft platform. You can add, edit, activate, deactivate, and change the permissions as needed.
Not all Google/Bing features are available through the MatchCraft platform. Since they are limited to what is available in the API some features like video campaign management and specific app targeting are missing.
Customized report scheduling is not yet available for each campaign and the automated reports can only be sent to one email address. Additional recipients have to be sent their's manually.
Reports can take a little time to be generated. Not more than 1 minute but it can slow you down if you have multiple reports to send.
Reporting platform leaves a lot to be desired. Requires a lot of trial/error to pull exactly what you need to drive optimizations/learnings.
The "stop"/"continue bidding" feature for sitelists, devices, player sizes, etc is awful. When you set something up specifically, you should not have the AUTOMATIC option to serve beyond those parameters.
Trafficking video (VAST/VPAID) tags requires a manual insertion of a click URL. Completely redundant ask and is not provided by advertisers as that URL lives within the ad tag. Should not require multiple actions traffic a video tag.
Creative approval process (manual) doesn't seem necessary and is not a part of peers' platforms. There is no "pause/deactivate" feature for creative, you remove them or adjust the end date.
It's very intuitive. We had some training materials, but found that users were able to navigate through the software without needing many resources. Our only suggestion would be to add hover-over capability in the browser, so users can see a pop-up message further explaining what each button does.
We noted no issues with our limited interaction with support. The software operated just as expected and we found that we were able to navigate needs on our own. We understand that The Trade Desk offers excellent support, so we believe it will be a good resource to us in the future.
The interface on MatchCraft is much easier to get started with than the native PPC provider interfaces. MatchCraft finds ways of maximizing ROI within current spend target rather than recommending 'increased budget' as the fix for all issues. the reporting dashboard is also easier to use and report generation takes only a few clicks. The main downside is that MatchCraft is limited to what the PPC providers allow through the APIs
The Trade Desk is a much better product than AppNexus. Even though both products showed promise awhile back, AppNexus stopped innovating and The Trade Desk became specialists on data, cross site tracking and CTV inventory thus having a better and more unique product that actually adds value to your advertising efforts.
The good thing about having an agency account is The Trade Desk lets you add your markups to the client billing.
We had a very positive response from clients regarding their perceived ROI on their ad spend through The Trade Desk.
We did not have many national clients, mostly local dealerships, so it was difficult for them to allocate a lot of funds to display advertising, even though the ROI yield was acceptable.
