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…
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Yahoo Ads
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Yahoo Ads supports mobile, native and search engine marketing and advertising, and is a solution for placing ads where visitors are. The marketplace offers search and native advertising in one advertising platform.
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
Good for instances where search campaigns are driving poor overall traffic. Campaigns for awareness work well, and you have pretty good control of how your ads look without having to do too much work. We've used this successfully for law, financial services, and political campaigns effectively. With Twitter banning political ads, and Facebook becoming increasingly strict on their approval guidelines, this may turn into the best alternative. Would not necessarily recommend for ecommerce campaigns, or lead based campaign where keeping cost per conversion down is a primary objective.
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.
No traffic -- despite a high ROI, the lack of overall spend led to us eventually remove support for the channel from our services.
Nothing to differentiate it from other paid platforms -- Gemini didn't particularly offer anything new or novel that made it worth using over Bing and Google.
One of my main pain points with yahoo gemini is that the product is very difficult to use and the UI seems like they took a skeleton of a similar product and made it bare bones functional for the purpose of generating ad spend. It is a huge barrier for new customers and I feel one of the main reasons they have new customers at all is all the free trial dollars they offer.
They were always super helpful during training and demoing and would answer any questions we had. We didn't have a direct account manager, which would have been nice, but I just don't think their size accommodates for that type of set up. They are very knowledgeable and help guide you through a set up for each particular client.
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
Yahoo Gemini! does stack up well against its competitors in the smaller spending realms. We've never been able to justify the ROI when we try to scale it up to even 10% - 15% of our spend. No, we've found that it's much better as a tangential win than a mainstream channel.
