Skai (formerly Kenshoo) is a cross-channel advertising solution for search marketing, social media and online advertising. The product aims to give advertisers and agencies the control and automation needed to make better investment decisions across search marketing and online advertising.
$10,000
Starting Price
Springbot
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Springbot aims to bring all the marketing capabilities large retailers have to small businesses at a fraction of the cost. Through Springbot, online stores will be able to leverage automated marketing on channels such as email, SMS, social and online ads. Business owners and marketers who find themselves wearing many hats can still send the right message at the right time with confidence. With an all-in-one marketing automation platform designed with ease of use in mind, business…
$199
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Pricing
Skai
Springbot
Editions & Modules
Kenshoo
$10,000
Starting Price
Platform Base Package
$199/month
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Skai
Springbot
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
See website for pricing calculator for additional pricing options.
Kenshoo would be a good tool if your client has extremely high budgets with low CPCs. For small, geo-specific accounts the capabilities have not be built out. Therefore, the tool could not budget pace our 250+ accounts. The main reason we had chosen Kenshoo was because of its budget pacing capabilities. Unfortunately, it did not save us time and created additional budget pacing issues with over pacing our accounts.
Kenshoo Search bid policies make bid optimization easy and automated. Optimizations are based off of sophisticated algorithms rather than simple bid rules (although Kenshoo Search also offers these). There are many different policies to choose from. Simply choose your type of goal (example: awareness vs. ROI), choose your metric, and assign to your campaign(s) and/or account.
Kenshoo Search reporting offers a large selection of reporting templates that are easily exported to Microsoft Excel. In addition, they also offer dashboard reporting with a variety of different widgets that are easily customizable. This feature makes it extremely easy to view metrics that may normally require manual excel work.
Kenshoo Search has a Desktop Editor tool similar to Google Adwords Editor that makes bulk optimizations easy and time efficient. This is a huge resource win for me and my team!
The demographic data was great. I could see how many males vs. females, ages, income, married, with or without children. It gave me a good idea of who my customers were.
Using their tracking URLs in all of our campaigns allowed us to get a better idea of what exactly was driving revenue.
Not only could I see top performing products, which I can do within Magento, I could also see top selling categories and colors.
I can pull a Coupon Usage report our of Magento, but Springbot gave me additional info like AOV and ROI on those codes.
Springbot also gave me a lot of info about our abandoned carts. It shows us which products are most abandoned along with views, conversion rates, etc.
Springbot gave us an Instagram Shop page that allowed us to curate social shares and then tie them to products on our site.
When working with large accounts, such as mine, the tool can be slow. There are a lot of times where the editor tool will freeze, and I'm not sure if I need to reboot or exit the tool. I wish it was a smooth process, much like the AdWords editor tool.
Kenshoo support can be slow to respond at times. In the ticketing industry, things are very much based on time of day or time of the week. If the product is down or not functioning during an on-sale or a major event, it can be difficult to get tech support on the phone.
Their reporting really doesn't set them a part from the competition. I've used social tools such as Marin and a few others, and they're all pretty similar as far as reporting. If possible, I think you're better off using Google Analytics for reporting, just so you have a common denominator.
After our purchase, I let spring or know that I was currently too busy to implement the system and to put things on hold. They ignored this request and kept charging us a monthly fee without using any of their systems. I have only logged in once. Nothing has been set up. They can see that from their side.
After multiple emails back and forth their out was in the user agreement. I never asked for my money back only credit so I can regroup and when I have time get on to implant the systems. They tell me they don't do that.
They don't care about any of the customer's needs. They only care about charging you that monthly fee. Terrible bus plan. With enough bad feedback, they will suffer from such a narrow plan.
I wish we had actual information about the cons using the system. Unfortunately I was not given the opportunity to do unless I wanted to keep paying while not using the system.
We received great customer service from the Kenshoo Social team, they listen to feedback, and truly work to get things fixed. The tool works well and they are always working on ways to improve it to help improve performance for our clients
We have raved about Springbot's support because they always get back with us so quickly. Our rep, Jared has been phenomenal in helping us, always being available to chat with us and explaining some of the metrics with us so we can better understand. He completely handles our ads, checks on them, and lets us know when to update and why.
I think Skai beats the competitors with its advanced bidding management system, this is a unique feature of them that if you implement properly, your accounts will surely benefit from this, especially if you have tons of data that the algo can learn from and optimize accordingly. In terms of reporting, they are the best we've got so far, scheduling options are great.
ROI is harder to track due to reporting/column & time frame default tech in my humble opinion but generally better results when compared to other products
Since the interface is difficult to navigate and paid search is a reactive medium, can produce barriers to change.
Springbot gave us a better idea of who our customer was. We just launched in January 2015 having been B2B previously. So we weren't really sure who we were marketing to.
I only paid $200/month for the service so I didn't waste a ton of money trying it out. They have a 30 day cancellation policy so I wasn't stuck in a year long contract.
It was a let down because I had such high hopes of everything it would allow me to do and see with one platform. Give them a couple more years and I think they will work out the kinks.
