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
YuMe
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
YuMe is a provider of digital video brand advertising, now offered and supported by RhythmOne since the acquisition in early 2018. The platform is designed to simplify digital video advertising campaigns.
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.
Ask advertisers what they would like to see offered from publishers that they aren't currently seeing in the space. Also, ask advertisers what their current challenges are or what they have noticed their clients pushing for recently
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 industry is constantly moving towards cross-device targeting and some advertisers are lagging behind in this regard. Many do not offer the ability to target on Connected TVs, which YuMe does. This is appealing for some of our clients that are more open to testing the latest technologies.
YuMe's sales staff are all very knowledgeable about their products, but not too pushy when it comes to getting on the plan. They try to add value to the meetings not by just pitching their products, but by educating us on industry trends and latest technologies.
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.
It would be interesting to see YuMe to provide ad solutions that are aimed to drive in-store traffic. Many videos are often geared towards engagement or the % of video completes, but it'd be helpful to see more ad formats that are able to track in-store sales outside of having the ability to print out a coupon.
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
YuMe's service was strong. They were able to regularly provide reporting and analytics. Whenever we reached out to make optimizations, the YuMe account management team was very responsive and would provide follow ups in a timely and professional manner. YuMe was also able to provide competitive rates and deliver all the inventory that was agreed upon on the IO. Many publishers that under deliver often get cut from the plan the next time around. This was not the case for YuMe
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.
YuMe is considered a leader in the video advertising space. YuMe had a very large array video ad formats that made it very flexible to run with them even though the creative and assets would change from campaign to campaign. YuMe also has a very strong portfolio of clients that have worked with them in the past. We have also requested to see the site list and there are many premium publishers that fit well with our target audience
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.
YuMe has driven a higher number of video views and video completions so that the overall campaign has strong performance metrics. YuMe also provides a great deal of reach and scale for campaigns due to its ability to offer more competitive and cost effective rates
