Smartly.io supports Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns with campaign optimization, multi-product ads, automatic budget allocation and optimization, and custom analytics.
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WordStream
Score 6.9 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…
It is the best for visually appealing brands, basically, any hedonic goods to advertise. Best if you have a lot of visuals to represent your business and want to leverage your presence on given platforms. You can easily turn images into videos or have dynamic attributes for your remarketing campaign. As the pricing is not attractive for smaller clients, it is the best to be either a big brand to use the platform on your own or a big agency to use smartly.io features as your competitive advantage.
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.
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.
Pricing is not attractive to smaller agencies. The base minimum was 1k per month, then 2.5k per month and it grew up to 5k per month. It means that agencies will have to choose service of competitors as Smartly.io is not affordable for everyone. It becomes a premium business.
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).
If the problem involves some product bugs, customer support does not leave it be. They forward the problem to engineers so it would be solved. Once we caught a problem, they fixed it through the weekend. They always keep you in the loop with the current status of the issue. Once a new person jumps in to follow up, the reaction is
They are all the time super polite and very friendly.
Replies in under 5 minutes.
Customer support can jump into your account and make quick fixes if you allow them to.
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.
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
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.