Marin Software

Marin Software is pretty expensive but it has capabilities built in to manage most accounts. I would not look to Marin Software to manage offline sales or more intricate or complicated accounts. If you are on a budget, Google Automated Tools can assist with a ton of what Marin Software does

It's well suited when you have to integrate it with another data source, like an FTP for example. The dimensions you can assign to campaigns or ad group levels help for easier performance management and reporting.
What makes it difficult is that everytime you need to update anything on the account, you can't use the publisher but have to do it through Marin. This makes the whole process very time consuming and causes more mistakes. Also if you have paused anything on the publisher and you don't remember to sync marin after, all changes on the publisher will get lost if you make new changes on marin.

Marin Software is great for large volume accounts ($100K+/month). It is also good with extensive keywords lists and campaigns. The more data and volume the system can use to optimize the bidding the better. Also, if an account is using a CRM such as Salesforce, integrating can allow you to optimize and prioritize around the actual lead disposition, which is very difficult without a tool like this.
Smaller accounts would likely not benefit as much and the fee would probably be used more effectively if put toward the actual spend.

Marin is great for users who are in both AdWords and Bing. Marin pulls both engines together to easily see performance and optimizations. If are working in a smaller account that is only on one or the other interface, Marin may not be as useful.

I think larger clients or clients with multiple initiatives and programs are better suited for Marin. Also, clients who have consistent and reoccurring reports that need to be accessed should use Marin. The web query abilities truly make reporting and bid strategy 100 times easier! The overview is intuitive and customizable according to your liking or your client's needs.

Marin Software is probably best if you have really big accounts. The scenarios only work on high volume conversions.

Marin Software is great to use for paid search, when there are numerous amounts of keywords.

Make sure their system can support your daily tasks in other ways beside bulk sheeting. Will save you a lot of time if you don't have to constantly use a bulk sheet. Also make sure you ask them what the process of switching for a new account representative is if the need occurs.

Key questions to ask:
-White glove service - set up expectations in advance. It's difficult to get a straight answer when reps keep sending you to the generic help section or insist that you dial the customer service line.
-Integration with third-party tracking services - the Marin tracking pixel is not always the answer for clients but certain functionalities will be limited if you don't use their proprietary conversion pixel.
-Expectations around what can/can't be managed in Marin - such as YouTube, GDN banners, dynamic remarketing, etc.

Ask whether your Key Performance Indicators (outcomes/clicks/site actions) can be integrated/tracked within Marin.

Marketing teams might have to engage a resource from Analytics or BI at least during integration to get maximum benefits. It helps to understand how the folder structure helps .

Marin is well-suited when it comes to managing large-scale accounts or many clients at once. But it falls short when it comes to integrating other vendors; in fact, we would always recommend Kenshoo when there were multiple data sources trying to be connected.

Larger agencies will benefit the most from the enterprise level or those needing to make bulk changes. Also, those in need of data directly imported into Excel for reporting will benefit greatly from the Excel web query function.

It is well suited for a colleague with large clients. I would not recommend it to a colleague who had clients that spent less than $50,000 minimum a month. There is no benefit to having it for smaller clients because it gives a lot of information that would not be relevant to them. Marin Software provides an excellent FAQ so once you start with the software it can answer most of your questions. I'd also highly recommend taking the certification courses to fully understand the software.

It was always appropriate to use this

It is well suited for Adwords, Bing Ads and Facebook integration. I would ask about their reporting and analytics - I haven't used Google Analytics or another tool in conjunction with this, but I feel it would be a tremendous help with decision making, etc.

Ensure your agencies management fees are high enough to cover the cost of the software. Ensure your team is utilizing the Marin on boarding team to the fullest. You will likely need a person just to manage the software for your team, make sure you can afford to have one person dedicated to managing the software.

Its more flexible for companies who need custom fields built in for reporting purposes. It easy allows API plug ins.

Marin software is a good fit for any large client looking to work within Adwords and Bing for digital marketing. Marin allows you to make many bulk changes at once with simple uploads and the reporting is seamless.

If you are running Google and Bing or multiple accounts on either, it's a must have

If you have a lot of campaigns and/or across multiple publishers, using Marin will help you keep campaigns in one place and watch performance more easily. But if you have a small account, it's not necessary to pay that much for it.

Marin makes it easy to manage campaigns with massive amounts of keywords. One of our clients has ~70,000 keywords and Marin's filtering, sorting and bulk upload features make it possible for us to make campaign changes quickly.

I would only recommend Marin to advertisers with large and complex paid search programs.

It is well suited to manage leads for the software products.

Well suited for accounts for large budgets and strict cost per lead metrics. Also helpful for accounts that require different locations, time zones, currencies. Not appropriate for smaller size accounts that are solely focused on branding.