TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Simpli.fi

Score10 out of 10

8 Reviews and Ratings

What is Simpli.fi?

Simpli.fi is the epoymous flagship product from the company headquartered in Fort Worth, for programmatic media buying, display advertising, and streaming / OTT monetization. It is a data management and demand-side buying hybrid platform (DMP / DSP).

Top Performing Features

  • DSP integration

    Integration with DSP platforms for ad buying

    Category average: 7.8

  • Data Transfer

    Transfer of data to ad exchanges to match third-party to segments.

    Category average: 7

Areas for Improvement

An excellent audience targeting tool

Pros

  • Geo-fence capability
  • Variety of targeting capabilities such as keyword, contextual and retargeting.
  • Only need one pixel to track different tactics

Cons

  • The approaches are not easily understood by our sales reps.
  • The reporting platform is pretty basic. The new platform is still in beta version.

Return on Investment

  • Very good on ROI
  • Our campaign performance is normally very good.
  • Customer support is very responsive.

Alternatives Considered

Dataxu ClearSight

We trust Simpli.fi with our clients' ad dollars

Pros

  • Simpli.fi's Geo-Fencing capabilities are top notch! The ability to include an unlimited number of geo-fences within a campaign is invaluable, as is the ability to measure the effectiveness of a geo-fencing campaign in driving foot traffic to our clients' physical locations.
  • Our organization appreciates the knowledge, experience and responsiveness of Simpli.fi's customer support staff.
  • One of the things Simpli.fi does particularly well is the education of its users and re-sellers. From monthly webinars, to its Bullseye learning courses, they have a way to make the complex understandable to even the most green digital sellers!

Cons

  • Perhaps the biggest weakness Simpli.fi has is in reporting. Although near real time campaign data is available at any time, they lack a forward facing dashboard we can share with our clients. The lack of a customization on customer campaign dashboards has more than once become a negative factor in winning a sale against a competitor.
  • When we first started working with Simpli.fi, we could add Facebook to campaigns and use the Simpli.fi reporting tool to measure results. That capability disappeared shortly after implementation. It would be nice to use Simpli.fi tools to integrate display and social campaigns into a single dashboard.

Return on Investment

  • We have been able to leverage Simpli.fi's geo-fencing tools to pry business away from larger competitors.
  • The lack of a customer-facing dashboard is a weakness.
  • Simpli.fi's low barrier of entry has allowed us to scale at our pace without the threat of being cut off in the face of high minimum spends.

Alternatives Considered

RocketFuel, Centro and MediaMath

Beware of Simpli.fi

Pros

  • Their geo-fencing capabilities are by far one of the best in the market. The reporting capabilities on the back end for geo-fencing is great & the way they can get down to a pinpoint location is great.
  • Having access to the amount of exchanges that they partner with is great for a small agency that wouldn't normally have that reach.

Cons

  • Their customer service over the last couple of years has been severely lacking! It has been an absolute terrible experience which has made us re-evaluate our plans of moving forward with them.
  • They over-promise & under-deliver constantly. Even though they say they have the best geo-fencing capabilities in the market and that's how they sell you on it, they take short cuts which inevitably makes their "glamorous" product look bad. If you send them the form that they have requested you to fill out, it ends up putting a radius around each fence. That isn't acceptable, just because they are "short staffed" or its too much work is no excuse to screw over the client.
  • A lot of times when we are getting questions from our clients that are truly relevant and are a cause for concern & we take that information back to Simpli.fi we feel like we are getting their "BS" answer. They talk a lot of game, but can't back it up when it comes down to it.
  • The sites that their inventory runs on is extremely alarming - we could never show that to a client when it is such garbage.
  • When we request keyword lists for Search Retargeting - we give them as much information as possible for the client + their website to pull keywords from. We could be running a restaurant and we could get keywords back for stock prices, linkedin, how to make donuts etc. Thousands & thousands of keywords that are completely irrelevant to our client and our cause.

Return on Investment

  • We have actually seen quite a bit of negative impact because of poor performance & poor quality of sites & keywords, we have lost quite a bit of business.
  • Regardless of any negative impact, we still are able to offer this as a service to our clients, which in turn we do make money off of.