WordStream Advisor

The software was very user friendly.

We utilized a premium membership to secure monthly support and their team was so kind and supportive!

It was nice to have all of our ad campaigns within one tool versus managing Bing and Google separately.

The monthly reports were AWESOME to present to clients and leadership!

This is definitely not for a beginner and require knowledge on how PPC/SEM campaigns are run unless you purchase the premium support package that includes a dedicated representative to which they are very helpful.

We had some serious tracking issues and were unable to effectively track the clicks to our website. Because of this, I had to start from scratch and decided not to use WordStream.

Reporting.

Customer support.

Ad creation.

Google syncing.

Some design.

On boarding.

Reporting. I am able to pull detailed analytical reports with ease. This helps when trying to really dig deep and analyze how my account is performing.

Set/Manage budgets. I don't even have to log in to AdWords anymore! I can integrate it with the WordStream platform, set budgets, and leave it to run. This is powerful and saves so much time!

Amazing customer support. Any time I have a question, they answer it within the day and are always friendly and able to help.

UX Design. Their design isn't bad, but they could definitely improve and make things a little more attractive for the end-user.

Connecting with your Google account. I felt this process was a little complicated and I wish they made it a one or two-click process to connect the accounts.

Onboarding. I feel every client should have a personal rep helping onboard them. Maybe others had this, but I did not. I still love the platform, but it would have been faster to learn if they had an onboarding rep.

Great recommendations for keywords and ad optimizations that we often implement.

Monthly report provides important details on the health of each account.

The new Strategy feature has potential but hasn't offered much insight at this point.

Some reportedly "underperforming" ads and keywords are not doing as bad as the system says.

It breaks down Google Ads and simplifies it.

It addresses issues with your accounts and guides you to make beneficial changes.

When updating ads sometimes it doesn't have suggestions and just lists that there is an issue with the ad.

The functionality of creating new ads gets kind of confusing and I'd prefer to do that within Google.

Remove duplicates: The platform has a tool that enables marketers to easily identify duplicate keywords across campaigns, ad groups, and the account; from there duplicates can be paused in an effort to improve quality scores and account performance.

Bid management: WordStream reveals which current keywords can improve campaign performance by increasing and decreasing their bids - updates can be made on the spot.

Ad optimizations: WordStream scans paid search accounts to ensure each ad group is using high performing ads. Marketers can quickly create new ads, and pause ads based on the tool's recommendations.

Keyword URL updates: There isn't an easy way to add new keywords to the account and add custom keyword level "final URLs" to each keyword (this is important for Marketers who use custom tracking parameters at the keyword level).

Ad extensions: WordSteam provides recommendations on how to improve some ad extensions; however, Google's newer ad extensions (Structured Snippets) are not supported by the tool.

Integrations: Currently, WordStream only integrates with AdWords, Bing, and Facebook - the tool would provide much more value if it integrated with more platforms.

WordStream surfaces all of the urgent action items for each individual account.

The platform makes managing negative keywords a breeze.

It also simplifies reporting with automated reports that hit on all of the important metrics.

Some of the algorithms could be smarter. For example, it suggests that we negate close misspellings of key terms when the user intent was clearly applicable.

Sometimes it will suggest that we pause an ad that has only been running for a week or so, which is not long enough for proper testing.

The system can sometimes run slowly, especially the accounts dashboard.

Explaining Google AdWords.

Showing examples and metrics.

Keyword analysis tools.

Not all Google AdWord settings can be managed through WordStream.

How to effectively set bid amounts.

20 minute work week

Insights into campaigns

Ease of use

One place to manage all our campaigns on different platforms

It is not a cheap software

The 20 minute work week function is an easy way to stay on top of your ads.

Querystream is a good way to see what people are already searching for related to your business.

Keyword Research tool is good for finding the right targets for your content strategy.

Their AI system in the 20 Minute Work Week doesn't always seem to learn what you consistently reject.

Their advice tends to be to build out large amounts of keywords and campaigns which can spread your budget thin.

Would be nice to get more in depth advice on how to optimize ad copy so they perform better.

Helps ad negative keywords

Rep is friendly

Platform easy to navigate

Customer service is awful.

Support email is non-responsive.

Sales technique to lower price is lock you in to a contract that's impossible to cancel , but they don't mention that when you cancel.

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.

We have B2B aspects of our business, so we also advertise on LinkedIn. There is currently no support for LinkedIn ads.

The Facebook Ads do not support the metrics of video ads yet. Hugely disappointing since those seem to perform the best for us.

Video training resources are a little lacking. Perhaps it is because they want to encourage the individual consultants?

Their consulting team is amazing. My consultant, Ben, truly knows his stuff. Even the smallest of notes or suggestions from him would result in massive improvement and click rate.

I love the weekly insights and ad monitoring. The suggestions improved as time went on, and I found the suggestions for ad changes to be a great way to use our ad budget more efficiently.

When I was using Wordstream, a great frustration of mine was the inability to have your leads exported into Wordstream. I know this was an improvement that they were already looking into at the time. This is also a fault of FB as they do not make FB Ad Leads easily to access so I do not think this is a big reason to not utilize WordStream.

I think they need a smaller business price model, the price may not be accessible to smaller businesses.

Streamlining basic tasks. The 20-minute work week function is great for finding low-hanging fruit in your account (negative keywords to add, underperforming ads to modify, and groups to split, etc.) in a quick, checklist-like function. It keeps you motivated to do at least the basics each week.

Easy negative additions. It's much easier to add single-word negative keywords using the QueryStream tool, rather than the standard Google AdWords interface, which by default has you adding the full search phrase. This may seem like a small thing, but it can greatly reduce the number of clicks needed to manage a larger account.

Ad editing/creation is much easier within the tool than within the standard AdWords setup. I'm able to duplicate ads and make minor tweaks without going through many steps. I also appreciate the tips for improving ad performance during the creation process.

The premier consulting package helps with answering questions and has given me a lot of good feedback regarding the strategic approach to our account and helped me with restructuring campaigns for better ROI.

The ability to see Quality Score at all levels (campaign, ad group, keyword) has given me a much clearer picture of where my account's inefficiencies are and how I can adjust my strategy accordingly.

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).

Simple reports

It did not add any value to our AdWords management.

Wordstream optimizes the budgets of each individual campaign.

Wordstream suggests new keywords and negative keywords for each campaign.

Wordstream gives you a weekly report on suggested fixes and updates to your accounts.

I would like to see an optional feature where Wordstream provides daily suggested updates.

It would be great if Wordstream could optimize Yahoo! Gemini accounts as well.

At first their software was really great for managed Google Adwords, because the interface with Google was difficult and confusing. However Google has improved their system and feel your time would be better served learning how to use it rather than investing time using an external software.

Reporting - From the first day of using their "Managed Services" program, I told them I was having issues with reporting. That is why I hired them, because I needed help setting up my PPC accounts and making sure that we were getting the correct data. Over the course of 9 months of using managed services this issue was never resolved. The data was so skewed that we were actually reporting more leads than clicks! The first thing that I had to do when I decided to stop using WordStream was to reach out to BING directly as see why we were experiencing this issue and within two hours we were able to identify the problem and resolve it. (It turns out that the conversion tracking code was on the site in multiple locations) . Why Wordstream was unable to identify this problem when paying $1,600 a month for managed services is beyond me...

ROI - I was thinking that these guys were the experts, that they knew about PPC than I do and would improve our paid advertising. I thought I would easily recovery the amount I was paying them per month by seeing a decrease in cost per conversions. However, this couldn't have been farther from the truth - my cost per conversions & monthly spend went up! Not only was I paying them to "manage" my account - I started paying more in advertising and getting less results.

Customer Service - I got passed around from rep to rep and often times felt that one less than the last. I never really knew how the actual manager was, or who to reach out to when things started going wrong. It was very frustrating!

Great for bulk edits to bidding strategies

Excellent time and work effort saving features

Synchronizes directly with multiple AdWords Ids

Quite a learning curve to learn many of the features

Recommend (unless you are a PPC pro already) to work with a Wordstream advisor which is an add'l cost

Can be expensive monthly if you are using the tool in combo with the advisor

Organization

Ease of Use

Customer Service

Lack of Analytics

No retargeting integration

No IP retargeting integration

Price structure

Simple interface that makes suggestions for increasing performance, organizing ad groups and analyzing campaigns for AdWords, Bing and Facebook Ads

Excellent staff and consulting team that provides webinars, individual consultations and training, blogs, best practices and changes to marketing platforms

Awesome reports that are customizable and easy to read, very visual and interactive

Monitors spend, keyword performance, quality scores, ad CTR, use of ad extensions and many other factors to managing PPC

They are rolling out new updates, but currently don't have a search function which makes it slower to find and access accounts

There are some sections that are still on an old layout and those pages are harder to navigate because you have to scroll to the right and can't see the whole screen at once

Some suggestions are not good at first, but by marking the reason for rejecting a suggestion the interface adapts and "learns"

We're grateful for the in-depth help provided by the strategy calls. We had some serious AdWords problems that were deeper that we had thought - WordStream helped us see the light with those.

The WordStream UI is a little old-school/clunky but it's absolutely effective and much more efficient (holy moly is it more efficient) than trying to do the same thing in AdWords itself.

The UI could use some help - it feels like an Excel sheet a lot of the time, and that's never a good thing :) That said, it's not that it's hard to use or that I'm unable to do what I need to do (which is the most important, of course), it's just that it's ... well, not the most modern look, is all.

Keyword Bidding

Highlighting Ad Errors

Campaign Bidding

Negative Keywords

I don't really have anything, it made my life easier.

Fast

Accurate health of PPC account

Uncovered issues that could be addressed immediately