"Over-Promise and Under-Deliver" - A Cautionary Tale About Using AdRoll
March 14, 2017
"Over-Promise and Under-Deliver" - A Cautionary Tale About Using AdRoll
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AdRoll
We were looking for a programmatic ad platform to help manage and optimize our larger clients' remarketing campaigns. Initially, we started with a couple clients who were interested in testing out the platform, or who had experience running it the past.
- Campaign management
- Access to premium inventory
- Cross-platform management in a single UI
- Full service management was the biggest selling point for us, but not a single campaign went live through our AdRoll reps without tracking errors, billing issues and lack of follow-through from their account teams. Our spend levels were high, which makes me wonder how much worse the customer service would have been if we were just spending a few thousand dollars per month.
- Despite what they claim, AdRoll's interface is outdated (has not materially changed since 2012) and inefficient. We had to rely on their unresponsive account teams to do even the most basic updates.
- Slow response time, despite clear service level commitments. Almost every element of our experience with their customer service can be summarized by "over-promise and under-deliver." When things went wrong, they were quick to apologize and make excuses, but the quality of service and response times never improved.
- Attribution models are very generous to AdRoll campaigns. In one case, they attributed over a quarter of a million in eComm revenue to one of our clients based off less than $10k in ad spend. Even after adjusting down the view-through attribution windows, they still gave their campaigns a disproportionate amount of credit.
- Finance team is not customer-facing. If you run into payment or refund issues, it will take months and many hours of back and fourth to get them resolved. We had to go through our account reps to get anything resolved, which took far more time that is would have directly with Google, Bing or Facebook.
- Lack of billing transparency. AdRoll does not tell advertisers this, but they pre-bill for the following period's ad spend. This means that when advertisers put campaigns on pause, they will see a "credit" for future advertising, which is actually their own money. This comes across as deceptive and shady, especially given how hard it was to get refunds processed. For context, no other ad platforms we've used pre-bill for future advertising.
- AdRoll's incompetent and unresponsive agency support team nearly cost us one of our largest clients.
- They billed one of our clients $14k of another client's ad spend, resulting in over 30 hours of unbillable time from our end to resolve the issue.
- AdRoll's reported ROAS was unrealistically inflated compared to other platforms we've used. Perceived ROI was strong, but actual ROI was no better than it was with other platforms.
The worst we've tried. We switched back to AdWords after our negative experience with AdRoll and have been very happy since.