Marin - Fits the Bill for Search Marketers and the Clients They Support!
May 01, 2014
Marin - Fits the Bill for Search Marketers and the Clients They Support!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Current
Overall Satisfaction with Marin Software
Marin is currently being leveraged across my teams for several clients. We utilize Marin for much of the heavy lifting in launching, managing, optimizing and reporting on paid search accounts across engines. Through Marin we're able to spend less time creating tactical paperwork and more time building strategic and effective search campaigns.
- Marin does a great job providing an aggregated dashboard for paid search. Through their portal we're able to identify what's working well for our campaigns, weed out elements that are sub par and fine tune each aspect of the account.
- Marin also takes the heavy lifting out of managing paid search campaigns. Through their tool we're able to bulk upload, schedule, create, augment and optimize. By being able to make changes across many campaigns at one time, my team spends less time navigating different engine UIs and more time optimizing and bringing strategic insights and optimizations to our clients.
- Through customized views, Marin makes it easy for our teams and clients to see just the right amount of data to answer their question without having to export and manipulate data to arrive at the answer. By creating dimensions for each account we're able to segment performance even further, making optimizations even simpler.
- The onboarding process with Marin can be a bit clunky. The request to launch a new account is vetted by the Agency Lead which is then queued for the Professional Services team. By potentially getting a new PS team for each onboard, you're potentially working with people not familiar with your business. Once the onboarding is complete, the account is transitioned to the Engagement team. With different teams touching the account at various phases, it creates a disconnect in the transition and often leaves our team explaining the situation on multiple occasions.
- Custom metrics can be hard to come by in Marin. There are some "custom" features hard-coded into the tool that are generally available, but several that are not, such as converting seconds into hours and minutes.
- Data tying the date/time stamp of the click to the conversion is a custom report that has to be requested specifically by the team but is something, from a conversion path standpoint, that should be standard in the user interface, regardless of integration type or complexity of account.
- Through Marin's optimizers we've been better able to control CPL on a much larger scale, at a much faster pace than manual optimizations. By categorizing performance we're able to break down campaigns and optimize specific pieces to certain criteria instead of applying blanket rules to the entire account.
- By being able to see all search activity, in aggregate, Marin has enabled faster response times to necessary updates and fostered greater accuracy for campaign details.
- With the automated and scheduling features, Marin has allowed our teams to respond faster and spend more time developing strategic insights from the data and much less time "working" the data.
- Kenshoo Search,Decide DNA
Marin and Kenshoo perform at nearly the same level. There are features in Marin that exceed that of Kenshoo (and vice versa). One great customer service feature of Marin is the ability to create full read-only access which enables clients to see reports just as we see them, without compromising the integrity of the account structure and changeability. Additionally, Marin support provides more than one point of escalation making urgent situations easier to resolve.