Marin Software - Can't be worse than DoubleClick or Kenshoo, right?
Updated April 12, 2015
Marin Software - Can't be worse than DoubleClick or Kenshoo, right?
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Marin Software
Marin is being used across the agency per the client's needs. When a client is onbaorded, we walk them through a scorecard of Kenshoo, Doubleclick and Marin and make our recommendation accordingly. We began to see Marin become the leader of the pack and roughly 60% of our clients were running on Marin.
- Found that Marin was surprisingly good at managing Local accounts within an MCA (anywhere from 50-60 accounts, depending on vertical/scale).
- Bid optimization was better and easier to setup than other platforms.
- Customizing and pulling reports was extremely intuitive.
- I mentioned in the previous answer that Marin was surprisingly good at managing Local accounts to scale, but that is in comparison to other platforms. For a long time, Marin didn't have the capability to make changes across accounts. Let's say you are managing 500 Local Automotive Dealerships. Each MCA has a limit of 2.5 million KWs (recommended). That means you would have to break those dealerships in to 7 or 8 unique MCAs. Managing that at scale can be difficult if you can't make changes across MCAs.
- They really need more integration with other vendors (ie., call tracking platforms). Yes, there are workarounds, but they are manual unless your agency has internal resources to lessen the pain points.
- For our Local paid search team, it increased our account managers productivity an incredible amount. When running on DoubleClick, AMs were expected to manage no more than 80 accounts per person. After the transition to Marin, some AMs were managing up to 130 accounts efficiency.
- When it comes to customer service, I was incredibly impressed the first 6-8 months. Then everything fell apart. We had a dedicated account manager but they wanted to push all issues through their support center. I understand why they would want to do this, but the support center didn't know our unique setup and, quite honestly, half-assed everything that came their way. This happened across teams in the company as well. I definitely saw an alarming decline in customer service over time.
The agency I was working at primarily used Kenshoo, DoubleClick and Marin but would sometimes also work direct to engine. Having played multiple roles as an account manager and also the technical lead on the product/vendor team, Marin definitely stood out as my favorite.
Using Marin Software
Marin Implementation
- Implemented in-house