Efficient, User-Friendly Paid Search Management Platform with Tolerable Shortcomings
Updated August 21, 2015
Efficient, User-Friendly Paid Search Management Platform with Tolerable Shortcomings
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Marin Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with Marin Software
Marin is our company's bid management software. It is used across departments and we strive to integrate Marin tracking into any new platform or product pitched to us. We use it to upload all our campaigns, keywords, ads, manage our bidding, determine our ad positions, set our destinations, and manage our budget. When it's time for reporting, whether ad hoc or monthly, we use Marin numbers as a rule.
- Marin is a self-serve platform. You can tailor your campaigns per your preference/convenience/needs. You can customize your view, see % changes, create custom columns depending on your Key Performance Indicators, and set any sort of dimensions and labels that will help you filter for your campaigns on a daily basis.
- Bidding and changes to destination URLs can be done through mass edits within the UI, without having to upload bulk-sheets. You push any changes from Marin to the Engines, and can also pull in your changes from Bing/AdWords engines by syncing your campaigns as well. The system will not publish anything you do not manually post until Midnight PST. You can copy paste straight from your excel bulksheet into the uploading tool (or upload the document through unicode text).
- The Administrative log keeps track of all changes, and keeps users (through their logins) accountable for any edits. This way, you can filter for your name, and find the edits that you made, just to double check your work, or to make sure you are publishing the correct changes. There is a keyword- group- and campaign-level history/settings log, where you can see the name of the user who created, edited, published, paused, activated, deleted, etc. any item.
- You can set up alerts that will help you manage accounts: anything from active campaigns with 0 ad copy, to finding keywords in low ad positions.
- If you push duplicate keywords, the system will reject them, keeping our accounts from getting clouded due to human error. There is no need to download existing keywords or groups and use their keyword or group IDs to make any edits--instead, editing is a breeze because the system detects the new changes automatically. The only need for IDs is when making edits to creative.
- The Marin (corporate) reps we deal with on a daily basis are atrociously condescending, difficult to deal with, and need to work on their transparency. We encounter attitude when requesting logins for new team members! However, the help desk is staffed by the friendliest professionals willing to help.
- While the filtering options (filter by account, campaign name, group name, keyword name, destination URL, dimension, strategy, model, etc) are very extensive, you cannot filter for 'either/or'. For example, if I want to filter down to a specific group of campaigns in the same account that contain "A", but do not contain "B", I cannot make this filter in the same area. I would have to find the common denominator between those campaigns on say, the "strategy level", and exclude the ones I do not want on a "model" level.
- Just like any other platform where corporate paid search accounts are managed, sometimes it takes a while to pull reports. However, I've worked across a few other search management platforms, and Marin speeds are tolerable.
- I've benefited from increased efficiency due to Marin's easy bulk-edit process, which eliminates the need for a bulksheet upload (say to change bids or destination URLs).
Marin pulls reports on a much faster basis than the previous bid management program I used. It also allows me to work faster with its bulk-editing capabilities, where I can raise bids, pause/activate campaigns, change destination URLS, etc, all within the UI.