Marin Software vs. X Ads

Marin is most effective when search campaigns carry a large budget, have more complex conversion goals, or operate across multiple publishers. As a rule of thumb, Marin and other bid management softwares are best suited for situations where editing with tools like AdWords Editor is no longer time-efficient or where changes need to be made cross-publisher.

Twitter is well suited for brands seeking to effectively manage and tweak their advertising campaign, while also interacting in real-time with people who stumble on their ads, thus maximizing optimal result. It is also my suggested ad platform for brands who want to target the younger generation, especially millennials and those born in the 1990s.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ease of use. It's very simple to add new creative to an existing campaign, or to quickly promote a tweet.
• Reporting. I appreciate the dashboard that shows how many organic and paid impressions tweets have received, as well as the resulting engagements.
• Low-lift advertising. The new auto-promote option makes it so I don't have to choose which tweets I want to promote.

Incentivized

• We have a lot of issues with syncing data from Omniture with our Marin clients. Often times, data will be missing for certain days.
• Sitelinks are not the easiest to upload and view in Marin.
• Better download speeds for reporting would help us get more done in a day.

Incentivized

• Limitation of characters to only 140.
• While the targeting of Twitter is relevant most of the time, it is not always right and there are some ads that are completely unrelated to the search terms entered.
• Not as many users as Facebook.

Incentivized

Since contract is month-to-month, there is little risk associated with contract renewal. I also enjoyed customer service and the fact that our CRM was integrated to better target our end user and deliver a higher profit to the company, to meet business goals. I believe Marin is one of the leading bid management software tools available on the market.

Twitter ads are not the best way for people to promote things because they do not pop out enough on people's feeds.

Marin Software's usability is bar none in the paid search world. All that said, I think Marin Software only appears superior because all the tools in the space provide extremely subpar support. Kenshoo is so complex that I don’t know think half the people that work there know how to use it.

Incentivized

The tool is ok to use, and ads are becoming more skippable on Twitter, so we are unsure as a company if it's still a good channel for direct response messaging. It does not perform as efficiently as other social platforms for lower funnel marketing. It does well for awareness campaigns that are set and forget, but optimizing for DR is not as efficient when you are trying to manage the ads on the client side.

Incentivized

I have had mostly successful support from Marin Software with the exception of one individual who I am assuming was new due to their lack of knowledge about the product. I do not hold this against Marin Software significantly because any time I have ever called/emailed with questions I have received help fast and accurately.

Interactive helpful videos, summaries, and quizzes help a user learn the platform in demo-mode. The only challenge was that once you clicked certain buttons per instructions, you couldn't necessarily go back to retake notes without redoing the entire module.

Incentivized

Not too much comes to mind for key insights regarding the implementation. Marin made the process as smooth as they could with the large account that we were working on. Once we had everything into the account, they walked us through the basic processes of the system and made sure everything was working properly.

Double click is easier to use as it offers a couple of clicks syncing with Adwords, while the process with Marin is longer. Besides, you can do any changes in both DoubleClick and Adwords, it doesn't really matter, while it maters with Marin. Speed of Marin is also an issue sometimes. Mainly these are the things that Marin is worse at.

Incentivized

Compared to Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads was more expensive. However, when we only look at the conversions rate of Twitter Ads, it always had way higher numbers, mainly because it is conversation driven and allows for the customer to speak directly to you as a business owner in a 2 way conversation.

Incentivized

• The improvements to CPA the bidding has made on the clients' accounts, made them comfortable and confident enough to incrementally keep raising budget from 100K to 400K/month over the course of the year.
• As an agency, the ROI is great. Being able to automate many of the more time consuming tasks makes it far easier to remain within monthly budgeted hours per client.
• The support could be a little better, there were instances where tags would break and would compromise the quality of data and it was difficult for us to diagnose the root of the problem.

Incentivized

• One Positive Impact has been that having ads running has increased the number of followers we have on Twitter.
• Another positive impact is that due to having more followers, we now have more visits to our site.
• A mixed impact would be that positively, since we have Adwords implemented as well, we can track back the source of our website traffic to being from a social source like Twitter. The negative of it is that Twitter ads does not have the tracking capability and we still need Google Adwords to do so.

Incentivized