Skai (formerly Kenshoo) is a cross-channel advertising solution for search marketing, social media and online advertising. The product aims to give advertisers and agencies the control and automation needed to make better investment decisions across search marketing and online advertising.
$10,000
Starting Price
WordStream
Score 6.9 out of 10
N/A
Wordstream, the eponymous offering from the company in Boston, MA, provides a free tool for analyzing performance "grading" an Adwords campaign, beyond which, Wordstream Advisor provides (for a fee, though a free trial is available) recommendations to optimize a paid advertising campaign on Google, Bing, and Yahoo! search engines, and place ads. Beyond the platform, Wordstream also offers full account management services, for outsourcing one's campaign, and white labeling for…
WordStream is a little different from the competition. There are much more expensive solutions that manage the account for you with more features (Kenshoo, Marin, etc) and there are cheaper solutions out there that offer some of the features that WordStream provides; however, …
Kenshoo Search may not be appropriate if you don't spend much on search engine marketing. It also may not be appropriate if you don't care about tracking conversions and are only concerned with increasing awareness. Or, if you care about tracking conversions but don't expect to capture many, Kenshoo Search may not be necessary.
WordStream is so beneficial to a green digital marketing team. If your team is new to paid ads, this will help immensely. It might not be as beneficial for a company that does not use AdWords and is strictly in social ads.
Customized reporting. There are many features that users can't report out on in power editor. Kenshoo makes it incredibly easy to get everything you need for a raw data dump.
Automation. Whether it's automated rules, portfolios or refreshing CRM uploads, Kenshoo helps cut some of the manual tasks out of the process making me more efficient.
Staying up to date with Facebook product updates. I can appreciate that Kenshoo does an exceptional job and ensuring new capabilities in Facebook are ready for use in the Kenshoo platform as well.
Remove duplicates: The platform has a tool that enables marketers to easily identify duplicate keywords across campaigns, ad groups, and the account; from there duplicates can be paused in an effort to improve quality scores and account performance.
Bid management: WordStream reveals which current keywords can improve campaign performance by increasing and decreasing their bids - updates can be made on the spot.
Ad optimizations: WordStream scans paid search accounts to ensure each ad group is using high performing ads. Marketers can quickly create new ads, and pause ads based on the tool's recommendations.
Syncing - I have had many issues where syncs would time out, or not show that changes were posted to Facebook.
Library - if there was a library for targeting settings that could be saved and easily accessed and input into new campaigns, that would be very helpful.
Updates - seemingly basic tools that a social management platform should have often taken a long time to be released.
This is definitely not for a beginner and require knowledge on how PPC/SEM campaigns are run unless you purchase the premium support package that includes a dedicated representative to which they are very helpful.
We had some serious tracking issues and were unable to effectively track the clicks to our website. Because of this, I had to start from scratch and decided not to use WordStream.
It's great to have a product like Kenshoo Social. It has a lot of data and is a great tool to use. Honestly, I think we would have looked somewhere else if we didn't have some much data and time invested into the platform. We had used it across search and social, so we invested a lot of time to get it running smoothly. It is very expensive and we think we could have gone elsewhere to get the same results over time. Once they have your data and the system is running smoothly, it's very difficult to go elsewhere
I have not had any experience with the customer support team for platform issues, but the account representative checks in with us often and is always available to answer questions. We will usually get on quarterly review calls so that she can share any new updates to the platform and answer questions.
While DoubleClick does not fully budget pace accounts I think it overall provides more accurate changes than Kenshoo. When our company selected Kenshoo we were told it would be able to manage hundreds of small accounts with small budgets. It is more designed for accounts that would be spending minimally thousands of dollars a month. We had extreme issues with Kenshoo budget pacing and increasing our bids. Overall it did not meet our needs, and we will be switching vendors at end of contract
I've never used a system to help with my Google AdWords. This was the first system I had used. WordStream definitely takes the cake though, I have a hard time believing there could be a better system out there. I wouldn't even consider going to look for a new system. I am confident WordStream has owned the Google AdWords space.
ROI is harder to track due to reporting/column & time frame default tech in my humble opinion but generally better results when compared to other products
Since the interface is difficult to navigate and paid search is a reactive medium, can produce barriers to change.