Marin Software vs. WordStream

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.

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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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.

I am not the PPC manager here so I have to use the products available.

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

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.

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.

Incentivized

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

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.

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

• Since beginning to use the tool, we've seen our search impression share nearly double for some campaigns.
• We've increased our click-through rates by over 25% since adding WordStream to our toolset.
• I'm more confident in the strategies that are having an impact on our cost per conversion, and can better forecast our impact for the future.

Incentivized