Adobe Advertising Cloud vs. Google Ad Manager

The platform is highly useful for digital ads marketing and campaign management. The platform provides a custom set of templates and tools to your ad production or designer team to create thousand of ads very quickly for your products or brands. To your marketing team, the tool provides full control over campaign strategy in terms of how to present relevant sets of ads to your web and app visitors based on customer behavior, demography, and age group. I could not think about any scenario where this platform is less suitable if you are looking for an advertising platform.

Incentivized

It is only suited for marketing. Make sure you have analytics on your site to track the people coming, final sales, and conversions because it is at it's best when you can use it to really read and understand the data at hand. Google Ads does everything it needs to in ads, and you don't need to be an expert to begin with it. However, I would not just tell someone to "go create an account" if they know very little about digital ads. Consult with someone first. It can be a little daunting if you were to do that!

Incentivized

• Automation - One of Adobe Marketing Cloud’s amazing marketing solutions is Adobe Campaign. This allows users to implement marketing automation to increase their campaign productivity and deliver an amazing customer experience. I can even set up users so they can build individual customer profiles based on the interests, actions, and preferences that are tracked through different marketing channels.
• A/B Split Testing – Most platforms have this now and most do not know how to even use it. However, the only way for a user to know how their marketing can be improved is to get a clear idea of how it is performing. But if all their data is in separate locations, it’s difficult to know which image, text or video is leading to sales or conversions. Adobe Marketing Cloud helps with keeping all of this clear for everyone on board.
• Social Analytics – when you or your customers are looking to improve their social marketing results, this platform offers Adobe Social, which is a social management platform that allows users to monitor conversations, promote and publish content, and analyze and engage with followers. One of the best parts is that the system automatically attaches tracking codes to users’ social content to identify what content drives engagement. It is a very powerful tool.

Incentivized

• Hyper targeting - I love how we can target, analyze, and then hyper target [advertisements] to our audiences to be able to hyper target the audiences that convert best. [Audiences besides] Google understands them, but also demographics, locations, search terms, and more.
• Advanced reporting - Without Google's seemingly endless ways to read and break down reports, we would not be able to best make decisions to maximize ROI.
• Strong conversion algorithm updates - The algorithm has become impressively strong for 'maximized conversions' and 'smart' campaigns. [That's] coming from someone who hated these portions of the algorithm until about 2019 where the updates (and continued updates) have worked incredibly well for these algorithms' purpose.

Incentivized

• As with most Adobe products, it can be a little tedious to use and requires a bit of extra training and "googling" around to make sure you are getting things right. It has improved over time within the entire Adobe suite, and I anticipate that this will be true of this as well.
• Adobe training and learning platforms can include a lot of technical terminology and jargon that makes it difficult for a novice to understand without feeling like they need a whole new education.

Incentivized

• Sometimes it can bog down and crash. This is rare, but it is processing a lot of steps/changes all at once and it's not expected to be perfect.
• Being able to quickly filter by campaign types would be nice (PPC/Display/Video Pre-roll). Our fix is to run these campaigns in totally separate accounts, so there is no overlapping in reporting/etc. This helps with seeing stats clearly without having to filter constantly.
• It could be visually prettier.

Incentivized

As of this writing, we have just discontinued our use of Adobe Media Optimizer. Other vendors gave us a better rate, a better contract option, and the product is just better than what we had with Adobe at the time. We may revisit Adobe again at the future, but it seems like they have a lot of work to do to catch up with the leader in the space

Incentivized

I think it's useful for our team and we rely on it to improve our business. It is within our budget also. Although we still will need an approval from the upper-level management team, I don't see any problem with that

Incentivized

It definitely takes some instruction to get to be able to use the system. One would struggle trying to get it to work without any previous experience with it. If you are famailiar with the interface it is actually quite fast and easy to maneuver around.

Love the product and how the GUI is as it is user friendly. When working with the product it is better to have some knowledge of what ad's you want to deploy where so that it is easier to use and move forward.

Incentivized

The reason being that support is extremely hard to reach, after the initial training period was over support became much harder to get from Adobe Media Optimizer's customer service agents which no one wants to deal with and we had to wait a long time for many inquiries to get answered

Incentivized

I could say a lot about this topic. As an agency, we get a new [representative] to talk to almost every quarter to go over select accounts and the campaigns within. Most of the time, these [educated representatives], don't provide any new feedback, or I just simply [disagree] with their approach. This is not all the time however. I have learned a lot from a rare few, [individuals] that have given me new strategies and access to betas early on. The other side of support, is the [overseas support platform]. [It] is usually not very helpful, but you can [emphasize] issues and they can research [them]. The Google Tag Implementation team is pristine though. When you need them, you need to set an appointment, which is usually 2 weeks out; they are so over-my-head intelligent, I've never had a bad experience with them and whenever I needed them for a fix, they solved it [within] the first call.

Incentivized

It was difficult initially, but the implementation of the Dynamic Tag Manager was a big help and timesaver.

It was a step up from Marin in terms of UI. Very similar functionality to Marin. Compared to Kenshoo Search and Google Marketing Platform it was probably not as advanced but offered the benefit of integrating with other products in the Adobe stack like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign.

Incentivized

As I alluded to earlier, you kind of have to be on Google if you want to search marketing. I've tried Bing Ads and I just don't see the same volume or quality. With dwindling targeting abilities on social media sites like Facebook, Google is still tall and mighty and helps us with intent-based targeting rather than just interest-based targeting.

Incentivized

• Adobe Media Optimizer delved deeper than other search engines could and actually provided us very useful information regarding how keywords were performing.
• The tool itself at first was quite useful in speeding our days up in being an all in one solution however it has various bugs that caused us to double-check our work basically costing us more time when using this tool.
• A large impact I had to how we were tracking our keywords was a bug with Adobe Media Optimizer informing us that we were not using a few keywords when it turns out we actually were and the tool was in fact incorrect in identifying what we actually were using.

Incentivized

• It has made the data from this accessible for all of my team to see.
• The ability to make changes can be bad - if the team does not agree.
• Getting current results lets us decide what needs to be changed and take their advice to see how things could improve.

Incentivized