Insightpool's Ads Optimization product is designed to help organizations see the best results for Twitter ads. The vendor says that its ads targeting platform not only utilizes interest data, but also analyzes thousands of behavioral data points to identify relevant people and predict those who are most likely to engage with customized media campaigns. According to the vendor, its in-depth targeting is more intensive and targeted than any other social…
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Marin Software
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Marin Software is a cloud-based cross-channel advertising campaign management platform which integrates many tools and functions, and it is the name of the company in San Francisco that issues the software. Marin touts cross-display (including mobile-optimized) advertisement retargeting, social marketing management, and many other tools to manage complex marketing and paid-advertising (PPC) efforts.
A free trial of this extensive platform is available. Marin Software maintains a client list…
I recommend Insightpool for anyone looking to build and maintain a relevant follower pool on Twitter as well as anyone that wishes to use Twitter for event recruitment, white paper downloads, etc. With a small team, I strongly recommend the full-service model, especially when you first get started. It's like having an in-house social team when you opt for full-service and has enabled us to do much more on Twitter than was previously possible with our small team.
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.
Event promotion and registration: Insightpool's unique ability to search both the Twitter stream and profile data makes reaching B2B marketing professionals at key industry events a cinch.
Building relevant follower pool: Insightpool's ability to target relevant users by profile data makes finding and nurturing the right individuals easier than ever before.
The personalized and targeted approach is well-received and prompts engagement from the people we care about.
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.
Initial iterations of the tool were buggy and not all that intuitive, which is why we moved to a full-service model. More recent releases are much more intuitive and less buggy.
The tool was limited before its ability to search Twitter steams, but now with stream search, we do not feel hindered in anyway.
Personally, I'm not a fan of public message targeting. Use with caution. The DM feature works great and is very well received by our audience however.
Just renewed for the rest of the year. Pricing is very reasonable especially when you compare it to the cost of paid Twitter campaigns. And, Insightpool campaigns have consistently outperformed direct Twitter campaigns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We've used sponsored Tweets via Twitter directly with limited success. We don't see the same level of engagement or types of followers with paid Twitter promos as we do with Insightpool campaigns. Additionally, we receive a fair amount of negative feedback when we use sponsored tweets as they tend not to be as targeted as running Insightpool campaigns
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.
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.
