Marin Software vs. Oracle Marketing

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.

A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to
recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a
great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its
marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it
executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities.
Less favorable for the people who want to have something at
a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing
much in detail.

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

• We can look for the behavior of our clients on our website and mobile application using the analytics it provides.
• It is highly customizable.
• It presents data in a form that is easily understandable and reports are highly beneficial for us.
• Analytics in the form of graphs.

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

• User Interface - The UI is a bit outdated and clunky, but gets the job done with some getting used to.
• Training - There isn't much out there for training, unless you are willing to pay Oracle or a 3rd party.
• Support - There is no dedicated support and you have to use their portal. It sometimes take awhile to get things looked at or fixed, but they eventually get to it.

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.

We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.

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

Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.

No one has experienced any problems with availablity.

There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.

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 would actually rate day to day support a 1. We often knew more than the person on the phone.

I would however rate escalation support a 7. When we went to “red status”, support was very good. We were assigned a technical resource who performed a full audit. Unfortunately the integration to Salesforce.com still failed

They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification.

After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”

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

Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout

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.

I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.

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

It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe
analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of
Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch
to something else better than Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at
a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at
Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.

Incentivized

Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.

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

• Eloqua has had a very positive impact on our ROI and ability to build very complex programs. We have been nomitnated for the past 4 years as a Markie finalist and have won a Markie ourselves.
• Eloqua has a great pulse on the marketing trends and future developments to help keep it's software competitive.

Incentivized