Beware of Simpli.fi
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Simpli.fi is currently used for our programmatic buying platform. We are an agency that does business with a number of clients, we place buys on their behalf for off-site targeting. We utilize their Search Retargeting & Geo-Fencing capabilities the most. One department within our entire organization uses this product.
Their platform allows us to have access to inventory we otherwise wouldn't have access to.
Pros
- Their geo-fencing capabilities are by far one of the best in the market. The reporting capabilities on the back end for geo-fencing is great & the way they can get down to a pinpoint location is great.
- Having access to the amount of exchanges that they partner with is great for a small agency that wouldn't normally have that reach.
Cons
- Their customer service over the last couple of years has been severely lacking! It has been an absolute terrible experience which has made us re-evaluate our plans of moving forward with them.
- They over-promise & under-deliver constantly. Even though they say they have the best geo-fencing capabilities in the market and that's how they sell you on it, they take short cuts which inevitably makes their "glamorous" product look bad. If you send them the form that they have requested you to fill out, it ends up putting a radius around each fence. That isn't acceptable, just because they are "short staffed" or its too much work is no excuse to screw over the client.
- A lot of times when we are getting questions from our clients that are truly relevant and are a cause for concern & we take that information back to Simpli.fi we feel like we are getting their "BS" answer. They talk a lot of game, but can't back it up when it comes down to it.
- The sites that their inventory runs on is extremely alarming - we could never show that to a client when it is such garbage.
- When we request keyword lists for Search Retargeting - we give them as much information as possible for the client + their website to pull keywords from. We could be running a restaurant and we could get keywords back for stock prices, linkedin, how to make donuts etc. Thousands & thousands of keywords that are completely irrelevant to our client and our cause.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you don't care where your campaigns are running, if you don't care about your clients then feel free to do business with them.
I would not recommend them to other agencies or business if they have a lot of particular advertisers and clients that they work with. It is too much work for them.
If you want to do a self-service model with Simpli.fi, then I could recommend working with them. As long as I don't have to deal with their customer service daily, and my company has the control of the campaigns, I can feel more comfortable working with them. But even still, there are a lot of red flags that have been raised over the last few years and I am skeptical.
