G2 Crowd publishes Spring 2015 rankings of the best social advertising platforms, based on user reviews

CHICAGO, March 26, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- The first Grid^SM report for social advertising platforms, published today by business software review site G2 Crowd, ranks eight products to help purchasers in their selections.

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The Spring 2015 report is based on data from more than 150 reviews written by advertising professionals.

The Grid^SM, which is created from G2 Crowd's software review platform, factors in customer satisfaction reported by users and vendor market presence determined from social and public data to rank products.

Social advertising platforms include advertiser campaign management products that automate the processes by which advertisers and marketers buy, manage and place advertisements on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In addition, these products typically offer functionality to serve advertisements across one or more additional channels such as display, video, mobile, or search or possess demand side platform capabilities to buy and serve ads in real time. This report only includes data from reviews where the reviewer specifically indicated that they use the product for social advertising.

To qualify as a Leader, a product must receive a high customer satisfaction score and have substantial market presence. Twitter Ads and Facebook for Business were named Leaders. High Performers have high customer satisfaction scores with a smaller market presence than Leaders. Marin Software, Kenshoo, MediaMath and AdRoll were named High Performers. Marin Software earned the highest overall customer satisfaction score.

Across all social advertising platforms, reviewers reported the product they use meets their requirements at an average rate of 81%, and on average reviewers said they were 80% likely to recommend the product they use.

Some highlights from the social advertising reviews on G2 Crowd:

"I really like being able to target by keywords. People are constantly searching for things on Twitter, and being able to target those keywords depending on my audience is super helpful. I also like being able to target by different users. This allows me to expand the reach of influencer marketing. For example if my audience is similar to [a competitor's], I can target similar followers to theirs."
- Sabel Harris, Senior Marketing Manager at Contactually

"Facebook has great consumer insights and can predict behaviors much more accurately than most [platforms]. The dashboards are informative and provide good insights into campaigns pre and post launch."
- Saad Salman Chaudhary, Manager, Loyalty Programs at Sears Holdings Corporation

"Having a unified view for everything you have running is very important, especially when [you're] dealing with large budgets across many campaigns. Marin allows myself and team to work more effectively and pull reports in [minutes] that would have otherwise taken many hours."
- Nick Taylor, Senior Paid Media Specialist at Ethology

"The Kenshoo platform is very user-friendly, enables us to create Facebook campaigns with ease, and also to quickly compare performance metrics across all of our campaigns at once. They can also pull Google Analytics [data] into the dashboard [for] custom metrics...which is extremely valuable."
- Kristina Simonsen, Marketing Associate at Brilliant Earth

"MediaMath is a very easy product to learn….The dashboard is really clean, allowing you to see all the ads and campaigns that are running. It was also relatively quick and straightforward to add creative."
- Misty Faucheux, Owner at Faucheux Enterprises

"AdRoll…[is] a great way to get into buying on the Facebook Exchange, if you've never used it before. They also [offer] other great display and retargeting packages to fit your specific needs."
- Jason Wadsworth, Digital Media Strategist at Boncom

Of the nearly 40 software vendors listed in G2 Crowd's Social Advertising category, the eight ranked products each received 10 or more reviews to qualify for inclusion on the Grid^SM.

Satisfaction rankings are generated from the user reviews, and market presence is calculated from vendor size, market share, and social impact. Based on a combination of these scores, each software solution is categorized as a Leader, High Performer, Contender, or Niche.

Premium research access can be purchased on the site for $599. These offer the original data for filtering and weighting, as well as individual profiles of each platform with the most helpful positive and negative social advertising platform reviews, detailed company information, user satisfaction ratings, feature scores and customer metrics. Future refreshes of the Grid^SM will provide updated rankings based on the latest reviews and social data.

Be sure to check out the new Grid^SM for the best social advertising tools and subscribe to the premium research.

About G2 Crowd, Inc.

G2 Crowd, the world's leading business software review platform, leverages its nearly 30,000 user reviews to drive better purchasing decisions. Technology buyers, investors, and analysts use the site to compare and select the best software based on peer reviews and synthesized social data. Co-founded by the founder and former executives from SaaS leader BigMachines and backed by more than $4.5 million in capital, G2 Crowd aims to bring authenticity and transparency to business technology research. For more information, go to G2Crowd.com.

SOURCE G2 Crowd

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http://www.G2Crowd.com