Dynamic Product Ads (DPAs) are a highly converting digital marketing strategy that has become more significant in recent years. If you are looking to manage complex campaigns, automate your workflows, and test multiple ad variations at once for creative decisions, then you need a good creative automation solution.
Marpipe is one of those platforms that transforms how marketers build, test, and launch ad variations across multiple platforms and gain real-time insights. It promises to turn your product ads into real ad creatives with a better chance of optimal performance.
Is Marpipe the best decision for your brand? This review will explore Marpipe’s features, pros, cons, and alternatives to help you choose the best choice for your campaign automation.
Table of Contents
Marpipe compared to other tools and alternatives
When comparing Marpipe to other tools like Smartly or Hunch, it is crucial to understand that the former can be more technical. For Marpipe, you will often have to write code when working with products, and you also need a very good knowledge of Meta ads. Therefore, Confect is often regarded as a better alternative to Marpipe because of its ease of use and “maturity” within the advanced Dynamic Product Ads.
An example of this is how to create custom field values – if you don’t know how to code, you will have a very hard time making something useful.
User reviews for Marpipe
Since Marpipe is fairly new, not many companies are using the platform. Therefore, they don’t have enough reviews for G2 to score them—as evident in the table below. However, let’s look at verified reviews compared to similar tools used for Dynamic Product Ads.
| 2 review scores | Marpipe | Confect.io | Hunch | Smartly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meets Requirements | N/A | 9.6 | 8.9 | 8.5 |
| Ease of Use | N/A | 10.0 | 8.3 | 8.3 |
| Ease of Setup | N/A | 9.6 | 8.9 | 8.9 |
| Ease of admin | N/A | N/A | 8.7 | 8.3 |
| Quality of support | N/A | 9.8 | 9.9 | 9.3 |
| Product Direction | N/A | 10.0 | 9.3 | 8.6 |
| Price (starting from) | $1,499/mo. | $299/mo. | $2,800/mo. | $4,000/mo. |
| Commitment | Yearly | Monthly | Yearly | Yearly |
Prices are lowest price points without ad-spend limits.
Marpipe fairly delivers on its promise as a platform that allows for creative ad testing. It can be seen as a mix between Confect and Smartly, as Marpipe is focused on Dynamic Product Ads (like Confect). However, it falls short in comparison to Confect as you will have to create ads and manage them from Marpipe instead of Facebook’s ads manager.
Tools like Hunch or Smartly are good alternatives for business needing full creative automation, whereas Confect is the best alternative for Dynamic Product Ads.
Our rating of Marpipe
For Dynamic Product Ads specifically, we think Confect.io is an overall better choice than Marpipe.
If you are looking for a Paid Social automation tool, that can automate more of your media buying and campaign management on top of your Dynamic Product Ads, you might want to look at Smartly or Hunch instead.
Pros and cons of Marpipe
What we like
- Optimized for Dynamic Product Ads/ Catalog Ads
- Gives you most options for advanced Dynamic Product Ads
- Have a dark-mode version
What we don’t like
- Can be a bit difficult to learn
- Don’t have any features for “manual ads” or automated media buying
- Not usable for Google Ads
Marpipe offers basic options for Dynamic Product Ads, making it easy to build and test several ads quickly. Also, the dark mode is a great attribute for us nerds out there loving dark-mode apps. Marpipe is good for smaller teams needing Dynamic Product Ads or catalog ads optimization.
Who is Marpipe best for?
The group of people best suited for using Marpipe are teams with technical resources. Suppose your team has a technical marketing specialist. In that case, they can leverage the platform’s potential to customize product feeds and implement advanced logic for creative ad testing.
Not all teams have adequate technical resources, which is fine – Confect offers a more friendly user interface ready for use without a degree in computer science. Therefore, if you are more of a marketing department than an IT department, you will probably be happier with Confect.
Marpipe is a good fit for midsized to large e-commerce businesses looking to optimize testing for Dynamic Product Ads. It is ideal for e-commerce companies where creative testing is at the core and performance marketing is required. However, if you need an automation tool for paid social, Hunch or Smartly is a good place to begin.
Since Marpipe has a steep learning curve, having someone on the team with technical knowledge can optimize the creation and testing of high-performance Dynamic Product Ads.
Features of Marpipe
Marpipe positions itself as the basic go-to platform for optimizing Dynamic Product Ads for social media campaigns. But what are its features, and how well does it support Dynamic Product Ads for e-commerce brands?
This section will examine Marpipe’s basic features, including designs, catalogue management, ad formats, campaign management and media buying, analytics, and support for other channels. Whether you are a small or medium-sized e-commerce business looking to upscale Dynamic Product Ads with Marpipe, here are some things to expect.
Designing
One of Marpipe’s outstanding features is its creative design capacities. When it comes to building industry-leading creative Dynamic Product Ads, Marpipe has an excellent design editor. With Marpipe, you can create templates, customize creatives per product set, and apply conditional logic to keep Dynamic Product Ads fresh for different product categories.
Design editor
Marpipe’s drag-and-drop editor has a fairly intuitive interface that is easy to use compared to some of their other features. This editor is great for building and testing ad designs and is also easy for non-designers to use.
Marpipe’s design editor gives you a decent amount of flexibility to create multiple creative ads. It has a drag and drop feature which automates design generation for hundreds of ad variants on your product feed.
On brand designs
With Marpipe you can make your designs as on brand as you want. You have complete control over color palettes and importation of custom fonts. This gives teams the express freedom to use images that align with their brand identity. It also comes with an AI feature to help you remove background from images for smooth integration into the ad campaign.
Managing catalogs
Marpipe has a feature that allows teams to manage catalogs and create ads inside the platform. This, in theory, eliminates the need to switch between the platform and Meta Ads Manager. But, if you are already working within Meta’s Ads Manager already, we prefer to keep working in there like you do with Confect.
Marpipe offers basic but useful features for managing catalog on Meta but lacks an advanced management system as seen with Smartly or Confect.
Marpipe offers good in-app catalog editing, allowing marketers to easily design and edit creative overlays. This platform is suitable for teams that focus on Dynamic Product Ads.
Editing Meta Dynamic Product Ads
When creating and editing creative dynamic product ads, Marpipe offers a good preview of how each variant will look across different Meta platforms. Getting a preview ensures there are no misalignments when the ad goes live.
When you are using Marpipe, all your editing of your Dynamic Product Ads will have to happen inside Marpipe’s ads manager instead of Meta’s own. If you are used to using Meta’s Ads Manager, like most marketers, this can be frustrating though from time to time.
Tailoring designs based on rules
Tailoring designs based on rules is a kind of creative ad personalization that maps product attributes to designs. Rule-based personalization on Marpipe is a useful feature, but due to the steep learning curve, teams without technical expertise may not thrive with this tool.
Marpipe provides a flexible rule builder for rule-based creative logic. Therefore, it offers good support for users to apply filters and dynamic layers to tailor designs based on product attributes.
Multiple designs
One of Marpipe’s core functions is multivariate creative ad testing. Marpipe allows creative teams to run different designs in different ads and track their performance. This feature replaces the usual manual A/B testing to ensure you always get high-performance Dynamic Product Ads.
Catalog Ads formats
Marpipe does support Story and Video DPA, but is still far behind on the user experience compared to Smartly or Confect. If your design team is used to a normal video editor, then it may take some time to adjust to Marpipe’s interface as an example.
And marketers will have to set everything up in Marpipe, instead of Facebook’s Ads Manager like you are used to.
Story Catalog Ads
With Marpipe, teams can assign different designs in 9:16 and 4:5 dimensions. This feature is crucial for optimal ad placement but Marpipe lacks good editing options. Therefore, converting a 1:1 design to 9:16 format is not as easy as in Smartly or Confect, which offer advanced and easy-to-use editing tools.
Video Dynamic Product Ads/ Product Level Video
Marpipe can only generate simple, frame-based product video ads. It lacks the necessary features for complex video story ads like you know from the normal video editors with timeline and alike: the things you can do with the Adobe suite, Smartly, or Confect.
Campaign management and Media Buying
Marpipe still lacks full campaign management and media buying. Therefore, if you need central campaign management options, you can go with an alternative tool like Hunch. In terms of functionality, Marpipe is a mix of Confect (focused on Dynamic Product Ads) and Smartly.
A great thing about Marpipe is that it provides some advanced options for product sets through it. Also, Marpipe can generate product sets for you in Facebook, instead of you having to do so in Facebook.
Other channels
Marpipe is an excellent tool for Dynamic Product Ads on Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Aside from Meta, Marpipe does support your other paid social channels like Pinterest or Snap, but the platform offers limited support for creative customization and testing TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat ads.
Setup and implementation
Getting started with Marpipe involves uploading your feed and configuring rule logic to create personalized dynamic product ads. Luckily Marpipe’s support team is a good team to work with, and we have been happy with the support and their technical knowledge.
The initial setup may be confusing, but the platform delivers scalable ad solutions once that is sorted.
Analytics
Marpipe does not offer any campaign management analytics or analytics directly from Facebook. Instead, you get some analytics when inspecting the products and optimizing properties in your feed. Although these analytics help to identify missing fields, they don’t address actual performance metrics.
Most ambitious e-commerce companies need more than just simple recommendations of the “you can’t run this product without these required fields” kind of analytics.
Google Ads
Marpipe does not offer support for Google Ads. If your team requires cross-platform Dynamic Product Ads support, such as Google or YouTube, then you may need to consider tools like Hunch or Smartly.
Final conclusion
Marpipe is an okay tool for e-commerce brands that want to optimize their Dynamic Product Ads. Teams can leverage its drag-and-drop design editor and multivariate testing to create and test thousands of ads across different platforms. However, it lacks a central campaign automation system, media buying, and support for Google Ads.
Best suited for midsized e-commerce brands that primarily work with meta platforms and have technical resources, Marpipe promises to take creative ad testing to the next level. Most companies should probably go with Confect, as marketers will be able to get more advanced Dynamic Product Ads up and running with Confect, including Story Catalog Ads. However, Hunch or Smartly may be the better alternative for companies looking to automate their campaign management workflow across multiple platforms.
Marpipe pricing
Although Marpipe seems less expensive than tools like Hunch and Smartly on their website, beware of the hidden fees once you get started.
Very few companies can use their “startup” plan they advertise (max 500 products, no support, monthly ad spend limit), and therefore most companies will have to use their enterprice pricing plan starting at $1499/mo for 1000 products.
Here are some extra fees that you may incur with Marpipe:
- Syncing
This costs an extra $499/mo if upgrading from daily updates to hourly, something included in Confect for free.
- Design Support
If you want design support, your team needs to pay an additional $499 per month (including 3 custom templates per month).
- Languages/Currencies
For this, you need to pay an extra $299 every month per source feed.
- Product Level Video
Getting videos will incur an additional $675 each month.
- Extra products
You will have to pay extra if you have more than 1000 products.
On top of this, you are committing for a full year in the contract. If you are a first time buyer for a tool like Marpipe, you are probably better off trying out Confect for free with their 30 day free trial and their monthly commitment.