As its name suggests, Smartly helps marketing teams to run their paid social campaigns smarter. While it’s rated as one of the best tools for dynamic product ads (DPAs), it’s important to note from the start that it’s much more than just that.
It’s an extremely big enterprise tool, trusted by the likes of Walmart, Discovery, and Disney. As it can also run very advanced workflows across several channels, it’s the ideal solution if you’re looking to scale your ad campaigns significantly.
In this review, we’ll explore how it compares to other popular contenders that help with DPAs like Confect, Marpipe, and Hunch. Smartly is a big investment and this review of its most critical features will help you to decide if it’s indeed a smart investment.
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Smartly compared to other tools and alternatives
Make no mistake, Smartly is one powerful tool. It’s more similar to a tool like Hunch than Confect or Marpipe as it extends its focus far beyond Dynamic Product Ads. Its editing, design, media buying, and integration capabilities in particular deserve special mention.
However, great functionality is often at the expense of ease of use, as is the case with Smartly.
Compared to other popular Dynamic Product Ads tools in this category, it’s less intuitive. Plus, as you would expect, its advanced set of features comes at a price, making it less cost-effective than tools like Marpipe, Confect, and even Hunch.
Here’s a closer look at how Smartly users rate their experience and how it performs in specific key tasks.
User reviews for Smartly
| G2 review scores | Smartly | Confect.io | Hunch | Marpipe |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meets Requirements | 8.5 | 9.6 | 8.9 | N/A |
| Ease of Use | 8.3 | 10.0 | 8.3 | N/A |
| Ease of Setup | 8.9 | 9.6 | 8.9 | N/A |
| Ease of admin | 8.3 | N/A | 8.7 | N/A |
| Quality of support | 9.3 | 9.8 | 9.9 | N/A |
| Product Direction | 8.6 | 10.0 | 9.3 | N/A |
| Price (starting from) | $4,000/mo. | $299/mo. | $2,800/mo. | $1,499/mo. |
| Commitment | Yearly | Monthly | Yearly | Yearly |
Prices are lowest price points without ad-spend limits.
Overall, Smartly performs well across all key criteria. It’s a well-rounded tool for paid social, but considering its intuitiveness and price, it’s more geared towards very enterprise companies with very complex workflows.
Our rating of Smartly
To evaluate and rate Smartly properly, we considered key features that marketers using Dynamic Product Ads on Meta prioritize. Here’s how Smartly scored across the major categories:
The results show that it’s a solid tool. Unlike a tool like Confect that intentionally niches down on Dynamic Product Ads, Smartly takes a more comprehensive approach, reflective in its price.
It shines in terms of automating media buying and how well it supports other channels than Meta. In fact, we couldn’t flaw it in these areas. This makes it an ideal tool for businesses that want to adopt a multi-channel strategy.
It also performs well in Story and Video DPA and catalog editing, making it a good tool for teams that want to leverage multiple ad types and formats.
That said, there’s still room for improvement. It’s a classic example of where the added functionality also increases the learning curve and you run the risk of paying for features you might not really need.
Like Hunch, its weakest areas are ease of use and value for money. When you compare its features versus its price, you’ll find that you get less value than Hunch. Add to that the fact that your marketing team will likely have a harder time trying it out and you’ll want to think carefully before you make such a long-term investment.
Pros and cons of Smartly
What we like
- Many features for a lot of usecases
- Good support
- Great for managing campaigns across channels
- Close collaboration with the platforms
What we don’t like
- Very expensive if only used for Dynamic Product Ads
- Can be too very complex, making you need consultants or their support team
- You have to work in Smartly’s Ads Manager, not in Meta
No tool is perfect and Smartly is no different. In fact, its biggest benefit also becomes one of its cons. It offers a long list of features for various use cases, but that makes it costly and complex.
Smartly can become overwhelming for most businesses or marketing teams that primarily want a tool for designing their Dynamic Product Ads. Also, while it offers great versatility in terms of use cases, you won’t be able to rely on Meta’s native tools and you’ll have to use Smartly’s own Ads Manager.
That said, if you get stuck, you can rest assured that they offer good support.
Who is Smartly best for?
Given its price tag and comprehensive set of features, Smartly is best for very big marketing teams. It will be overkill for most companies focusing solely a single platform at a time. If this is your main objective, you’ll find that a tool like Confect or Marpipe will offer more value for money.
To justify its fee, you need to run complex, large-scale campaigns across Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok simultaneously and plan to leverage automation for bidding or targeting.
That said, if you specifically need a software to help you with only Meta ads, Smartly will add value to a marketing team of 50+ that’s spending at least $200,000 per month on Meta ads. Keep in mind that it also comes with a steep learning curve, making it more geared towards experienced marketers.
Features of Smartly
Smartly positions itself as a unified AI-powered advertising platform that boasts creative and campaign innovation. As you would expect from one of the biggest SaaS digital advertising platforms, they offer more features than tools like Confect and Marpipe and can be used by marketing teams as well as agencies alike.
Here are the key areas where Smartly will add value to your ad efforts. Whether you need help with the creative aspect or you’re looking to leverage automation so that you can scale operations, the following breakdown will give you a better idea of what you can expect.
Designing
Smartly is a powerful design tool that bridges creativity with automation. It offers advanced creative solutions like image/video templates, badge layering, and dynamic ad personalization to help you reach the specific segments of your target audience. Combine these features with its creative automation and you can rest assured that your ads will be consistent, high-quality, and scalable.
Design editor
Smartly offers a range of image and video templates or you can use its presets to create your own. Creative teams can check out its Creative Suite that includes an editor app that can automatically generate ads using any data source across all social channels. Then, to make your assets even more creative, you can use AI for real-time editing and dynamic customization.
For teams that need more advanced design functionality, it also integrates with state-of-the-art design tools like Adobe After Effects and Photoshop.
On brand designs
With Smartly you can of course make your designs very close to 100% on-brand, even for your dynamic ads.
Smartly offers a media library where you can store all your templates and media assets, helping you to keep your ads on-brand and authentic. It also streamlines collaboration as different team members can easily access the right documents.
For example, if one of your team members recently tweaked a template, the most recent version will be available to the rest of the team in its asset library. You can also use its Concepts App to organize creatives approved by the team for post-production.
Managing catalogs
Smartly’s Feeds feature offers an advanced product catalog management system, much more sophisticated than Marpipe’s basic features. It connects to your product feed and automatically pulls in real-time data. Whether you have 100 SKUs or 100,000, Smartly keeps your catalog synced, accurate, and up to date across all platforms, turning your catalog into a growth engine.
Editing Meta Dynamic Product Ads
While DPAs isn’t Smartly’s only focus area, it doesn’t neglect this area. Users have access to various tools to create and edit dynamic product ads. You can easily connect one of its image templates to a product catalog or other data source to create a personalized visual ad.
Tailoring designs based on rules
With Smartly, you can apply advanced rules to control your ads dynamically. This includes custom text rules so that you can dynamically add custom key elements like headlines, descriptions, and calls to action (CTAs). You can, for example, set up rules to highlight products on sale or current bestsellers or hide products that are currently out of stock in the design.
In Smartly you set up these rules directly in the design template, whereas in Confect you set up these rules to select which design templates to show at what point. It might sound like a small feature, but it makes it easier to give a tailored experience in a tool like Confect.
Multiple designs
With Smartly you can have multiple image templates running at the same time, like the other good tools offering DPA designing.
Catalog Ads formats
Whether you prefer image ads or video, Smartly lets you leverage various ad formats. In fact, its rich media capabilities are one of the features that have made a big impression on its users.
Story Catalog Ads
With Smartly’s template editor, you can create visually appealing video creatives that fit all aspect ratios, including stories. Not only does its image templates speed up the process, but it also helps to maintain visual consistency.
You can both edit the designs in 1:1, 4:5, and 9:16.
Video Dynamic Product Ads/ Product Level Video
To help with Dynamic Product Ads on Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest, Smartly offers video templates allowing you to easily turn a static product image into an engaging video ad.
With Smartly you gget a full-blown video editor, with a video timeline and effects just like you know from other video editors. This is a big plus compared to Marpipe’s more limited video editor.
Campaign management and Media Buying
Unlike a tool like Confect that sticks to the creative aspects of launching Dynamic Product Ads, a big part of Smartly’s appeal is its unified cross-channel campaign management features. Its features allow you to run multiple campaigns and ad groups simultaneously. You can use automated workflows to launch, manage and update your campaigns and other time-saving automation features like bulk editing and cloning to streamline campaign management further.
This frees up time that can be better dedicated to testing your ads across different channels and various stages of the funnel, making it a useful tool for optimization. Like Hunch, Smartly is a better option for teams that specifically want to centralize campaigns and manage them at scale more efficiently.
That said, while the bulk editing is convenient, Smartly users have reported issues with this feature. It’s not as intuitive and renaming ad sets in bulk can be difficult. Adding new ads to existing ad sets has also been highlighted by some users as inconvenient.
Other channels
Integrations is another department where Smartly shines. It supports the main platforms like Meta and Google as well as smaller and newer channels like Pinterest, TikTok, and Snapchat. This makes it a great choice if you’re planning on running multi-channel campaigns and looking for a tool to centralize both creatives as well as campaign management.
In addition to these channels, it also has an impressive Smartly Partner Marketplace giving you access to various other partners that can help you improve your digital and social marketing such as:
- Insense to help with UGC ads
- Google Analytics for more accurate advertising ROI calculations
- Amazon to expand your reach
Setup and implementation
Smartly offers onboarding and tailored support to each client. However, as mentioned, be warned that it comes with a steep learning curve. The platform takes months to master. Plus, the fact that error messages fail to explain issues clearly and training materials are limited make the process more time-consuming.
Know that if you want to use Smartly, you’ll likely need to schedule a workshop or hire a specialist. That said, Smartly users have praised their customer support. They offer a 24/5 chat support that consistently receives good reviews for its speed, reliability, and solution-oriented approach. Their team is proactive and responsive and can help you to troubleshoot issues quickly.
Analytics
Smartly offers a consolidated view of real-time campaign insights across all of your social platforms, eliminating the need to switch between platforms to some degree. What makes it a useful tool for data tracking is that you can import data and create custom expressions so that you can specifically track the metrics that are the most important for your specific campaign goals. This allows you to view outcomes related to your objectives.
Included in its Intelligence Suite, it also offers actionable reports with pivot tables from where you can view and edit bids and budgets (either one by one or in bulk). That said, its reporting tools aren’t as strong as Business Manager. This means that you might find the need to switch between platforms. It also lacks some optimization features which will force you to use Meta to make manual adjustments.
Google Ads
Another feature that sets Smartly apart from other tools like Marpipe and Confect is that it also offers support for Google Ads. It can help you to create custom image, video, responsive, and HTML5 templates using your brand assets. In addition to helping with the creative side of running Google Ads, Smartly also offers impressive campaign management support.
You can see your media plan in one view, pull in audiences and cohorts from your account, and automatically assign ads to the right audience.
Then, to help you make sense of all the data and allow you to optimize strategically in real time, it offers creative scoring, analytics, and reporting.
Final conclusion
Smartly is geared towards very big marketing teams that want to optimize and manage large-scale and complex ad operations. If you don’t want to work in Facebook Ads Manager anymore but want to automate your whole ads setup with various complex workflows, you should go with a tool such as Smartly. A cheaper alternative for this could be Hunch, but expect a product that isn’t as solid as Smartly’s all around.
However, if you only want to start designing Catalog Ads and have no need to make your whole Facebook Ads setup smarter, a tool like Confect will serve you better. Confect is cheaper and better for Catalog Ads specifically, since it doesn’t try to do everything in regards to paid social like Smartly does.
Smartly pricing
Smartly’s pricing is one of its biggest drawbacks. It’s even more expensive than alternatives like Hunch that’s already at the upper end of the spectrum. Plus, unlike Confect that offers accessible, transparent pricing, Smartly’s pricing isn’t shared on its website.
If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find out that pricing starts at $5,000 per month. From there, depending on your ad spend, you’ll need to allocate about 2-4% of your overall ad spend.
According to customers from Vendr, a SaaS buying platform that shares pricing insights for thousands of software products, the average Smartly user pays $90,000 per year (while the high end is closer to $130,000 per year). Even if you manage to be one of the customers that are towards the low end of the pricing scale, you’re looking at about $61,000 per year, which is already a lot of money.
A second con is that they require a yearly commitment. What makes this investment riskier is that unlike a tool like Confect that offers a free 30-day trial, Smartly doesn’t offer any free plans or trial. While you might not be able to test for yourself how it fits into your workflow before signing up, you can request a demo which will give you a better idea of its functionality.