What do you dislike about AdRoll ABM (Formerly RollWorks)?
- Journey Stages iFrame to help us understand a prospect journey: Didn't meet expectations because it only goes back 90 days. By the time we win a deal 6 months later, more than half the journey isn't there. It also should have pulled through marketing emails but doesn't do that for Pardot.
- Journey Stages (JS): Wanted to use "company intent" for JS to establish "In Market". RW can't use Bombora directly in journey stage setup as a filter (intent is data they are providing), so have to manually import bombora to Salesforce weekly into a field, so that the filter can be used to establish JS (we have to manipulate data provided by them w/ Salesforce to use it. Backwards.)
The accuracy of later in market stages relies on website visits to our website. They were touted to have very good company identification but we see them as 3rd. If RW can't identify a Co as visiting our site, it can't update them to a JS of "In Market / Aware / Interested" (more below)
- Company Identification: When it came down to it, Company/Account de-anonymization is the worst out of 3 platforms we use for this. They "use ZoomInfo as one of their providers" but you wouldn't know it comparing the 2 website data streams. Here's where it's a problem. We see companies visiting our website via ZoomInfo, or downloading our content where we’re adding them as a campaign member so we KNOW they’ve been on our site. RW might still show them as “not in market / unaware” because they can’t personally identify the visit to that company.
- Reporting: For their business review, they had to pull out of the backend of the platform (not something we can replicate). Also, no attribution reporting. In RW if an ad touched an Account w/ Opp - they show the full value as influenced. To tell whether an ad was shown prior to Opp creation or after, we had to look month by month for 2025 to see when an Account showed first showed up in the associated campaign as a click and then compare that with Opp created date. A very manual process for reporting of ad success to match our expectations/the way we do things.
- There are features included in RW that are part of the setup process that RW themselves advise against using. For example, Bombora intent within setup is at the contact level. They recommend creating a new list and adding it at the account level. If your customer success rep doesn’t tell you this, how are you supposed to know?
- Budget recommendations are shown during the playbook setup process, but our account rep told us not to follow it. Why have it then?
- We just found out after several years that audience should be divided by 7 to account for the average # of cookies assigned to each individual due to multiple devices. Again, we wouldn’t know that except for the fact we just got a new account manager who told us.
- We wish there was a budget limit feature. You can’t set a budget and have RW paced it out the rest of the month. You have to babysit it and make sure you lower budgets of each individual campaign or playbook in order to not exceed your budget. We have to keep a separate spreadsheet to keep track of what all the budgets should be at so I can change them back at the 1st of the month.
- We wish you could save your job titles to a list so you didn’t have to find each one individually every time you set up a playbook. It’s very time consuming to do it from scratch everytime.
- Regarding job seniority on playbooks – we wish it didn’t jump from C-Suite to management. Directors and VP levels should be added. We are spending budget on managers and that isn’t really who we are targeting, but we have to select it in order to serve ads to the levels we want to.
- We agreed to a 2-year renewal because we believed we could still unlock value from the platform after all the setup work we invested in year 1, and the discount made the commitment seem worthwhile. But with AI and other lower-cost technologies rapidly improving, the platform has become an expensive, cumbersome option that falls short of its promised value. What’s worse, the vendor has been unwilling to work with us to adjust the contract in year two (not in platform spend, or even a decrease in ad spend, and didn't agree to getting creative what-so-ever to help provide value), a level of rigidity that stands in stark contrast to how most vendors operate. If you’re considering this platform, think carefully before committing to a long-term contract. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
