Cash Converters is an internationally franchised retail network that specializes in second-hand goods and also provide short-term loans. Started in 1984, Cash Converters has grown from a single store to now more than 150 locations throughout Australia and 700 worldwide. Cash Converters excels at changing consumer perceptions of its industry through the systematic application of modern retailing practices, professional management techniques, and high ethical standards to the management of its stores.
Since adopting Marin, I’ve been able to significantly reduce time spent doing reports. I’ve also seen an increase in impression share on brand terms while holding a desirable CPC and maintaining our target CPA in Personal Finance generic term campaigns.
Paul Ferry
Digital Marketing Specialist at Cash Converters
Cash Converters seeks to increase impression share
While Cash Converters began their business with second-hand retail goods, they have also been rapidly growing their short-term loans business. As part of their growth strategy, Cash Converters was looking for a platform to help them increase brand awareness, acquire new customers, and compete with other big-name competitors. They selected Marin Software to help them streamline their workflow, manage bidding, and provide insightful reporting.
Flexible bidding and effective attribution
Cash Converters began leveraging Marin’s powerful bidding algorithm, which gave them the flexibility to target their specific business objectives. This allowed them to maintain their target CPCs and CPAs, while increasing the number of brand impressions. Cash Converters was also able to save time on reporting by taking advantage of Marin’s web query reports, which allowed for easy integration and consolidation of reports from Bing and Google into a single file. Marin’s web query reports also made it easier for Cash Converters to report on approved loans instead of having to manually matching data in Excel spreadsheets.
Additionally, through Marin Revenue Upload By Order ID (RUBOID), Cash Converters has been able to track approved online loans, providing their team with better attribution insights they can use to optimize campaigns.
Achieving desired results
Since onboarding with Marin, Cash Converters has been able to streamline their online short-term loans operations resulting in positive and measurable results. Their brand impression share jumped from around 70% to 90%, and their average CPC dropped by 20%. This has resulted in more opportunities for optimization and significant improvements in productivity, cost per acquisition, and time-savings.
Specific results include:
20% lift in brand impression share
>10% decrease in average CPC
Time-savings from reporting
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White paper
Marketing Data Pipelines: Turning Data Into Insights
Wrangling and making sense of all your marketing data is hard. For longer than a decade, we’ve been helping companies solve some pretty complex marketing data challenges – and we’ve compiled some of the knowledge we’ve gained over the years into a handy guide. The tl;dr? It’s complicated, but with the right tools, namely a marketing data pipeline (MDP), it doesn’t have to be hard! In this guide we break it all down to help you make sense of it, including breaking down:
What an MDP is
The stages of MDP maturity
Some of the key challenges with building an MDP
How to tell if you need an MDP
How to get started
And so much more!
Check out the report to learn all about corralling your marketing data today!
The limitations of smart bidding and why your paid search campaigns deserve more
Arguably the biggest innovation the paid search industry has seen in the past decade is the advent of Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bidding solution. I remember when I first entered the industry as an Account Coordinator… Ah, the good (or bad?) old days. A majority of my time was spent manually updating CPC bids for every keyword in my client’s Google and Bing Ad accounts. I would analyze how each campaign was pacing toward my client’s KPI and calculate new bids multiple times a week.
Enter Google’s tROAS and tCPA smart bidding strategies. I remember my Google account reps encouraging my team to test these automated strategies and how skeptical we all were. The only automated bidding we had heard of in the past was through Marin! But as the years went by and Google’s automation won more and more bidding tests, Smart Bidding became the norm.
Now manual bidding is a thing of the past – manual CPC isn’t even an option anymore. And what paid search marketer isn’t relieved to be freed of the tedious tasks associated with manual bidding?
These publisher bidding strategies are great… but they’re an incomplete solution. What if you want budget pacing, not just ROAS or CPA, to be considered in bidding decisions? Can you ask Google’s algorithm to do that? Not without a complex custom script… and I certainly don’t know how to code.
Managing budget pacing still requires manual intervention – that is unless you use Marin! Read on to understand some of the ways Marin makes smart bidding even better.
Manage everything in one place
Jumping across publisher tools can be time-consuming and fragment your workflows and data. With Marin, all your different campaigns across Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more are unified in one UI.
Marin unifies publisher data from tools like Google and Microsoft ads with backend data from tracking solutions like Google Analytics. We even have our own tracking solution, Marin Attribution, which is a more straightforward alternative to Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
All that data comes together in our interactive, customizable reporting grids. From campaigns, all the way down to individual keywords, front-end metrics – like costs and clicks – are married to backend metrics – like conversions and revenue – and attributed to the correct source. You can even create your own custom columns with the calculations that matter most to you. That means no more spreadsheets.
Transitioning your reporting and analysis from an Excel grid to the Marin grid eliminates the need for any manual data wrangling, saving time and improving data accuracy. Check out how easy it is to analyze performance in Marin.
Marin makes it easier than ever to analyze cross-channel performance and clearly determine what is working well and what needs attention. If you decide to take any action based on that analysis, Marin makes that process easier than ever, too.
Edit smart bidding settings across publishers
After using Marin’s reporting grid to determine what’s working and what’s not, you can use our multi-edit functionality to make changes. Update your smart bidding settings like strategy, target, bid cap, and more in Marin and avoid wasting time hopping between unintuitive publisher UIs.
Maximize ROAS with Dynamic Allocation
If you find yourself grappling with questions of how much you should spend on each of your campaigns, let Marin solve them for you. Our budget allocation solution harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible across campaigns and channels.
It all starts with your goals. First, you’ll meet with your Marin team to discuss your KPI targets and spend goals. Next, you’ll group your campaigns into different spend groups. Some examples of typical spend groups are brand, non-brand, retargeting, and prospecting.
Marin’s AI will take it from there. It will analyze how each of your campaigns is currently pacing toward your KPIs and review impression share metrics to determine if there is more room for a campaign to spend in the SERP or if that campaign is already dominating. It’ll then allocate your budget across all the campaigns in the given bucket based on each campaign’s potential.
You can either auto-apply Marin’s budget recommendations, or review them in the Marin app and apply them manually as you see fit. Manage it all in Marin’s budget pacing dashboard, which showcases not only how your budget groups are pacing toward spend goals, but revenue and ROAS trends as well.
Get unbiased recommendations for improvement
The publishers all provide recommendations to improve performance. But if you look closely, these recommendations always seem to lead to you spending more money on ads — not necessarily getting you any closer to hitting your KPI targets. Marin’s recommendation engine is free from publisher bias and has complete context on how all of your campaigns are doing across your customer lifecycle. This makes it more accurate than Google or Bing’s recommendations. And just like Google’s recommendations, they can be applied with one click.
If you’re only using publisher tools for paid search media buying, you're limiting your marketing program. Marin can help you save time and improve your ROAS or CPA in countless ways. The best part? Marin is completely customizable. Unlike the publisher tools' one-size-fits-all approach, we can adapt our software to your business’s specific needs. Share your struggles with a Marin rep today and learn what we can do to help!
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If you’re still unsure what Marin can do for you, see some of our favorite features in action.
Alumni Ventures doubles lead volume and reduces CPL by 33% with Marin budgeting optimization
Background
Alumni Ventures is the #1 most active venture firm in the US and America’s largest venture firm for individual investors. They believe in the power of networks, and their network is uniquely broad and deep. The 600,000+ members of their community are the source of their capital, deal flow, and value-added services to their portfolio of companies. Alumni Ventures relies on performance digital media to generate leads for their sales team.