AMF Bowling Centers, Inc. is the world's largest owner and operator of bowling centers, with over 285 centers in the United States. In 2010, AMF Bowling set a goal of increasing revenues from its online coupon redemption program, and subsequently turned to MediaWhiz for help with campaign strategy, design, and execution.
MediaWhiz, a Hyper Marketing Inc. company, was founded in 2001 and has rapidly become a leading online performance marketing agency that helps clients acquire customers more profitably. MediaWhiz specializes in combining all forms of online performance marketing (Affiliate, Search, Social, Display, Email and Data Acquisition) for a broad range of leading advertisers. MediaWhiz has standardized on Marin Software as its platform for managing and optimizing paid search.
We’ve customized Marin to our specifc needs creating a client solution that drives efficiency through the automation of bid management and offine revenue pass back for ROAS 360 degree measurement. Marin’s fexibility and willingness to work with us and RevTrax to take advantage of custom data integration opportunities for our clients has further enhanced our reporting and optimization capabilities.
Kaleb Ernest
Search Marketing Operations Manager at MediaWhiz
Challenge
AMF Bowling’s online marketing campaign is unique in that AMF Bowling needs to entice customers to visit a local bowling center rather than simply encourage them to purchase an item online or download a piece of collateral. With over 285 bowling centers across the country, AMF Bowling utilizes coupon offers to drive customers to a nearby location. The company found tailoring paid search campaigns for local offers to be extremely time consuming as each campaign requires the localization of thousands of keywords, adjustments to geo-targeting settings, and customization of coupon offers in ad creative.
Tracking the effectiveness of search marketing also proved difficult since coupons were redeemed offline. Consequently, AMF Bowling needed a tool that could integrate offline conversion data from RevTrax –a coupon analytics platform – with campaign data from the search engines to accurately analyze return on advertising spend (ROAS). Moreover, the team needed a tool that could provide the necessary workflow to manage the complexity of nearly three hundred local campaigns.
Results
MediaWhiz’s integral use of Marin Software allowed the marketing agency to succeed straight out of the gate with AMF Bowling’s search marketing campaign. The flexibility of Marin’s platform permitted offline conversion data to be factored in for accurate campaign analysis, while automated bid management and improved workflow increased overall campaign performance.
After 6 months, monthly revenue attributed to search marketing was more than 10 times higher than revenue in the first month of the program. Over nine months, AMF Bowling’s conversion rate jumped 74% and cost per conversion (CPC) dropped nearly 70%.
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PPC for B2B: a Performance Marketing Survey Report for 2023
To help you stay on the leading edge of performance marketing, we surveyed over 300 B2B marketers to uncover actionable insights that will help you improve the performance of your PPC investment. Through a Marin and LinkedIn partnership, we sought out to understand what B2B marketers face right now and how they are dealing with a complicated market. Read the full report to get a better understanding of how B2B marketers are changing their approach this year.
What You'll Learn from the Report:
How budgets have changed through the years 2020 to 2023 and how budgeting complexities affect the work of advertisers this year.
What challenges are most prevalent this year and how other marketers like you are adapting.
The critical role audience targeting plays in your success, especially during a recession, and some interesting trends relating to targeting techniques.
The types of content and campaign management techniques are currently helping advertisers move buyers through the sales funnel.
What paid social or PPC channels are providing the best ROAS or conversions for B2B right now.
Running ads across Google, Bing, Amazon, and social media is necessary for online vendors and sellers. So why is analyzing the performance of those ads so complicated?
Data fragmentation and walled-garden publishers create roadblocks for retail marketers. You’ve got ASINs on Amazon, SKUs on Google Shopping, Meta Advantage Plus, and more – making it hard to align data and get the full picture of a product’s performance. Manually unifying cross-channel data for each product is a tedious process that you honestly don’t have time for.
It’s time to break down data silos with an AI-powered reporting and optimization platform like Marin. Here are five problems you’re probably facing today that Marin can solve.
1. It’s hard to compare product performance across channels
Retail marketers need to be able to compare conversion rates by publisher to spot sales trends. What if a product suddenly starts driving a significantly higher conversion rate on Amazon than on Google? You’ll want to identify that variance immediately to understand what’s working on Amazon and apply what you've learned to your search and social campaigns.
We make it easy to analyze how every product is performing across publishers. No more pulling data from each ad platform and unifying it in a spreadsheet. Marin marries cross-channel data for each SKU – and pulls in conversions and revenue from your source of truth, too. It also matches SKUs to ASINs, making it easier than ever to compare performance between Amazon and your other ad channels.
Thanks to Marin’s data visualization suite, you’ll never need to do manual data pulls or create visualizations again. The data model is unified and built-in. It’s all right there in the app, so you can move at the speed of business when making critical decisions about where to spend your next dollar. And if you like using spreadsheets, it’s one click to open our reports in Excel.
2. Your sales are impacted by social media trends
If sales for one specific product suddenly skyrocket, congratulations - an influencer may have recommended it to their audience. If you sell in the beauty, lifestyle, fashion, or wellness spaces, you’ve probably experienced this more than once. It’s important to recognize those surges the second they happen so that you can capitalize on them.
Marin’s Alerts will keep you on top of unexpected shifts in performance by sending a report straight to your inbox. The Alert’s thresholds are totally customizable, but a common one is for campaigns where spend has increased or decreased more than 70% day over day. If any campaigns meet your chosen thresholds, you’ll be emailed a report with all the relevant data and details, making it easy to decide what to do next. And once you’ve determined your next move, you can update budgets, bids, and settings for all your ads right in the Marin grid.
If you’re looking for something more turnkey, our Anomaly Detector might be for you. This AI-powered alerting tool doesn’t require any setup. It automatically identifies deviations in performance and sends a sharable, actionable email explaining what changed and what to do about it.
3. You need an optimization suite that understands the big picture
Jumping from one ads manager to another can be frustrating, especially since some UIs work better than others. And many campaigns share the same goal across publishers, but thanks to those pesky walled-gardens, you have to navigate through each interface to change ROAS targets for a campaign group. But not with Marin.
Our optimization suite is a command center for all your bidding needs. Tweak bids or targets for all your different campaigns in one grid. Or, unify everything with Marin Bidding. Our bidding algorithm runs across all your channels, so you can map Google, Bing, and Amazon campaigns that share a ROAS target to one Strategy in Marin, making optimization management easier than ever. With one click of a button, update targets across all your PPC publishers. You can also mix and match Marin Bidding with publisher bidding if you prefer.
The TL;DR? You tell the AI what to do. You handle the strategy because that’s what you rock at. Marin automates implementation and performance monitoring based on the strategy you choose.
4. Distributing budget across campaigns and channels is complicated
What if you could ensure that every campaign always has the most efficient daily budget possible? With Marin, you can. Simply set a monthly spend goal for a category of campaigns that share a budget, like brand, non-brand, or by geo. Then, choose a ROAS target. Once you’ve customized your settings, Marin’s AI will allocate your overall budget across campaigns by updating publisher daily budgets, giving the majority of spend to the products with the most marginal opportunity to drive revenue. The algorithm runs daily, so it’ll pick up on any shifts in the SERP and adapt daily budgets as needed. Sounds blissful, right? Let our AI take budget allocation off your plate. Learn more about Marin’s industry-leading budget allocation tool here.
5. Expanding to new channels is daunting
If TikTok gets banned in the US, are you ready to start advertising on Lemon8? Retail moves fast, and your brand can’t take years to establish a presence on the next major social media app.
Marin simplifies the process of testing new channels. You can review the performance of your products at the SKU level by publisher to decide where to start. For example, if you’re seeing success with Amazon Ads and want to test out Google Shopping, simply navigate to Marin’s Product Performance report to understand what your top-performing ASINs are.
Then, you can use our bulk-create tool to build Google Shopping campaigns for those products that you already know drive sales. That way, you’ll put your best foot forward when launching on Google. And you can do all the analysis, campaign creation, editing, and performance monitoring necessary to test a new publisher without leaving Marin. No more hopping from Amazon Ads to Google Ad Manager. Marin will be your mission control center, making it possible to do all your reporting and editing in one window.
…And so much more!
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what Marin can do for your retail media and shopping campaigns. Our customizable platform can solve almost any paid media problem, and automate almost any optimization or reporting workflow. But don’t take our word for it – we’ve got a plethora of case studies detailing how Marin has revolutionized one paid media program after another. And if you want to discuss your unique business needs with a Marin expert, we’re more than happy to chat.
Yotel Increases Revenue by 323% Using MarinOne’s Google to Microsoft Sync
Background
Established in 2007, Yotel is a hotel group that offers guests an experience that challenges the status quo; with a promise to deliver a different kind of stay through awesome people, smart design, and the creative use of technology.