A little about Blinkbox and Arrow Media
Blinkbox offers the latest movies and TV to watch instantly, without subscription. The service presents thousands of titles on a growing number of devices including game consoles (Xbox 360 and PS3), iPad and Android tablets, Smart TVs (LG, Samsung, Technika and Philips), Blu-ray players (Samsung and LG), Technika set-top boxes and PCs/Macs. Arena Media, part of Havas Media Group, manage the blinkbox account. Arena Media are a top 20 UK agency offering planning and buying services across all communication channels, including search. 140 talented individuals based in London manage more than 70 accounts including several blue chip brands.
Managing the accounts manually was time consuming with many hours spent building new campaigns from scratch. The amount of time required to manually calculate bids increased each week as more and more keywords were added to the account. Arena Media sought a technology solution that would provide both time savings and financial lift.
Challenge
Arena Media was tasked with acquiring new customers and maximising revenue for blinkbox through search marketing. With blinkbox offering a large array of titles on a growing number of devices, the competitive pool was vast, challenged by expensive generic terms that needed to be carefully managed. In addition, blinkbox constantly adds new titles to their offering, requiring Arena Media to quickly create new, highly targeted campaigns to capitalize on the initial consumer interest when a new title is released.
Managing the accounts manually was time consuming with many hours spent building new campaigns from scratch. The amount of time required to manually calculate bids increased each week as more and more keywords were added to the account. Arena Media sought a technology solution that would provide both time savings and financial lift.
Solution
Arena Media chose Marin Software, a leading online advertising management platform. They now use Marin’s Campaign Copy feature each time a new title is released, which has drastically reduced the time it takes to launch new campaigns. Arena Media also leverages Marin’s Keyword Expansion functionality to ensure that they are adding new keywords to campaigns based on raw query data. Marin’s campaign expansion tools have enabled Arena Media to add relevant new keywords with a single click, increasing campaign relevance and conversions, while lowering cost per acquisition.
Marin’s tracking pixel was deployed across the blinkbox website in order to capture multiple conversion events; registrations, sales and rental and revenue. Marin’s powerful automated e-commerce bidding solution was deployed leveraging all three conversions types and their associated revenue. Marin’s automated bidding solution was able to maximise overall revenue and maintain volume of registrations, which ultimately result in sales or rentals at a later date.
Results
By integrating the data from all publishers in one place, Marin enables Symantec to quickly analyze and optimize revenue performance on a daily basis, identify the outliers and trends, and apply this information to inform strategy. Despite the complexity of multiple publishers, multiple conversion types and campaigns that span not only search but display and retargeting, Marin’s automated bidding capability enables Symantec to key on revenue maximization—the one financial metric that means the most to their business—and provided a 67% increase in their return on ad spend (ROAS).
- 83% increase in customer acquisition
- 90% increase in revenue
- 30% decrease in cost per conversion
Working in retail media is challenging, fast-paced, and certainly never boring. It’s one of the most competitive spaces for media buyers to operate in. You have to constantly keep your finger on the pulse of industry trends and optimize campaigns daily based on the ever-changing marketplace.
We feel your pain. And we know you’re good at your job. But everyone could use a little help from AI these days! No matter what type of product you sell, Marin can make your life easier.
Our platform was built by retail media marketers, for retail media marketers, because a niche industry requires a specialized solution. We also built Marin to be flexible and customizable so it can meet each user's unique needs. Here are five ways Marin can help you work less and smash your performance goals.
1. Let AI Handle Budget Allocation
Most retail media marketers manage many campaigns in different accounts and channels, and publisher walled-gardens can make it difficult to deploy automation across those channels. Marin was built to solve this problem. Marin’s dynamic budget allocation harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible, across all your campaigns.
All you have to do is map each group of campaigns with a shared budget to a Strategy and set the spend target for the month or quarter. Then let us know what your goals are - ROAS, conversion volume, impression share, etc. Marin will take it from there.
By comparing each campaign’s performance against your KPI targets and analyzing impression share metrics to determine which campaigns have incremental room to drive more conversions, Marin will intelligently allocate your budget across all your campaigns in Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Meta, LinkedIn, and more. Goodbye, budget pacing spreadsheets!
The beauty of this solution lies in its customizability. We’ll start by meeting with your team and discussing your current budgeting workflow and goals. Then, your Marin team will customize the automation to meet your needs. You just sit back, relax, and watch your campaigns meet those spend targets every month.
2. Identify opportunities for growth
As a busy digital marketer, one of the worst feelings is knowing that there are opportunities to improve performance but not having the time to act on them. Between investigating the next steps and building bulk sheets, even the simplest optimization initiative ends up taking hours. But with Marin, you can optimize your accounts in seconds.
Marin runs hundreds of daily checks on every account linked to our platform and identifies opportunities for growth. From ad copy improvements to changes to bidding targets to improving account structure, Marin covers the basics for you so you can focus on high-level strategy. Recommendations can be applied with one click, so no manual work is needed to act on your Insights.
For example, the above Insight recommends that our client move their top-performing ads into individual dedicated ad groups. This will help them manage the bid for that specific product independently, which makes sense since it's driving so much volume. To act on this recommendation, they simply need to click ‘Apply Changes.’ Marin will then build the new ad groups and pause the ad in the old group for them. It’s that easy!
See it in action:
3. Auto-create ads based on your product feed
Once you link your product feed to Marin, there are countless ways to apply automation based on it. For example, Marin can automatically create a new ad every time a new product is added to your feed. This is extremely helpful for brands that continuously create new products and want Shopping Ad coverage over every product. Rather than spending time every day checking your feed for new products and creating ads for them, automate that tedious process with Marin.
And speaking of shopping ads…
5. Manage all your shopping ads in one place
Marin pulls all your Google, Microsoft, and Amazon shopping ads into one unified view and organizes them by SKU. Understand your top-performing SKUs across channels and compare the performance of different channels for the same SKU to see what's working and what's not.
Create and edit shopping ads with our multi-edit grids and bulk creation tool. No more jumping from one publisher tool to another. Manage it all in one Marin Grid. And speaking of all-in-one grids…
5. Harness the power of data unification
The value of using Marin to clean, unify, and visualize all your cross-channel data cannot be overstated. Our clients often describe Marin as a ‘mission control center.’ We integrate with all the major publishers and backend sources of truth. You can link as many different tracking sources as you want, from Google Analytics to Tealium to Marin’s own first-party tracking solution. Marin supports all the major ad formats like sponsored products, sponsored brands, Amazon DSP, and more.
Look how easy it is to link all your data sources:
Marin also solves the challenge of tracking conversions that start on other ad platforms but end on Amazon. For example, lots of retail media marketers include sitelinks to ‘buy on Amazon’ in their paid search ads. Additionally, marketers may drive traffic from ads on Meta to an Amazon storefront. If you’re just using the Amazon Ads UI for reporting, there’s no way to attribute those conversions back to their original source. Marin’s cross-channel Amazon Attribution solves that problem. You can see Amazon conversions attributed to the paid search or social campaign that drove the conversion right in the Marin UI.
With all your data unified and attributed down to the keyword/product level, reporting on performance has never been easier. Create saved views in our grids to capture data you reference often, or build a custom dashboard using Marin’s data visualization tools. Whether you’re an agency team reporting to a client or a brand reporting marketing performance to upper management, you’ll never have to manually wrangle your data again.
“Marin automates all of our reporting, performance monitoring, and optimization, saving us countless hours per week so we can spend more time focusing on strategy as we expand our presence globally.”
- Philip Ascott, Director of Digital at YOTEL
Check out how quickly you can respond to an ad hoc data request with Marin:
And there you have it! These are just 5 of the countless ways Marin improves the lives of retail media marketers. And don’t just take it from me, check out our case studies where real retail clients have shared their Marin success stories.
The thing that makes Marin more powerful than other marketing automation tools is its customizability. Our technical team will tailor the platform to your needs, and that starts at the very beginning, when you schedule a customized demo with us. We look forward to chatting with you!
