About Starcom
Starcom is among the largest media networks in the world and a part of France’s Publicis Groupe, the third-largest communications group globally. Starcom provides solutions for investment, management, strategy planning, and research.
The time savings and performance benefits that we see with Marin Social have been key drivers for us to deliver positive growth. Marin’s expertise in the paid social realm allows us to push the boundaries with industry-leading solutions you simply won’t find anywhere else.
Measuring and Optimizing Performance from an Omnichannel Lens
A leading international jewelry brand worked with Starcom, a digital advertising agency, to increase brand awareness and sales to both their brand site and retail stores in the United Kingdom.
Starcom wanted to expand the retailers reach while maintaining Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) goals. They’re always on the lookout for innovative and cost-effective ways to target new, high-value audiences on Facebook. As an omnichannel retailer with a large global presence, it’s challenging to determine how online ad campaigns impact leading retailer’s offline sales, while making scalable performance adjustments to reach a new audience beyond traditional website retargeting.
Working hand in hand with Marin’s customer success team, two key objectives were identified heading into the competitive retail holiday season:
- Scale Performance. How can we maintain ROAS goals while reaching new audiences? Instead of just remarketing to people who didn’t convert, how can we get the most out of Marin’s innovative audience targeting offering to achieve goals?
- Omnichannel Audience Optimization. How do we measure ROI impact both online and in-store? Instead of just measuring performance to e-commerce sales, it was vital to also be able to understand the impact online campaigns had on in-store sales.
Scaling Performance with Marin Social
After analyzing account performance, Marin’s customer success team recommended an innovative audience targeting feature called Campaign Lookalikes to scale performance. The team tested audiences from Campaign Lookalikes against Facebook’s standard custom audiences, including website traffic and traffic lookalikes.
Thanks to the ability to create lookalike audiences based on previous campaign conversions, the marketing team was able to reach high-quality audiences more likely to purchase than just browse. The team also implemented offline conversion tracking to measure the impact of Facebook campaigns on in-store sales, delivering new performance insights for better decision-making.
Doubling Down on Paid Social for Omnichannel Growth
Campaign lookalike audiences delivered outstanding results for the leading retailer, far exceeding their growth goals while maintaining ROI targets. This was true not only for online transactions, but also in-store sales at the cash register.
A Closer Look
Campaign lookalikes delivered 2.7x higher ROI online and 2.9x higher ROI offline than website custom audiences and website lookalikes.
Link CTR grew 2.7x, showcasing increased engagement from the campaign lookalike audiences compared to regular Facebook targeting strategies.
The team is exploring new strategies to optimize in-store sales with campaign lookalike audiences.
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.
In the modern paid media landscape, maintaining independence from domineering publisher tools is more valuable than ever. If our blog hasn’t convinced you of that yet, Marin’s unbiased recommendations will.
Say goodbye to publisher walled gardens
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!
Meet your next Marketing Automation Platform
If you’re still unsure what Marin can do for you, see some of our favorite features in action.
