OVERVIEW
Founded in 2010, Stylistpick.com is a one-stop shop for the latest, hottest accessories, curated by leading celebrity stylists, including MTV presenter Louise Roe. The proposition is founded on edited choice – the stylists pick their perfect pieces and provide tips on how to wear them. Cheryl Cole also designs an exclusive collection for Stylistpick as well as choosing her favourites from the main range. In line with edited choice, there is a strong personalisation element to the proposition – customers can take a fashion quiz and receive a personal showroom that has been picked to match their style profile.
Marin Software is different to many other Facebook advertising management platforms, as they understand that Facebook plays a role further up the sales funnel. The fact you can manage Facebook alongside other channels such as search and display means you can gain an understanding of how Facebook Ads are working as part of your online media mix and not in a silo. Their workflow, campaign management and optimisation features also mean we save a lot of time and gain a greater focus on ROI in a scalable way.
CHALLENGE
Stylistpick have a very successful Facebook page, with over 100,000 likes. They encourage people to take their “Style Quiz” as the first step in the sales cycle, which fits very well with Facebook’s social environment. They were using Facebook Ads to drive signups, but were keen to scale up their Facebook campaigns. Additionally, the number of impressions for Facebook ads meant that consumers were quickly becoming blind to their advertising creative, resulting in low Click-Through-Rates (CTR). Stylistpick needed a solution to facilitate campaign optimisation and automate bidding to an ROI goal.
Stylistpick also wanted to expand their online advertising campaigns across paid search and the Google Display Network. Furthermore, they had existing affiliate campaigns, email campaigns, sponsorships with online publishers, display activity through various agencies and offers on daily deal sites and wanted to understand what impact Facebook had in the path-to-conversion amongst all the other online channels they were using. In particular, they wanted to make the connection between Facebook actions and website conversions.
SOLUTION
Stylistpick turned to Marin Software, the leading online advertising management platform across search, social, display and mobile. Marin Software’s creative rotation functionality helped Stylistpick reduce the impact of ad blindness on Facebook creative. They could also use Marin Software’s predictive bidding algorithm to optimise Facebook ads to drive maximum volume while meeting or exceeding ROI targets. These and other workflow and campaign management capabilities within Marin Software, made their Facebook Advertising campaigns more scalable.
Additionally, because Marin Software’s platform can manage and optimise campaigns across search, social and display, Stylistpick were also able to manage their paid search and Google Display Network campaigns through the same interface as their Facebook campaigns. This meant they were easily able to understand which actions taken by consumers across search, social and display were driving conversions. Furthermore, Stylistpick could integrate click data from their other online campaigns into Marin Software’s path-to-conversion report so they could understand how these channels were working with clicks from search, social and display to assist consumers to a conversion.
RESULTS
Working with Marin Software, Stylistpick was able to identify Facebook’s role in the path-to-conversion and understand the value that Facebook was providing. When Stylistpick looked at Facebook actions taken on a last click attribution model the conversion rate was only 3%. However, when they looked at Facebook on a multi-click attribution model, it showed a 15% conversion rate. Showing that while Facebook is not as powerful as a direct response tool, when used as a channel within a wider online advertising strategy it plays an important role influencing downstream conversion.
Furthermore, Marin Software’s workflow, campaign management and optimisation functionality saved Stylistpick’s team significant time in the management of Facebook campaigns and also generated a CTR increase of 50% within the first month.
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!
