Background
Nautilus is a worldwide manufacturer of fitness equipment brands including Bowflex®, Nautilus®, Schwinn®, Universal®, and Octane Fitness®, designed to meet the needs of any fitness level. Their products are sold through four diverse channels—direct to consumer, retail, commercial/specialty, and international.
Our Managed Services Team at Marin is top-notch! They are a breath of fresh air. The team provides our company the day-to-day, hands-on management to help us with nuances of multifaceted campaigns. They come to the table with ideas, efficiencies, and strategy. We’re excited for the future as we continue to grow our campaigns with the team at Marin.
Business Challenge
Nautilus was previously utilizing an agency that used their own ad accounts to fulfill Nautilus campaigns on Facebook. As a result, the agency “owned” the data, and was reluctant to share any kind of historical performance.
Without any kind of first-party data to build valuable insights from and optimize towards, Nautilus was eager to foster a relationship with a team that could help them build an audience-aligned social marketing strategy. Their goal was to increase ROAS and further validate the value of social as a highly effective marketing channel. The most crucial key to success, however, was gaining full transparency into campaign metrics and performance.
Solution
Performance Visibility
First and foremost, Marin’s Managed Services Team established a reporting cadence and structure so that Nautilus could track the progress of their campaigns regularly. These reports offered higher engagement opportunity for the regularly scheduled communication with Nautilus, with detailed data interpretation and actionable insights that aligned with their business goals. Furthermore, these insights resulted in an A/B testing framework and calendar, which Marin created, that aims to expand Nautilus’ brand recognition and increase sales.
Less Manual Work, More Strategy
Given that there was no historical data to reference, it was crucial to configure and edit campaigns at scale in order to build an effective audience strategy within a short time span. Marin’s Mass Editor helped reduce the time spent on manual campaign edits and refreshes, allowing Nautilus to ramp up quickly and get their ads in front of the right people in record time.
In addition, Marin’s DPA wizard, an easy-to-use tool that incorporates “Creative Templates,” helped the team at Marin configure many of the manual elements of DPA creation into a single step, further contributing to time savings and efficiency. With less manual campaign legwork, the team was able to focus more on campaign optimization.
Hyper-Targeted Optimization
Marin put forth a full-funnel optimization strategy, which reaches potential consumers based on where they fall within the purchase journey. Marin was able to create exclusion lists, lookalikes, and remarketing audiences for more personalized messaging and experiences on Facebook by:
- Incorporating customer lists for each of the Nautilus products
- Deploying the Facebook pixel on the website to track online user behavior
- Segmenting users who had engaged with Nautilus’ video content
Together, Marin’s Managed Services Team and the MarinOne platform were able to deliver on time savings and efficiency, total transparency into campaign results, and performance uplift.
Results
The US exceeded the Nautilus ROAS KPI by 132% within a three-month timeframe, with its counterpart Canadian market exceeding that goal by 30%. The remarketing campaigns in both the US and Canadian markets were also a huge success, with a 388% increase from the initial ROAS goal.
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.
