Automation

In the digital marketing world, successful leaders possess a unique combination of strategic thinking, technical expertise, and a talent for connecting people. One such individual is Meg Madden, the Vice President of Products at Marin Software. With her vast experience and remarkable achievements, Madden has established herself as a trailblazer in the industry. In this article, we delve into Madden's professional journey, her accomplishments, and the values she holds dear.

A Journey of Growth:

Meg Madden's professional journey can be traced back to June, 2012 when she joined Marin Software, a leading provider of digital marketing solutions. Her tenure began as an Online Marketing Manager, where she excelled in activating social strategies for notable companies such as General Motors and PayPal. While working in the Austin office, Madden was instrumental in fostering team growth and spearheading global strategies for paid strategies, including collaborations with AT&T.

As a Pod Leader for the Austin team, Madden showcased her leadership skills by managing independent network agencies and overseeing account directors and customer managers. She also played a crucial role in breaking down silos within teams, facilitating cross-channel and cross-regional collaboration. Her efforts resulted in forming the Global Customer Engagement Team, further strengthening Marin Software's customer-centric approach.

Professional and Educational Background:

Before joining Marin Software, Meg Madden pursued an MBA at Yukon, where she honed her skills in business management. Prior to that, she served as a Social Media Manager for Quickluck, showcasing her expertise in leveraging social media platforms to drive brand engagement. Madden's educational journey began at Yale, where she earned a BA in American Studies, providing her with a solid foundation in understanding consumer behavior and cultural dynamics.

Beyond the Office:

Meg Madden's story is not just defined by her professional accomplishments. Growing up on the border of Texas and Mexico in Harlingen, TX, she was exposed to a multicultural upbringing. This experience instilled in her a deep appreciation for diversity and a strong sense of community. Madden's formative years were marked by active involvement in various activities, from playing softball and participating in color guard to volunteering at the Women's Crisis Center.

Even today, Madden continues to impact others' lives through her volunteer work positively. She regularly guest lectures at Stanford Business School, sharing her industry insights and experiences with aspiring business professionals. Additionally, she remains active in her church group, contributing to the children's ministry and participating in activities at the cowboy church located on the rodeo grounds.

Meg Madden's personal life revolves around her family. She is a proud mother to three children, aged 8, 6, and 3, comprising two boys and a girl. Her husband has taken on the role of a stay-at-home dad, allowing Madden to focus on her professional endeavors while balancing her responsibilities at home. Madden believes that being a mother is the most challenging yet rewarding role she plays, finding solace in her rural lifestyle on a farm, complete with chickens and ducks.

Values and Inspirations:

When it comes to personal values, Madden emphasizes the importance of continuous learning. She believes that staying curious and open to new ideas is key to personal and professional growth. Additionally, she has always learned to assume positive intent, realizing that it took her some time to truly understand the impact of this mindset.

Madden's unwavering commitment to her team's growth is one of her proudest achievements. She takes immense satisfaction in witnessing the professional progress of individuals who have worked under her guidance. Many of these talented individuals have either moved on to new opportunities outside of Marin or have climbed the ladder within the organization itself.

Conclusion:

Meg Madden's journey from an Online Marketing Manager to Vice President of Products at Marin Software is a testament to her exceptional skills, dedication, and ability to connect people. Throughout her career, she has prioritized breaking down silos, fostering collaboration, and building customer-centric solutions.

Today, one of the biggest technological advancements is Artificial intelligence (AI), which has immense B2B sales and marketing potential. That's why enterprises have transformed their marketing strategies by adopting full automation via smart AI technology. 

Around 87% of businesses plan to use AI for sales forecasting. Whether it's engaging more website visitors or managing predictive analytic campaigns, AI is quickly becoming an integral part of the success of B2B marketers. In this article, we'll take an elaborative look at the impact of Artificial Intelligence on B2B sales and marketing and the challenges and opportunities that come with it.

Impact of AI on B2B Sales & Marketing

With AI technology, B2B sales and marketing have witnessed significant and transformative growth, revolutionizing various aspects of the industry by enabling businesses to enhance their whole business process. 

• AI helps businesses and encourages customers to have a more personalized experience. Through this, marketers use their software to get insights and provide the customer with smart purchase decisions. 
• AI has made predicting customers' future purchase choices and shopping patterns easier using predictive analytics blended with the natural language process. 
• We have all seen how Amazon uses AI-powered product recommendations using tags like 'recommended for you' or 'customers also bought' while purchasing or adding something to your cart. This works amazingly for the brand by encouraging customers to increase the value of their carts. 

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• Similarly, HubSpot used AI-powered chatbots to engage with visitors and generate leads through conversation. 

• With automation tools, it has become quite easy to facilitate repetitive and time-consuming tasks in AI-driven B2B marketing. Automating email outreach, lead nurturing, and follow-up activities can be managed by robots so that high-value activities, such as building relationships, could be prioritized by real human beings. 
• AI in B2B sales and marketing has also influenced competition in business. It has worked to many organizations' advantage by enabling them to deliver optimized marketing campaigns, provide a superior customer experience, and generate more qualified leads.

5 Ways How AI will transform B2B Sales and Marketing

Enhanced Lead Generation and Scoring 

AI in B2B marketing has started overcoming some of the biggest challenges marketers face, including generating high-quality leads and increasing leads. The labor intensity of data collection, analysis, and management plays quite a significant role in marketing problems. That's why data collection and analysis can be automated by incorporating AI into lead generation processes. This results in an increased number of quality-generated leads. Lead generation is a time-consuming manual task, so when automation came into this area, it became a powerful business process optimizer and a strong IT business strategy. 

Pro tip: Focus on the call to action. Ensure your call to action button requests the user's details and stands out from the background. The button text must be clear; for instance, 'Download Free eBook' tells users the result of a click. The button's location should be eye-catching.

Increased Engagement 

Your content can be amazing and optimized, but it will only succeed if you publish it right. And that's where the implementation of AI in the B2B space works the best. It helps drive maximum engagement by providing the right content at the right time and in the right manner. 

Simply put, the best time to publish any written or social media content is in the evening or afternoon. Similarly, the best time for sending marketing emails is in the morning, when your audience wakes with a fresh mind. AI monitors your customer's behavior to determine the optimal publishing times. This way, it schedules your content and publishes it accordingly on its own.

Optimized Website Functionality 

Usually, in B2B businesses, marketers miss out on scrutinizing their website performance data to identify any issues or improvement areas. But with AI-powered analytics tools, machine intelligence can shorten complex data into easy and actionable insights.

And the best part is that if there is any sudden or unauthorized data transfer, AI can immediately notify the marketers about it. The same goes for when there is an abrupt spike in a critical metric, like the percentage of the audience that leaves your website just after a single page session. This way, businesses can improve their website's functioning and performance.

Simplified SEO

The main problem with SEO optimization manually isn't just the time consumption; it's far more than that. And AI recognizes that and helps inform the new content by identifying trendy content, making keyword predictions, and discovering competitive gaps. Moreover, AI optimizes your website's old content for SERPs using dynamic keywords strategy and link updates. This way, your old content stays fresh, and the new one stays ahead of the curve. 

Although AI cannot be that reliable when it comes to actually creating engaging content, with its marketing tools, writers can surely use it to enhance and optimize their content according to SEO best practices. AI-powered tools will help you make more optimized, professional, and error-free content.

Pro tip: Remember, SEO isn't just about keywords anymore; it's about providing valuable content. Research Google's recent "Helpful Content Update" to ensure your content is on the right track. This update emphasizes a people-first strategy and encourages SEO experts to focus on search intent, relevant subtopics, and content demonstrating expertise and depth. SEO is a lot more than just adding keywords; you need to deliver substantive value.

Improved Customer Insights

To keep your business at a competitive advantage, it's essential to conduct personalized targeting from the minute a customer enters your sales funnel. This is essential to developing accurate buyer personas and ideal customer profiles (ICP). And this is where AI benefits most through social listening and analysis tools that help businesses achieve their goals.

Challenges and Opportunities in AI Implementation

AI has played a significant and transformative role in strengthening the B2B sales and marketing industry. By improving business-customer relationships and streamlining sales processes, AI has enhanced the multi-segment marketing strategies of B2B businesses. However, the new technology also comes with certain challenges as well as opportunities, which we have discussed below: 

• Data Quantity and Quality: One of the biggest challenges B2B marketers face with AI implementation is data quantity and quality. The thing with AI algorithms is that they require large amounts of data to make more accurate predictions. 

• Skepticism: Another major challenge with AI implementation is skepticism in people's minds about its capabilities. Customers often hesitate to interact with the AI-powered system, making it quite difficult for businesses to adapt to AI usage.

• Incorporation into existing systems: Incorporation of AI into the existing sales and marketing methods can also be challenging for businesses, as they have already invested in implementing these systems. So, incorporating AI would become more difficult and time-consuming as well.

• Outmoded Infrastructure: As AI delivers the desired results, it also requires much information to process within seconds. And that becomes quite difficult with the outdated infrastructure many companies still use. To learn and develop methods with machine learning, one needs to be prepared to invest in its tools, infrastructure, and application, which becomes very challenging for marketers. 

• Requires Good Investment: Implementing AI in your business takes time to come cost-efficiently. You need to collaborate with an AI expert and launch an ongoing AI training program for your employees to get comfortable with AI and the requirement for machine learning tools. And all of this requires a good investment.

Conclusion

With the help of AI-powered tools and insights, businesses are boosting their sales by meeting the demand and needs of customers, generating more leads, and giving them a personalized experience. And as marketing is known to have the best usage of AI thus far, in the coming years, the B2B sales and marketing industry will be revolutionized on a whole new level.

Work with MarinOne and our team of advertising AI experts to get started with streamlining and scaling your B2B marketing campaigns.

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Kamna Saini is a guest contributor to the MarinOne blog.

Email automation is the way to go in 2023. But don’t just take our word for it. Take Hubspot’s. They say that 71% of B2B marketers use it to grow their business. And they are not alone. Statistica says that by 2025, there will be 4.6 billion people using email. That means a lot of opportunities for you to connect with your audience. You can also use automation to deliver your messages at the right time, increase conversions, analyze their behavior, and optimize the customer journey across different channels and touchpoints.

In this blog, we will show you how email automation can help you align your email campaigns with your customer journey-mapping strategies and how that can lead to more trust, loyalty and action from your customers.

What is Email Automation?

Email automation is like having a magic wand that lets you send emails to your customers without lifting a finger. It uses smart rules that tell your emails when, how, and to whom to go to based on what your customers do or don’t do. Plus, you can save time, make your customers happy, earn more money and customize your messaging for each point of the nurturing funnel.

Email Automation Campaigns You Ought to be Running

When it comes to email automation techniques, there are different types of campaigns or automation series that are simple to execute and very effective for virtually any industry, such as: 

Welcome Email Campaign: A series of emails introducing new subscribers to your brand.

Standard Promotional Campaign: A single or multiple emails that offer discounts, deals, or incentives to your subscribers.

Seasonal Campaign: A series of emails that aligns with a specific season, holiday, or event.

Triggered Email Series: A series of emails sent based on specific actions or events your subscribers take.

Post-Purchase Drip: A series of emails that follows up with your customers after they purchase.

Connect-Via-Social Campaign: A series of emails encouraging subscribers to follow you on social media platforms.

Newsletter: A regular email that provides valuable content, updates, or news to your subscribers.

Cart Abandonment Followup: A series of emails reminding subscribers of the items they left in their shopping cart.

Re-Engagement Campaign: A series of emails that tries to reactivate inactive or unresponsive subscribers. 

High Level Phases of Email Customer Journey Mapping

Before we dive into how email automation works in customer journey mapping, let’s understand what customer journey mapping means. It may sound fancy, but it’s just a way of showing how customers interact with your business. We can break this down into three steps: How they discover you, buy from you, and get your support.

To connect your email automation campaign to customer journey mapping, you need to focus on the following phases of user engagement:

Onboarding

Onboarding is the first step of an email automation campaign. You can “Greet and Welcome” your new customers, show them what you offer, and help them get started. For instance, if they signed up for a free trial, email them tips and resources.

Nurturing

Create a nurture campaign that increases trust between you and your customers and converts them from potential customers to customers. For instance, if they download a brochure, email them exclusive content and a special offer related directly to that brochures' content.

Retention

Retention is the last phase of your email automation funnel. Customer retention relies on customer satisfaction and engagement. A retention email, or series of emails, is sent to existing customers to maintain their loyalty. These emails vary in form but share the goal of enhancing education about your brand and deepening customer loyalty. Moreover, they aim to minimize effort for the customer over time and provide exceptional service with easy calls to action. 

Know the Difference Between Customer Personalization and Marketer Segmentation

Though the terms are often used interchangeably, personalization and segmentation are different concepts. While segmentation is all about marketers, personalization is about the customer.

Segmentation refers to dividing your customers into smaller groups, while personalization means tailoring your messages to each customer’s needs, preferences, and behavior. Here’s how it can help you transform your email automation strategy to address both your needs as the marketer and the users' needs as the customer:

• Email automation tools can be used for personalizing triggered email sequences, cart abandonment emails, and re-engagement email series to grab your customer’s attention.
• Personalization helps you create a better customer experience and loyalty by expressing to your customers that you know, value, and care about their needs.
• With properly personalized and segmented emails, you can reduce your costs and increase your return on investment by sending your customers fewer but more effective emails.
• When emails are relevant, users engage. A majority of marketers agree that subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%) are the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns, based on a recent Hubspot survey.

Some ways you can personalize and segment your email automation campaigns are:

Dynamic content

Dynamic content is a game-changer for email marketing, adding a special touch and increasing conversion rates. With dynamic content, you can personalize your newsletters, delivering exclusive information tailored to specific subscribers. This customization improves click-through rates as people engage with content relevant to their interests. Additionally, by utilizing subscribers' shopping behaviors, targeted cross-sales campaigns can be created, boosting sales. Not only does dynamic content save time by consolidating multiple marketing messages into a single email, but it also enables the sending of ultra-personalized emails that drive conversions. Change the email content based on the customer’s data, such as name, gender, interests, etc.

Merge tags

Merge tags are placeholders that represent contact data in your CSV file. These customizable variables, such as First Name, Last Name, and Company, allow you to personalize the emails you send in your campaigns. By utilizing merge tags, you can increase customer engagement and improve email open rates. These tags are automatically created from the column headers in your CSV file, ensuring that each contact in your campaign receives a personalized email. 

Behavioral data

Create your email based on the recipient’s actions or inactions, such as clicking a link, visiting a page or opening an email, etc. Once you've collected and organized behavioral data, you can create segments of subscribers based on their behavior. Segment options include purchase behavior (frequency, recency, value, product category), website behavior (pages visited, time spent, bounce rate, conversions), and email behavior (opens, clicks, replies, unsubscribes). Utilizing this data, you can send targeted offers like loyalty programs to frequent buyers, re-engagement campaigns to inactive customers, content offers to engaged blog visitors, or win-back emails to unsubscribed subscribers. These segments provide valuable insights for improving email campaigns and informing stakeholders.

Buying history

Order history provides valuable insights for boosting sales and making informed decisions. By analyzing data and trends, you can accurately manage inventory, ensuring stocked shelves and avoiding missed sales opportunities. Understanding what sells well allows you to plan promotions and feature popular products both in-store and online, while discontinuing less popular items. Additionally, order history enables targeted marketing campaigns by allowing you to send relevant messages and offers to specific customer groups based on their past purchases. Segment and personalize your email based on the recipient’s previous purchases, such as product category, price range, frequency, and more.

Location

Location-based email marketing utilizes customer location data to send targeted and personalized emails. While mobile marketing focuses on real-time location using GPS, email marketing relies on broader location information such as zip codes. Location-based email marketing takes advantage of static data points like city, state, country, and zip code to create region-specific content, zip code-centric emails, and city-based emails. These emails can provide personalized experiences based on the customer's location and can be combined with location-based mobile marketing for a seamless customer journey. By leveraging available location data creatively, marketers can deliver highly relevant and engaging location-based email marketing messages that enhance the customer experience. 

Why Timing and Triggers are Essential for Successful Email Automation Campaigns

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“#1 — TIMING. Timing is everything when it comes to email marketing. If you send too many promotional emails or run too many sales…..You’ll burn out your list.” ~ Vlad| Direct Response on Twitter.

Timing and trigger-based automated emails are sent to your customers at the right time and based on the right action or event. According to SmartInsights, general trends indicate that Tuesdays and Thursdays are the most popular days for trigger emails, and one should send them at 10 AM and 2 PM for the best results.

To measure the effectiveness of your email automation triggers, and the timing thereof, several metrics can be used. Take a look at the total number of emails sent, open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribing rate, site traffic, and conversion. 

Common mistakes marketers make when executing email automation triggers include buying third-party email lists, not syncing the right triggers, sending too many emails, and not analyzing performance metrics continually over time. 

If you want to do it the right way, and we assume you do, utilize opt-in forms to collect interested users' emails, add value to messages, provide clear call-to-action buttons, keep messages personalized and humanized, and check triggered email performance against set metrics that align with company objectives. 

How to Measure and Optimize Performance for Email

The phrase "Data is King" holds true, emphasizing the importance of measurement and optimization for your email campaigns. To ensure success, it's essential to analyze email performance effectively. Here are some compelling reasons why measurement and optimization matter and how you can approach them with excellence.

• You can track how your clients interact with your emails. Use Google Analytics to measure email traffic, bounce rate, and conversions.
• It is easy to find out the loopholes in your customer journey. For instance, surveys, feedback tools, or heat maps can help you find pain points and opportunities to keep contacts moving through the sales funnel.
• The use of interactive email marketing tools can help you assess how campaigns affect consumer behavior, loyalty, and satisfaction. 
• You can use data analysis to experiment with different email elements over time, such as design, content, and personalization. For instance, use multivariate testing to find the best design version of an email.

The right blend of all these steps can help you enhance the customer experience and boost your email revenue. Many email automation providers, like MailModo, have templates available for email design, automation funnels, and common audience segments to help you get started. Customize these elements for your company in a few clicks and you'll have boosted conversions and retention in no time at all. 

How to Craft the Ideal Email

Email automation campaigns are some of the best ways to deliver personalized and timely messages to your customers based on their actions and preferences. Here's how you can create great email funnels that nurture and convert:

Pay Attention to the Structure

Crafting a perfect email requires attention to various elements. Starting with the "from" name, it's crucial to choose a familiar and recognizable name for better open rates. Creating an engaging subject line that focuses on the benefits and has around 28-39 characters can significantly improve open and click-through rates. Utilizing a cohesive preheader that complements the subject line adds value and provides a snippet of the email's content. Clearly explaining the purpose of the email establishes trust and helps readers decide whether to continue reading. Keeping the email short, concise, and visually appealing is important to capture and maintain readers' attention. 

Visualize and personalize your audience

Design and write your email with a picture of your target audience in mind. Use catchy subject lines, compelling copy, strong Calls-to-Action(CTA), and attractive images. DemandSage claims that emails with personalized subject lines increase open rates by 35%. Personalized subject lines show that you care about your audience and their interests, and they can help you stand out from the crowd. 

Test your email campaigns regularly

A/B testing is a crucial practice in email marketing to improve campaign performance. It involves sending two different variants (A and B) to your email list and analyzing which one performs better. A/B testing allows you to make evidence-based decisions. Common elements to test include subject lines, preview text, sender name, email timing, call-to-action text, landing pages, email length, design, subscriber greetings, and new ideas. By consistently testing your campaigns, you can maximize engagement and drive better results. With user-friendly email apps available, conducting A/B tests is convenient and highly recommended.

Key takeaways

Despite being the oldest digital marketing channel with a long history, email marketing is going strong and continues to deliver great performance for marketing teams across the globe. With the right email marketing strategy, companies are improving their customer journey mapping  and getting the best ROI on all their omnichannel efforts. To sum it up, here’s a reminder of how you can leverage email automation to improve your customer journey mapping:

1. Segment your customer based on their behavior and interests.
2. Create personalized and interactive email campaigns for each audience segment you have.
3. Measure and optimize your email performance.
4. Use customer feedback, heatmapping, and unsubscribe rates to know if you're on the right track.
5. Execute proper implementation of different types of campaigns to build rapport, satisfaction, loyalty, and business amongst your customer base.

Email automation can be complex and challenging, with multiple campaigns needed to nurture contacts throughout the customer journey. Simplify this process with the right combination of AI assistance, best practices as outlined in this guide, and content that captures your target audience. This combination has the potential to grow your business exponentially. 

The right email strategy is an important part of any company's omnichannel marketing efforts, but we know you have much more than just email to worry about. Work with MarinOne today to streamline your advertising and make sure all your marketing channels are working together effectively.

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Aquibur Rahman is a guest contributor to Marin Software.

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While it’s considered the underdog of paid search advertising and can often fly under the radar, Microsoft is still an effective platform for generating conversions. Like any ad platform, the key to achieving high-performing campaigns is with optimization. 

For over 10 years of running DataFeedWatch and having helped over 17k retailers optimize their product feeds for various channels - including Microsoft (formerly known as Microsoft Advertising), I’ve witnessed countless approaches to this marketing channel. Some less and some more successful. And today, I’d like to focus on the latter.

In this article, I am breaking down 13 tips on how to optimize Microsoft Advertising campaigns to generate the best possible results for you or your clients. The optimization tips will feel familiar for those experienced in managing Google Ads campaigns, however, there are subtle differences of which you must be mindful.

Why Microsoft Advertising

Microsoft's market share varies from country to county and can be anywhere from 2% to 25%. If you want to break it down by search engine, Bing accounted for 8% of the global desktop search market at the start of 2023, and Yahoo accounted for less than 2% of the global search market in 2022. While we don’t need to tell you who took the #1 spot for market share, 10% is still a lot of people. In fact, since launching their AI chatbot, Bing now has 100 million daily active users.  

This is why including Microsoft Advertising in your paid search strategy makes sense…the actual volume of people that use the platforms has shifted significantly and seems to be growing. And the consensus among advertisers is that Microsoft's new features and placements make it a solid addition to your paid search strategy. 

Some advertisers use Microsoft Advertising as a secret weapon in gaining a competitive advantage, especially if it’s a space where their competitors are less active. Others claim lower CPCs and higher conversion rates, which can mean better performance in comparison to Google Ads. 

So there are a good number of reasons why advertisers choose Microsoft Advertising - the next question is, how to optimize those ads to ensure you are maximizing your ROAS. 

13 Tips to Optimize Your Microsoft Advertising Campaigns

Let’s explore 13 practical tips on how to optimize Microsoft Advertising campaigns to generate the best possible results. Work through each of the tips below and prioritize them based on what will have the biggest impact on your account. 

Import High-Performing Google Ads Campaigns

The vast majority of advertisers running Microsoft Advertising campaigns will already be using Google Ads. If this is you, then this step is a breeze. Import your Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft using the Import feature. It can be found along the top panel once you’ve logged in. 

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If your Google Ads campaigns are high performing and you are happy with how they are set up and structured, then even better. Go ahead and import your campaigns into Microsoft as soon as possible. If you anticipate some larger Google Ads campaign optimizations or structural changes shortly, it might make sense to import once that work is complete.

Having said that, this feature is extremely handy, and anytime you’ve made changes to your Google Ads campaigns, whether it’s adding in new campaigns or ad groups, or updating ads and ad copy, then import those changes straight into Bing in a few simple steps. 

I recommend doing an advanced import to have more control over what gets pulled into your Microsoft Advertising account. For example, you can customize bid strategies, bids, budgets, and naming conventions (and so much more), tailoring these aspects to the individual needs of your account.  

Right before starting the import, click on the advanced import button seen in the screenshot below:

You’ll then get the choice on a wide selection of settings:

Experiment With Bid Strategies 

There are six bid strategies to choose from in Microsoft Advertising. The most optimal bid strategy depends on several factors and should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Not only does your objective need to be considered, but other things such as conversion tracking set-up, how much budget you’re spending, and having enough data in the account for some bid strategies to work effectively should also factor in.

Here are the 6 bid strategies that you are currently available to choose from:

1. Enhanced CPC
2. Maximize Clicks (automated)
3. Target Impression Share 
4. Maximize Conversions
5. Target CPA
6. Target ROAS

Three common scenarios that would indicate Enhanced CPC, Maximize Clicks or Target Impression Share would be the best choice are the following:

• The objective is brand awareness or to drive traffic
• Conversion tracking hasn’t been set up
• You have had less than 15 conversions in the past 30 days

If any of the above reflect your situation, then the first 3 bid strategies on the list above will likely be the best choice, but there’s still an opportunity to experiment with Microsoft Advertising bid strategies. If you start with Enhanced CPC, experiment with Maximize Clicks to see how an automated bid strategy impacts performance, or with Target Impression Share to see if that bid strategy drives an uplift in results. 

If the objective is to generate conversions or you are working towards a Target CPA or Target ROAS, then the latter three bid strategies on the list above will probably be the best option. When starting, it’s recommended to use Maximize Conversions and allow the campaign to collect as much conversion data as possible. Following that, experiment with Target CPA or Target ROAS, which are considered more optimal, taking into account your goals.   

Track Your Conversions

Microsoft Advertising tip #3 follows nicely from the previous tip on bid strategies. Setting up conversion tracking is a key way to improve the performance of your Microsoft Advertising campaigns. Not only will this allow you to use the more advanced bidding strategies - Maximize Clicks, Target CPA, and Target ROAS - it’ll provide you with more optimization options. 

For example, without conversion tracking, you can still optimize your campaigns and keywords to drive as much traffic as you can. However, with conversion tracking, you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact campaigns and keywords that drive action on your site, whether that’s sign-ups, purchases, or other actions, and double down on those keywords and campaigns. It’ll also enable you to reduce waste in the account by pulling back from areas that are underperforming from a conversion perspective. 

Although setting up tracking requires some initial analytics work, tracking conversions will make all the difference when it comes to your Microsoft Advertising optimization. 

Optimize Keywords Using Data

Keyword optimization on Microsoft Advertising is really important and something that can be added to the weekly to-do list. Some of the key metrics to keep an eye on are CTR, average CPC, impression share, quality score, conversion rate, CPA, and ROAS. This sounds like a lot, and they may not all apply, but being mindful of these metrics and striving to make them as efficient as possible is a great way to optimize your account. 

Here are some practical steps I follow when optimizing keywords in Microsoft:

• Navigate to the keywords section of the left-hand panel, either on a campaign-by-campaign basis or looking at all campaigns
• Choose a date range. When choosing the date range, ensure there is enough data to make well-informed optimization decisions.
• Add the key metrics you are monitoring to your columns so that you can view these metrics on a keyword-by-keyword basis
• Filter keywords either by ‘keyword text contains/doesn’t contain’ or by metric, for example, ‘Quality Score is less than 6/10’. Doing this will allow you to single out the best and worst-performing keywords based on your criteria
• Once keywords in need of optimization have been identified, take the necessary steps to optimize them, whether that means adjusting bids, pausing or moving them, qual. score work, etc.

Following the above process regularly is a surefire way to optimize your Microsoft Advertising keywords using all of the data that’s available to you. 

And should you want to skip the hustle of manual keyword optimization of your search ads, DataFeedWatch's Feed-Based Text Ads software will soon be able to do that for you. It’ll automatically pull in the keywords from your product feed and create unique ads for each and every product you have in your store – even if you sell thousands.   

Monitor Search Terms 

Search terms should be monitored and optimized in the same way as keywords, detailed in the previous tip. Follow the same process, this time in the ‘Search Terms’ section of the account, to find non-relevant search terms that can then be excluded from your ad groups and campaigns. Doing this will focus your budget on more relevant searches, have higher intent, and are more likely to drive better results. 

For example, in the screenshot below, for a pet-friendly holiday business, searches relating to ‘home rentals’ and ‘houses to rent’ are not relevant and are a waste of budget. Filter by ‘Search Term contains home rental/houses to rent’ to isolate all search terms that relate to this, and then exclude them from your campaigns. 

This is also a great exercise to uncover new keywords that can then be added to ad groups and campaigns accordingly. For example, let’s say the ‘pet-friendly travel lodges’ search term is showing up in a ‘Pet-Friendly Hotels’ ad group. This term could be added as a new keyword in its own ad group, which means it can be better managed, and the ads and landing page can be tailored to this specific search. 

Add Negative Keywords 

Negative keywords are a vital way to optimize Microsoft Advertising campaigns by excluding certain words and phrases that are not relevant. Doing so will mean saving budget, reducing waste, and instead focusing on only relevant searches. Adding negative keywords is especially important for phrase and broad match keywords, in fact, they are a good optimization technique for any campaign and campaign type that doesn’t use exact match keywords.

Start by blocking out keywords you know are not relevant from the start. It could be a particular product or service you don’t offer, competitor brands or other non-relevant searches, such as people looking for jobs, or people searching for locations you don’t operate in. 

Next, following on from the search term analysis, identify new negative keywords that can be added based on non-relevant search terms that are cropping up. Using the example in the previous section, ‘home rental’ was identified as a non-relevant search term, so this could be added as a negative keyword in phrase match to block out any future searches that include this term. 

Monitor/Improve Quality Score 

Your Microsoft Advertising quality score indicates how competitive your ads are by measuring keyword, ad, and landing page relevance concerning customers' search queries.

The quality score can range from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. You can see the quality score on the Keywords, Campaigns, and Ad Groups tables. If your keywords, ads, and landing pages are particularly relevant, you can expect a higher quality score. If they are not relevant, it’ll be low. As a general rule of thumb, a quality score of 1-5 means you are underperforming, and it could be improved. 6 is competitive but still fairly average, and a quality score of 7-10 is highly competitive and what we should aim for. 

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Improve quality score by focusing on three key areas - improving expected CTR, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Practically speaking, this could mean enhancing ad copy to improve expected CTR, or making the ad more relevant to keywords and searches. Separate keywords into ad groups by tight themes to improve ad relevance. Or make improvements to your landing page, such as page speed, including keywords on your landing page or page navigation. 

Quality score optimization will translate to more competitive CPCs and ad delivery, helping to drive better results. 

Write Effective Ad Copy

Writing impactful ad copy plays a crucial role in optimizing your Microsoft Advertising campaigns. The primary objective of ad copy is to capture your audience's attention and increase the likelihood of them clicking on your ad. To achieve this, address your audience's needs while highlighting the unique aspects of your offering.

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Make sure to incorporate attention-grabbing headlines that clearly communicate the value your product or service brings. Emphasize the benefits and USPs to entice your audience and then prompt them to take action with clear call-to-actions. Finally, including relevant keywords throughout your ad copy enhances its relevance and quality score, as discussed in the previous section.

To further improve the effectiveness of your ads, use as many ad extensions as possible, such as site links, callouts, and structured snippets. Ad extensions provide searchers with additional information, making your ads larger in the SERPs and enhancing their visual appeal. 

Use Bid Adjustments With Targeting

In Microsoft Advertising, a bid adjustment is a percentage you want to increase or decrease the bid for particular targeting elements. Bid adjustments are a handy way to optimize Microsoft Advertising based on performance and finetune how your budget is spent. 

Bid adjustments can be applied to audiences, demographics, locations, ad schedules and devices, and within these categories, there are a lot of things that can be adjusted. For example, you may have identified that desktop devices far outperform mobile and tablets. Therefore, it could make sense to add a +50% bid adjustment to desktop devices, to increase competitiveness for that device since it performs so well. Or perhaps a particular age group, day of the week, or in-market audience underperforms. In this case, use a negative bid adjustment of -20% (or how much makes sense for you) for these elements, so that when someone who’s part of this target searches, you’re spending less and bidding less competitively. 

Bid adjustments provide an extra layer of Microsoft Advertising optimization and are considered an effective way to enhance performance. 

Experiment With All Match Types In The Same Ad Group

Mixed-match type ad groups are now the recommended approach to structuring your campaigns. Historically, separating ad groups by keyword match type had been the recommended approach, to better manage spend and keep a close eye on phrase and broad match searches. However, a lot has changed. Thanks to machine learning, phrase, and broad match keywords can perform just as well as exact keywords, and in some cases, better. 

If your ad groups currently contain single match type keywords, try broadening them out by adding in other match types. Remember relevance is key, so ensure the keywords are still really closely related.   

A final note on this, proceed with caution. Phrase and broad match can quickly spend your budget on things that are not relevant. Therefore, ensure you use a robust negative keyword list and monitor search terms daily when experimenting with phrase and broad match keywords.

Maximize Your Impression Share 

Impression share is measured as a percentage. It’s the number of times your ad is shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting. In simple terms, if there were 100 impressions available, and your campaign achieved 80 impressions, you would have an 80% impression share. 

This metric is important because it highlights how much visibility you have relative to your market. As well as that, it tells you how much growth potential there is. 80% impression share perhaps means you are really competitive, but there’s also an opportunity to achieve another 20% impression share. Optimize your Microsoft Advertising campaigns by maximizing impression share for the top-performing campaigns, ad groups, and keywords.

Use Ad Recommendations

Navigate to the ‘Recommendations’ section of your Microsoft Advertising account. Here you will find a list of recommendations relating to repairs, bidding, budgets, keywords, targeting, ads, and extensions. It’s essentially the same tool that’s used in Google Ads, for those that are familiar with Google. 

Consider each of the recommendations that are provided and work through them based on your account. Not all of them will be relevant, but apply those that are. For example, in the screenshot above, setting up conversion tracking would hugely benefit performance, so this recommendation should be actioned to better optimize campaigns. However, fixing campaigns that are limited by budget essentially means increasing campaign budgets, which isn’t possible due to the fixed monthly budget that’s in place. 

Although a lot of the recommendations won’t be relevant and applicable, some of them will be so it’s a great way of staying on top of housekeeping tasks and discovering new ways to optimize your Microsoft Advertising account. 

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Last but not least in our 13 tips on how to optimize Microsoft Advertising campaigns is landing page optimization. Campaign set-up and management can only go so far. The effectiveness of a landing page has equal importance in generating conversions and will therefore impact performance. Therefore, landing page optimization can help in the following 3 ways:

1. Improve user experience by providing them with a seamless and positive experience
2. Increase conversion rates, which will in turn, improve CPA and ROAS 
3. Improve quality score and ad relevance, as discussed previously 

Poorly designed, slow, and tricky-to-navigate landing pages will more likely lead to poor performance, and vice versa. Although this tip doesn’t relate to Microsoft Advertising itself, optimizing landing pages will improve the performance of your Microsoft Advertising campaigns. 

Here’s a list of some potential landing page optimizations to consider:

• Clear and compelling headlines
• Persuasive messaging and the use of keywords
• Strong call-to-actions throughout the page
• Visuals that resonate with your target audience
• Mobile-friendly landing pages 
• A streamlined conversion funnel or form
• Testimonials, reviews, and ratings to build trust and authority
• Page loading speed

A final thing to consider when optimizing landing pages is setting up a/b testing and experimenting with various elements from the list above, as a way to get better results. 

Conclusion

By following the 13 Microsoft Advertising optimization tips in this article, your account will be in with a good chance of successful results. Take the time needed to go through each aspect of account optimization, and remember that optimization work is ongoing. It’s vital that weekly, fortnightly, and monthly processes are in place and strictly followed, to stay on top of performance and to ensure your campaigns stay healthy.

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Jacques van der Wilt is a guest contributor to Marin Software's blog.

Navigating what tactics and strategies to use in B2B marketing is tough. To gather insights on how to stay ahead, we recently participated in the Forrester B2B Summit in Austin, Texas. Leaders and visionaries from various industries gathered to explore trends, strategies, and innovations. The sessions, discussions, and networking opportunities provided valuable knowledge that will shape our B2B marketing approach for 2023 and beyond. Here are our "TLDR" notes from our favorite sessions.

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Opening Remarks

George Colony - Forrester CEO

• Out of 100 presentations, 17 are focused on AI.
• Out of 100 sponsors, 50 of them already have AI built in to their tools.
• "Ironman effect" - this isn't about robots taking your job, it's about marketers putting on a robotic suit to create superpower-like efficiency and effectiveness.

AI's capability to analyze vast amounts of data enables B2B marketers to identify patterns, predict customer behavior, and personalize content and interactions. It also streamlines lead generation, automates repetitive tasks, improves customer service, optimizes for voice and visual search, aids in competitive analysis, and necessitates ethical considerations. Marketers should prioritize training and upskilling, refine Account-Based Marketing strategies with AI, and stay updated on AI's future directions.

Introducing Forrester's B2B Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine 

John Arnold, Principal Analyst @ Forrester

Sam had an amazing experience meeting Sebastian Vettel's pit crew, sitting in the racecar, and receiving a personal letter from the racer himself. Despite Mercedes' dominance in racecar driving, being a Ferrari fan was essential to Vettel's winning mindset. Experiential marketing, particularly in the context of Formula I, played a significant role in driving customer loyalty and advocacy. Key elements of experiential marketing include interaction, engagement, personalization, and creating memorable experiences. Leveraging technology like VR and AR enhances the impact. Storytelling and adapting to virtual events are crucial, as well as considering emerging trends and building long-term relationships with customers. The Forrester B2B Growth Engine emphasizes aligning marketing, product, and sales to meet the changing needs of buyers, as evidenced by their dissatisfaction with providers in 2022.

Buyer Value is the Core of Your Customer-Obsessed Growth Engine 

Katie Fabiszak, Principal Analyst @ Forrester

Katie and her son Drew faced the challenge of choosing a college among numerous options, feeling overwhelmed by the lack of differentiation. Similarly, B2B brands encounter a "sea of sameness" and must differentiate themselves by listening to individual customer needs. Key strategies include understanding buyer value, adopting a customer-centric approach, maximizing customer lifetime value, personalization, predictive analysis, customer feedback, crafting compelling value propositions, increasing customer retention, aligning product development with customer expectations, customer journey mapping, cross-functional collaboration, and evolving with changing customer preferences for sustained value delivery.

How CMOs Support the Six Ways a Company Can Grow

Barbie Mattie, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester 

CMOs can drive market penetration by implementing targeted marketing campaigns, enhancing branding efforts, and implementing customer retention strategies. Market development involves conducting market research, creating market entry strategies, and tailoring messaging to different market segments. CMOs collaborate with product teams in product development by integrating customer insights and developing marketing strategies. Diversification requires exploring opportunities, validating them through research, and executing marketing strategies for new products or markets. Strategic partnerships involve identifying compatible partners, creating collaborative marketing strategies, and maintaining brand alignment. CMOs also play a role in assessing potential acquisitions, overseeing post-acquisition integration, and developing effective communication strategies to inform customers about changes resulting from acquisitions.

Outreach: How Unified Revenue Operations Strategy Drives External Growth 

Ashley Naumann Vonella, Sales Enablement & Operations Senior Team Manager, VelocityEHS 

Ashley Naumann discussed the concept of Revenue Operations (RevOps) and its significance in driving business growth. RevOps involves aligning sales, marketing, and customer service departments to provide a seamless customer experience. It emphasizes the integration of data from different departments to create a holistic view of customer interactions, enabling informed decision-making. RevOps also streamlines business processes, enhances revenue forecasting and planning, and helps overcome organizational silos, fostering collaboration and improving performance. She highlighted the impact of RevOps on customer experience and provided strategies for successful implementation. 

Making Sense of the B2B Intent Data Landscape 

Brett Kahnke, Principal Analyst, Forrester

B2B intent data is defined as data that reveals the signals and indications of a potential buyer's interests and purchasing intentions. It plays a crucial role in modern marketing and sales strategies by providing valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. There are various sources of B2B intent data, including first-party and third-party data providers. First-party data providers utilize a company's own data, such as website analytics and CRM data, to analyze user behavior. Third-party data providers collect data from external sources, offering a broader view of the market. Other intent data provider models include bidstream data providers, cooperative data providers, predictive analytics providers, publisher-based providers, and data aggregator providers. Understanding the pros and cons of different data sources helps businesses make informed decisions about utilizing B2B intent data in their marketing and sales efforts.

Dun & Bradstreet: True Stories of Successful Master Data Management

Neil Honaker, Data Hygiene / Data Privacy Manager, Essity

Jackie McBrady, Sr Director, Lead-Finance Applications EMEA, Cushman & Wakefield

Jenn Atkins, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet 

Master Data Management (MDM) is a comprehensive method that helps organizations define and manage critical data, providing a single point of reference for all data elements. It ensures data accuracy, consistency, and uniformity across the organization, leading to improved efficiency, decision-making, and regulatory compliance. MDM consists of components such as master data, metadata, data quality, and data integration. Best practices for implementing MDM include having a clear strategy, securing executive buy-in, prioritizing data quality, involving stakeholders, starting small and scaling gradually, choosing the right tools, and planning for data governance. Common challenges in MDM implementation include inconsistent data quality and resistance to change, which can be addressed through data cleansing and effective communication. Successful MDM implementation results in enhanced decision-making, improved operational efficiency, and better regulatory compliance.

How We Plan to Use What We've Learned

Attending the Forrester B2B Summit was truly an illuminating experience that has invigorated our team at MarinOne. As we reflect on the invaluable insights gained from industry experts, thought leaders, and fellow marketing professionals, we are inspired to push the boundaries of B2B marketing and embrace innovation. Armed with a fresh perspective and a deep understanding of emerging trends, we are eager to implement the strategies and best practices we've learned to drive tangible results for our clients and stay ahead of the curve. The Forrester B2B Summit served as a catalyst for growth, igniting our passion for continuous learning and reaffirming our commitment to delivering exceptional B2B marketing solutions. We eagerly look forward to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, armed with the knowledge and inspiration we gained. Reach out to work with one of our team members to revamp your B2B advertising campaign strategy.

PPC Management is one of the most effective ways for a business to achieve positive ROI. In this article, we break down what PPC management is, why it’s important, and what kind of processes go with it. We wrap up with some opportunities to automate your PPC management (and why automation is an attractive option).

‍Defining PPC Management

Let’s start by defining “PPC” as “pay per click”, which refers to the common pricing model of digital advertising publishers constrained by the advertiser’s overall budget. PPC Management is the process of organizing, managing, and optimizing the PPC budget to achieve optimal performance. 

This definition is extremely basic, as the practice of managing PPC encompasses a myriad of tasks that result in the efficient spend of the budget toward a company’s goal. These goals are typically related to awareness or ROI. While PPC is one of the best ways to improve ROI, it can take a lot of time, effort, and testing to produce optimal results. This is why many advertisers go the route of hiring a PPC agency and/or leveraging automation (more on this later).

Why PPC Management is Important

Simply put: effective PPC Management can help you reach your business goals. Done properly, PPC Management is a game changer for businesses large and small. 

PPC Management Essentials

The PPC management process includes many parts, some of which a business might opt to take on internally. There are many great resources for learning the ropes of PPC management (check out this guide from HubSpot), but sometimes it’s best to bring in a professional to get the most out of your time and advertising investment.

Some common tasks typically included with PPC Management are:

Keyword Research and Analysis

• Researching the keywords that customers are looking for related to your business. These are then evaluated and adjusted based on performance during optimization.

Targeting Channels

• Google and Bing are the top publishers for PPC, but they aren’t the only places where your audience spends time. PPC management might extend to channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Criteo, and many more depending on your unique business needs.

Optimization Tasks

• Are some keywords spending money but not driving any ROI? Is there a headline that is performing way better than others? Is that bid too low for your ads to be seen? Optimization is the essential process of identifying what is working and making changes based on the findings. This may look like excluding keywords in Search ads, pausing an ad in Social, adjusting a keyword bid, etc. Consistent implementation of these tweaks is important as the ppc landscape is dynamic, meaning that there is always room for optimization based on the current factors at play.

Competitor Analysis

• There are many options for competitor research out there that vary by channel. Tools like SpyFu can be used to gain insight into competitor keyword strategy, while Facebook Ad Library can help you scope out the creative strategy of the competitor. Competitor analysis is great for finding inspiration for your own ppc strategy.

A/B Testing

• Always Be Testing! Testing copy, landing pages, creative, etc are all essential to continuous improvement. Testing and learning is the best way to understand what works for your business and how to improve.

How to Automate your PPC Management

As you might imagine, the tasks above can take a considerable amount of time and effort. While there are some tasks that can be outsourced to agencies, there are others that can be easily managed through automation.

One pillar of Marin Software’s offering is automation, saving businesses time and money on essential ppc management tasks. 

Here are a few of the ways that Marin’s automation can help you with your ppc management strategy:

Flexible Rules and Dynamic Actions

• Integrate external signals into Marin for smart optimizations that are performed without you lifting a finger. 

One-Click Keyword Expansion

• Marin identifies keyword opportunities, and with the tap of your mouse they can be launched in your campaigns. No need to spend time researching the best keywords, Marin does it for you.

Build Campaigns Based on Feeds

• Build out text and shopping ads from your feeds or use our dynamic campaigns tool to pause ads based on inventory. This is a fast and effective way to manage your ppc campaigns.

Bidding

• Marin’s Strategies offer transparency and efficiency while performing optimizations to your ppc campaigns. Algorithmic bidding is available for multiple publishers through Marin.

To learn more about opportunities for automation customized to your business, reach out to us!

PPC advertising has revolutionized the world of online advertising, allowing businesses of all sizes to reach their target audience and generate conversions. However, managing PPC campaigns can be a time-consuming and laborious process, especially for businesses that run multiple campaigns simultaneously. This is where MarinOne comes in, providing businesses with a powerful and efficient automation tool that can save time, improve accuracy, and increase efficiency.

MarinOne Scripts is a part of MarinOne, a comprehensive cross-channel advertising platform that integrates all of a business's advertising data into a single platform. With MarinOne Scripts, businesses can automate various aspects of PPC campaign management, including adjusting bids, budgets, and ad status based on preset logic. Similar to MarinOne bidding, automated changes to bids and budgets allow businesses to focus on strategic aspects of their marketing program while MarinOne Scripts takes care of the routine tasks. Since MarinOne Scripts leverages Python, users can leverage Scripts that handle spend optimization, keyword expansion, negative keyword mining, data analysis, and ad copy optimization. 

Automate Bidding, Budgets, and Keyword Monitoring

With MarinOne Scripts, businesses can automate bid adjustments and budget allocation, eliminating the need for manual monitoring and adjustment. MarinOne Scripts can also help businesses identify underperforming keywords and pause or adjust them automatically, saving valuable time. Users can customize scripts so that they can chain actions together - ex.everytime a poor performing kw is paused, it is also added as a negative keyword to the original campaign and/or all campaigns. 

Increase Efficiency Based on Performance

Another benefit of MarinOne Scripts is that it increases efficiency. MarinOne Scripts automatically adjusts SmartBidding targets based on performance data, ensuring that businesses get the most out of their ad spend. It can also optimize ad copy to improve conversion rates and reduce cost-per-click. By streamlining the PPC campaign management process, MarinOne Scripts helps businesses improve their efficiency and increase their ROI.

Increase Accuracy with AI

MarinOne Scripts improves accuracy of data analysis as it minimizes the instances of human error - a common problem in manual PPC campaign management. MarinOne Scripts eliminates the risk of human error by automating several aspects of campaign management. This ensures that businesses get accurate and reliable data on their campaign performance, allowing them to make data-driven decisions. It also ensures business continuity in the event that a PPC manager has unexpected time off and is unable to manually monitor and/or optimize PPC campaigns. 

Customize and Scale All Advertising Campaigns Cross-Channel

In addition to saving time, increasing efficiency, and improving accuracy, MarinOne Scripts is scalable and customizable, making it an ideal solution for businesses of all sizes. Whether a business is managing a single campaign or multiple campaigns, MarinOne Scripts can help automate and optimize PPC campaigns across online ad accounts. 

MarinOne Scripts customization capabilities give advertisers the flexibility to create automation rules that are tailored to their unique business goals and objectives. Each script can have pre-defined start and end dates - this way, advertisers can apply scripts that are aligned with their business calendar. As an example, end of quarter spend governance rules may be more flexible than start of quarter so two scripts with complimentary start and end dates would ensure that the appropriate spend governance rules are applied. 

With scalability and customization options, MarinOne Scripts is a valuable asset for any business that wants to get the most out of its PPC campaigns. Speak to us today about getting started and trying MarinOne Scripts for free during the first 30 days.

Advertisers know how important optimization is, whether it’s major changes or several small changes throughout the week. With Marin Insights, making these regular optimizations is easy. Our Insights are designed to save you time and to catch important details that may have been missed. 

Many advertisers are used to looking through multiple publishers and making adjustments within each of them. With the recommendation engine in Marin, you can easily make adjustments to multiple publishers at once. Whether that is downloading the Insight and re-uploading with the desired changes or using the one-click implementation that will seamlessly adjust each publisher included in the Insight. Leveraging data from multiple publishers can be useful for advertisers as well. 

How Various Marin Insights Work

In Marin's “Duplicate Keywords” Insight, the MarinOne tool will look through your account and find keywords with the same text, publisher, match type, location target, and audience. Instead of looking through the account to find these, they will automatically be searched for every day and show up in the Insights section. We have now made the process of this Insight and several others easier by adding a one-click implementation. Saving more time with the click of a button, rather than manually updating these. 

In the “Keyword Expansion” Insight, artificial intelligence technology looks at top-performing keywords across publishers and recommends adding them to other publishers. If Microsoft has great performance with a specific keyword, our Insight AI will pick up on that and suggest it be added to Google as well.

About the Insights Algorithm

We have years of digital experience that we’ve applied to perfect these algorithms. Every day automated machine learning will search your publishers, seeking out new opportunities for performance improvement. Using the Insights tab can save advertisers time, effort, and money. There are also separate sections of the Insights page that divide the Insights by category. Insights are a key initiative, and we are continuously working on creating new Insights and finding the best way to implement them. 

One-Click Implementation

Our one-click implementation Insights have been created for ease of execution, you click the button and we’ll do the rest. The one-click implementation Insights currently include;

• Amazon Keyword Expansion - Add high performing search terms as exact keywords to gain bid control and improve performance.
• Amazon Keyword Match Type Expansion - Add missing phrase and exact match keyword variations for high performing broad and phrase match keywords.
• Apple Keyword Expansion - Add high performing search terms as exact keywords to gain bid control and improve performance.
• Apple Keyword Match Type Expansion - Add missing exact match keyword variations for high performing broad match keywords.
• Keyword Expansion - Add high performing search terms as exact keywords to gain bid control and improve performance.
• Keyword Match Type Expansion - Add missing phrase and exact match keyword variations for high performing broad and phrase match keywords.
• Negative Keyword Expansion - Add negative keywords for non-converting search terms to reduce wasteful spending.
• Amazon Negative Keyword Expansion - Add negative keywords for non-converting search terms to reduce wasteful spending.
• Budget Capped Campaigns - Increase budgets on high performing campaigns to improve overall efficiency. If spend needs to be maintained, reduce bid targets.
• Ad Optimization - Pause or replace underperforming ads to drive more traffic to top performing ads.
• Duplicate Keywords - Pause or delete duplicate keywords, keeping the keyword with the higher quality score or spend, to improve performance and make more informed bid decisions.
• Landing Page Errors - Pause keywords directing traffic to broken landing pages until the issue is resolved.
• Landing Page Errors (enhanced) - Resolve landing page errors or replace with functioning URLs.
• Keyword Bid Overrides - Remove keyword bid overrides to allow Marin Bidding to optimize towards the bid strategy goal.
• Bid Caps - Remove or raise bid strategy caps to allow Marin Bidding to operate more efficiently.
• Bid Floors - Remove bid strategy floors to allow Marin Bidding to operate more efficiently.

• Bid Changes Preview - Review bid changes recommended by Marin Bidding and set Bid Strategies to Traffic.
• Bidding Reactivity - Prevent drastic daily bid changes by setting ‘Limit Bid Change under %’ to 25%.

The MarinOne Difference

There are many other Insights that we have within the platform as well. Some will eventually have one-click implementation, while others require more analysis. Advertisers have the ability to download any Insight on the page for a more thorough review if desired.  We have set up our tool to include complete transparency on how we define an Insight which allows you to understand why specific recommendations have been made; and you will be able to implement Insights to several publishers from one page.  By utilizing this tool, you will have more effectively optimized accounts and more time to focus on the real building blocks of your business.

To learn more about our automated paid media management Insights or any other campaign management quandary you may be facing, schedule a consultation with a MarinOne expert today.

Augmented analytics is drastically changing the way marketers work, empowering them with better ways to identify customer needs, develop more effective campaigns, drive conversions, and ultimately improve business outcomes. 

Using advanced tech solutions such as artificial intelligence to collect and analyze data, augmented analytics helps marketers make more informed, data-driven decisions. Simply put, it’s a smart and powerful solution that enables marketers to move way ahead of competitors by helping them achieve more with less. From providing smart insights to revealing valuable intelligence, augmented analytics is a game changer that can transform your business in 2023 and beyond. 

What is Augmented Analytics?

Augmented analytics is a data processing approach that uses a variety of techniques, including data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning, to analyze a wide range of historical and current data to improve data exploration and analysis. Applying advanced algorithms to the data enables businesses to better understand customer behavior, identify trends and anomalies, and make predictions that inform decisions based on facts, rather than intuition. By leveraging these complex algorithms, augmented analytics enhances the way businesses can use data for further analysis in business intelligence applications. This strategy has huge potential and is a key tool in helping marketers develop a strong competitive advantage. In fact, the augmented analytics market is expected to grow by 25% in the next five years, reaching $22.4 billion by 2025.

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4 Ways Augmented Analytics can Help Your Business

Using augmented analytics can multiply your business’s success by improving your bottom line and introducing new ways to boost campaign efforts. 

Maximize ROI

Marketing teams confronted with frozen or shrinking budgets are nonetheless still expected to generate leads and build pipelines to increase revenue. Using augmented analytics, marketers can make data-driven decisions and optimize their marketing investments through accurate insights and recommendations. Instead of just relying on past experience, estimates, gut instinct, or trial and error, the technology provides an accurate picture of which campaigns are performing well and which aren't, enabling marketers to allocate their budgets effectively to maximize returns. Here are two ways augmented analytics can help optimize marketing budgets.

• Budget Forecasting

Budget forecasting supports operational improvements that can lead to greater business success. For many marketers, monitoring spend versus allocated budget is a time-consuming process that is often prone to inaccuracies — especially when juggling several clients simultaneously. With augmented analytics, however, forecasting allows marketers to stay on track by providing historical and current information about budget spending so they can act on timely suggestions. This way, marketers can ensure that allocated budgets are spent according to plan, freeing time to spend on granular analysis of under- and overspending, preparing them to navigate future campaigns that will achieve higher ROAS. 

• Anomaly Detection

Another practical way augmented analytics can help marketers maximize ROI is through anomaly detection, a tool that uses historical data on metrics including clicks or CPM and impressions to identify and self-learn expectations for the metrics. When an anomaly is detected, the outlier is automatically flagged, indicating issues that can drain a budget. These anomalies reveal campaign performance problems that might have otherwise gone unnoticed, helping to minimize negative effects – or eliminate them altogether. 

Rapid Time to Insight

The beauty of augmented analytics is the way its powerfully constructed machine learning algorithms reveal important insights that can save time and improve a company’s bottom line. Through real-time insights and recommendations based on data analysis, marketers can make more informed decisions, understand customer behavior and needs, and tailor their campaigns accordingly. 

With such proactive insights, augmented analytics can not only help reduce risk, but can also minimize issues by allowing marketers to use its highly sophisticated number crunching to drive more sales, build effective pipelines, and retain customers.

Improve Customer Experiences

Augmented analytics give marketers accurate and detailed information about their customers that they might have not been able to obtain through other means. With greater insights about prospective and existing customers, marketers can improve customer experience by understanding how their customers will interact with their brand. 

Since augmented analytics is able to unify a diverse range of datasets such as demographics, CRMs, psychographics, and more, it can provide critical information marketing teams need to maximize customer value. By exploring large volumes of different data, augmented analytics can also model and predict customer behaviors, calculate customer lifetime value, and discover customer trends and patterns — all of which can be used to improve customer experiences. 

Task Automation

Marketers can also harness augmented analytics for smoother operations. By automating certain tasks, such as data preparation, data discovery, and data visualization, marketers can save heaps of time and effort. Additionally, augmented analytics can automatically generate charts, graphs, and other visualizations based on data analysis, helping marketers to quickly and easily understand and communicate the results of their analysis. When data is streamlined and manual tasks are automated, marketers can spend less time combing through data for insights, and more time focusing on other strategic business initiatives that demand attention. 

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Getting started with augmented analytics

Here are three steps to help you get started with your augmented analytics journey. 

Start Small and Choose a Use Case that is Aligned with Your KPIs

To begin using data science and artificial intelligence, your data doesn’t need to be perfect. Identify the business problem or opportunity you want to address. Focus on a use case that is aligned with your KPIs and has high business value. Once you see that it is successful, you can move on to other larger projects. 

Invite your Whole Organization to be a Part of Your Analytics Initiatives

Being strategic about rolling out augmented analytics and collaborating with your entire company can help build trust and show employees that you want them to be involved with the implementation. Communicating with different stakeholders in your company will help them understand the value of the technology and how it can be used to drive business results. Encourage employees from across the organization to play a role in the initiative, demonstrating that you value their input and cooperation in achieving your business’s mission and goals. 

Provide the Right Training to Gain the Most Value out of Your Investment

Concentrate on creating a data-driven culture. When you’re ready to start using augmented analytics as part of your company’s daily operations, establish strategies and offer training in place so employees can get the most out of the valuable data assets. When you include users from the beginning, they will likely be more invested in the outcome. 

Exercise Flexibility

Be prepared to make changes along your augmented analytics journey. Encourage others to contribute feedback so you can gather insights and make adjustments as needed. A flexible approach supports iteration. In turn, when you iterate with stakeholders, you’ll be better equipped to adjust to their needs. Adopting a flexible outlook will help ensure a successful transformation for your business and make for a more seamless transition. 

Using Augmented Analytics to Improve Your Campaigns

From identifying user segments to refining your target audiences, you can use augmented analytics to gain a deeper understanding of customer data and optimize your campaigns. With the right insights, you can effectively focus on those customers most likely to buy or respond positively to your offers, putting the right messages in front of them at the right time.

As you embark on your augmented analytics journey, remember that success is achieved through collaboration, training, flexibility, and the right data-driven strategies. When implemented properly and consistently across all areas of your business, these principles can help you maximize the value of your investment and take your analytics initiatives to the next level.

If you're eager to elevate your marketing efforts with sophisticated analytics, reach out to MarinOne for help. As a customizable, enterprise-class solution, MarinOne can help you more efficiently analyze your customer data, better understand your customers’ needs, and take advantage of the opportunities augmented analytics provides.

PPC advertising is already used by 45% of businesses to promote their products and services, and 62% of marketers plan to increase their PPC budgets. With figures like this, it’s clear that advertisers need to set themselves apart from competitors to drive more qualified leads and visitors. 

Using the right PPC campaign management tool is a good place to start and can make a world of difference in how you manage your campaigns. In short, they can make your campaigns more effective and less time-consuming. But with such a vast array of tools on the market, choosing the best one can be a complex process—especially if you aren’t sure what to look out for or what features you need. We've put together a quick guide on what to keep in mind as you start exploring your options.

Choosing a PPC campaign management tool

So, what do you need in a PPC campaign management tool? Here are seven things to look for.

Meets your short-term and long-term business needs

Look for a tool that can help your business achieve its goals and enhance performance. The ideal solution should help you find new opportunities to improve your PPC campaigns and produce lasting results. When you begin your search, clearly outline your business needs. Once you’ve identified your goals, you can turn them into measurable objectives. Doing so will help you easily narrow down your options and find the solution that suits your business best. 

Saves you time

The right PPC optimization tool will afford you more time to monitor and manage campaigns instead of getting bogged down with small, tedious tasks. Some tools are designed to create bulk campaigns or PPC ads using a keyword research tool or receive automated recommendations on bid adjustments. Using a PPC campaign management tool will also enable you to reduce in-house resources you’re currently devoting to digital marketing. Not only will it cut your expenditures, but you’ll have more free time to focus on other core areas of marketing that matter the most. 

Has several different features

You want a tool to do more than just run audits or produce results on a dashboard. Pick a tool that has robust functionality and can help with:

• Analyzing your performance
• Monthly progress reports
• Providing recommendations for improvement
• Automating workflows
• Optimizing bids 
• Keeping you on budget
• ROI calculations

Cost-effective

The price of a PPC campaign management tool may ultimately impact which solution you choose. However, using one allows you to determine an effective budget for your ads by channel and increase the ROI of all your campaigns, making it a worthwhile investment. By automating your campaigns and working at scale, the right tool can also help save costs on additional resources in your organization. So be sure to choose wisely and consider more than just the cost of the tool itself.  

Helps you through the entire PPC journey

A PPC journey begins with an agency offering potential clients a proposal, which is typically done through a PPC audit that illustrates past success stories in the form of case studies, and a bit of sales know-how. After a client is on board, an ROI calculator and monthly reports will be needed. A solid PPC campaign management tool will be able to easily generate performance reports that can be converted into PDF format so everyone has access and can track your team’s success through the journey. 

PPC campaign management tool features

When you purchase a PPC campaign management tool, you’ll want to be sure it includes all of these basics, and hopefully some additional unique extras too. Creating a criteria checklist of which attributes you need can help you spot which tool meets all of your requirements. 

Standard tool features

• Intuitive keyword search
• Campaign optimization
• Competition analysis
• PPC monitoring
• PPC channels to target

Extra features

• AI-led customer rules
• Split A/B testing
• Cross-platform management capabilities
• Ad scheduling

Why MarinOne is the right optimization tool for you

With the digital market constantly evolving, it’s crucial to keep up with the most current technology, especially when it can help improve your bottom line. The right PPC campaign management tool will deliver measurable results and minimize costs to drive your business forward. Additionally, it can help you stand out from your competitors and stay ahead of the game. 

The success of your PPC campaigns depends on them being fully effective and efficient. If you’re looking to boost your sales and streamline your PPC campaign management, the right tool can make it easy. By taking a strategic approach to selecting the ideal PPC campaign management tool that’s best for you, you’ll achieve maximum results that will grow your business. 

Now that you’ve read about how to choose the best PPC campaign management tool, take a look at why MarinOne is the best option on the market for both B2B and retail-focused marketers. Just a few of the time-saving features our tool offers include: 

• Optimization Automation
• AI-powered Keyword Bid Changes
• Ad Extensions
• Unique Audience Segmentation and Testing
• Ad Scheduling
• Custom Parameters
• Dynamic Targeting

We offer free audits on your performance marketing campaigns and our team of expert consultants is ready to help you today. 

From emails to chatbots to scheduling, automation has transformed the way we work—and it’s only getting bigger: 86% of employees surveyed think automation will help them improve their efficiency, productivity, and growth. And one area that’s grown by leaps and bounds recently is creative automation. 

Creative automation can be a lifesaver for small and/or stretched marketing teams (which is probably every marketing team ever) because it does the heavy lifting for you when it comes to some of the most time-consuming parts of creating, launching, and managing ads.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at how marketers can take advantage of creative automation to save time. 

What is creative automation?

In a nutshell, creative automation uses technology to automate the creation and/or optimization of your ad campaigns. This can include anything from simple A/B testing to more complex machine learning algorithms that will automatically generate new ad variations based on past performance. 

There are a number of different platforms that offer creative automation, each with its own unique features and capabilities. Some of the more popular ones include Creatopy, BannerFlow, and Celtra. 

How does creative automation work?

Creative automation apps create multiple versions of a base template automatically. Dynamic elements like text and audio are customized on top. Teams then link these components to a field in a data repository spreadsheet. When something in the spreadsheet changes, the dynamic elements respond. This makes it possible to launch an entire ad campaign with just a few clicks—and without ever having to leave your creative tools.

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Why use creative automation?

Saving time is a major benefit of creative automation, but it's not the only one. Here are a few more reasons to consider using it in your marketing campaigns.

• Improved quality: By running multiple versions of an ad simultaneously and letting the data determine which performs best, you can be confident that you’re always putting your best foot forward.
• Increased efficiency: Automating the ad creation process frees up your team to focus on other tasks, like strategy and analysis. It also makes it easy to align your marketing campaigns, collect data, and learn what’s working (and what isn’t) faster. 
• Better organization: With all your creative assets stored in one central location, it’s easy to keep track of everything and ensure that everyone is working with the most current and effective versions.
• Reduced production costs: By using automation to create ads, you have shorter production cycles, which saves time and therefore keeps costs low (not to mention reducing your dependency on agencies).
• Better brand consistency: Automated ads can be templated to match your brand guidelines, ensuring that every ad that goes out meets your standards.
• More scalable: As your business grows, you can quickly and easily scale your ad campaigns to reach more people without having to increase your team’s headcount.
• Easier marketing localization: If you’re running campaigns in multiple countries, creative automation can help you customize your ads for each market while still maintaining brand consistency.
• Easier A/B testing: A/B testing is famously time-consuming. With creative automation, you can test multiple versions of an ad—from banner ads to Facebook ads—to concurrently and quickly gather insights to inform your next round of tests.

5 Ways to get started with creative automation

If you’re convinced that creative automation is right for your business but you’re not sure where to begin, here are a few tips to help you get started.

1. Define your goals

What do you want to achieve? Do you want to save time on ad creation? Improve campaign performance? Collect data? All three? Be sure to establish some clear goals before you start shopping for a solution.

2. Do your research

Not all platforms are created equal. Spend some time researching your options to find the one that best meets your needs. 

3. Consider your team’s needs

What does your team need from a creative automation platform? Make sure to take their input into account before making a final decision. Things like a user-friendly interface and good tech support are a must.

4. Compare features

Once you’ve narrowed down your options, it’s time to start comparing features. Which platform offers the features you need at a price that fits your budget? Create a shortlist. 

5. Test it out

Don’t forget to test out the platform before committing to it. Most providers offer free trials so you can explore the features and see if it’s a good fit for your needs.

Discover MarinOne, the all-in-one advertising platform 

Once you've determined the right tool for automating your creative assets, you can then save time with a tool for automating the distribution of those assets. Paid media management puts all your ads in one centralized campaign manager, from TikTok to Facebook to Google Ads…so you can see what creatives perform well on multiple platforms and what creatives will need to go back to the drawing board.

MarinOne is the most versatile PPC management tool on the market. It makes it easy to plan, buy, optimize, and report on all your campaigns. Plus, with our automation insights feature, you can easily uncover opportunities for reducing spend, make the most of high-performing areas, and analyze data across your channels to improve your campaigns with ease. 

Request a demo today to see how we can help you streamline your ad creation process and improve your campaign performance.

We are thrilled to share that Marin Software has been recognized as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave^TM: B2B Advertising Solutions Q3 2022 report, conducted by Forrester Research Inc. For many years Marin has aimed to provide you with the best advertising management solutions possible; and it is great to hear that our work stands out amongst the industry.

The report evaluated 14 B2B Advertising Solutions providers based on 28 criteria across their current offerings, strategies, and market presence. Marin Software received the top score in the B2B performance criterion reporting and also received the highest possible score in the execution roadmap and market approach criteria.  We are proud of this recognition in these two areas. We have many other product improvements planned for the next year as well, so we hope to excel and shine in the other areas of evaluation in the coming months as well. Our primary goal is to listen to our users, stay at the forefront of paid media technology, and respond with the best possible tools accordingly.

According to the report, “Marin Software’s execution roadmap and market approach are superior and include the innovative use of audience data to enable a variety of B2B advertising use cases from e-commerce to ABM… Ad-level, performance-level, and ROI-level reporting are also superior.”

Our Chief Executive Officer, Chris Lien, said the following in regard to the report: “We are proud to be named as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave^TM B2B Advertising Solutions report. We are committed to delivering B2B advertisers with the best solutions for analyzing, automating, and optimizing their marketing campaigns and we are thrilled to be recognized in the report.” 

Marin has been helping advertisers advance their digital advertising campaigns for over 15 years and has managed over $40 billion in advertising spend for some of the world’s top brands. We look forward to continuing our innovation process, and if there are any other areas where our software can improve, the feedback of our clients is invaluable for us to keep moving forward and create the time-saving features digital marketers need. 

Whether you are an existing client, or new to us and looking to potentially utilize MarinOne as your advertising automation tool, know that our team of experts are some of the most knowledgeable marketers you can find, and ready to help you strategize the best possible digital campaigns. 

We also offer self-serve functionality to our MarinOne platform where you can get a unified view of your omnichannel marketing. Our industry leading optimization tools have flexible reporting to help advertisers maximize the impact and reach of their digital marketing investment across paid search, social, and ecommerce channels. Learn more about our offering in the ads management space–we're standing by ready to give you a complimentary analysis and consultation on your current campaign setup.

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‍Marketing technology is advancing its pace, with innovative new platforms and approaches being released faster than ever. In an uncertain economy and inflation skyrocketing, many companies are rethinking their marketing budgets and trying to determine the best ways to be profitable. The pace of change in innovation and technology can make it difficult to determine what those digital marketing budgets ought to be. Find out how automation technology can help you optimize your digital marketing campaigns and determine the best budget allocation to ensure maximum ROI. 

Introduction

Several obstacles stand in the way of effective marketing budget allocation, both internal and external. These include: 

• Unpredictable consumer behavior
• Economic uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic (and the tightening of budgets as a result)
• The age-old issue of fragmented marketing teams

Fortunately, many of the advances in marketing technology can help make budgets stretch that little bit further. For example, automation makes time-consuming processes such as A/B testing much more efficient – and effective. 

As marketing can cover a wide range of areas (search, social, ecommerce, display, apps, CTV, video, website, etc.), budget allocation is also a great candidate for automation. If done properly, it can turn a complex process into something automatic, adaptive, and optimized – freeing up time for your team to think about the bigger picture.

How to automate budgeting

“Brands need to understand what is working across publishers and embrace budget fluidity to quickly shift their spend to the elements of their programs getting the best response.” 

•  Marin Software’s Trends 2022 Report 

There are many platform-centric budgeting automation tools, such as Facebook’s CBO (campaign budget optimization), Amazon’s campaign bidding strategy, and Google’s tools and settings. While these allow you to flex your budget around averages for the day or month, they don’t integrate with each other, leaving you with a fragmented approach to your cross-channel budget. 

A third-party automation tool can give you a birds-eye view over a range of platforms and incorporate external elements such as day-of-week or -month, month-of-year, or various promotional occasions such as holidays. You can also carry out highly detailed analysis that would otherwise cost you a lot of time. 

Marin Software’s Autopilot does exactly that. It allows you to:

• Find the right level of investment for your bid strategies
• Forecast trade-offs between spend, volume, and efficiency
• Automatically pace and maximize performance within your budget

Autopilot does this using a range of approaches that fall into the following categories:

Plan

Forecast expected conversions, revenue, and profit for your account or specific elements of your account. Autopilot can allocate spend across bid strategies according to your budget or efficiency target (CPA or RoAS).

Pace
Track your spend over the month,quarter, or custom tracking period and adjust as needed to keep you on target.

Bid
Apply predictive algorithms using MarinOne Bidding, which automatically incorporates over 75 signals to ensure responsiveness and accuracy across audiences, devices, location, and more. Add custom bid modifiers to adjust to external market signals that are relevant to your business.

Budgeting considerations

When allocating budgets automatically, there are certain factors that you need to account for in the planning stages. It’s important to set goals that span the full range of your sales funnel and all audience segments. A typical campaign budget has to consider the following factors to ensure effective resource allocation: marketing funnel, campaign goals, campaign length, and budget focus.

The first consideration involves deciding if the campaign will take a full-funnel approach to engage customers throughout their brand interaction journey from awareness to retention. The next factor that affects budget allocation is the desired outcome of the campaign. This factor will help marketing teams decide the appropriate channels to use, geographies to target, and functions to perform.

Depending on the approach that marketers take, time can also have a significant impact on budgets. Smaller campaigns that run for short periods of time have a much smaller budget compared to campaigns that engage the customer throughout their lifetime. The final consideration for marketing teams is the focus of the campaign. This refers to the extent to which the budget determines spending. Marketing teams that have an efficiency focus might choose to spend more to achieve certain outcomes compared to a team that is constrained financially. 

Data-driven budgeting

While the above considerations can provide an effective blueprint for the early stages of planning and budgeting for an online marketing campaign, it is important for marketing teams to develop and retain an in-depth understanding of how campaign performance is affected by financial decisions. 

AI-powered software can help marketers effectively collect and analyze performance data to determine the point in the budget that offers teams the highest return on investment and adjust marketing budgets accordingly. Automated budget allocation also allows marketing teams to react quickly to changes in customer preferences, online behavior, or changing market conditions. 

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Candace Boren, Product Marketing Director at Marin Software, believes that a bid strategy is the best option for companies that wish to make the most of their marketing budgets. She shares that “capped bidding doesn’t perform as well near the level you have capped it at vs. uncapped automated bidding at the same level, highlighting why a bid strategy is better for managing budget spend than simply trying to ensure your daily spend adds up to your monthly budget perfectly.” 

With a bid strategy in place and MarinOne’s pacing module adding the guardrails to keep you on track over the period, you shouldn’t have to worry about putting budget caps on your campaigns.

How to decide where to add incremental budget increases

With CPMs at all-time highs on Google and Facebook, marketers will have to get creative to stay within budget while making the most impact. That could mean testing new channels, testing new creative, timing and setting bids differently, and much more. 

There are two major approaches that marketers can take to analyze campaign performance from a budget perspective and decide the point at which budget increments can be the most impactful; analysis by conversion rate and analysis by incremental lift. 

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Automation in action

The automation of these processes can have a direct and immediate impact on marketing campaign performance and can even help companies save money by optimizing resource allocation at all times. Japanese automotive brand Nissan found that collecting and analyzing data from keyword’s vertical, impression share rules, and more. The entire process is automated and allows Nissan to identify the point at which a customer is most likely to make a purchase and can ramp up engagement to increase conversion rates. This approach has allowed Nissan to increase lower-funnel conversions by 34% while reducing cost per lead by 8%, revealing exactly how a data-driven approach to digital marketing can help businesses fully optimize their customer outreach for the best results. 

Marin’s solution

With so many variables at play in determining and managing digital budgets, it’s critical that marketers have the tools they need to stay on track while driving maximum performance. 

When we set out to develop Marin Autopilot, our goal was to simplify life for digital marketers in such a complex advertising landscape. Simply give us your destination and we’ll make sure you get there. 

If you are using Smart Bidding, not to worry. Autopilot works seamlessly with publisher bidding, keeping you on pace by adjusting the target for your Smart Bidding strategies, with the added benefit of transparency and control that you won’t get from publisher tools. 

Download our Autopilot brochure (PDF) to find out what it can do for you or reach out here to schedule a demo.

Today's consumers are always connected and always on the go. Marketing is omnipresent and users are incredibly sensitive now to inauthentic marketing tactics. Companies wanting to make a lasting impression need to shift their focus to catering to increasingly savvy digital marketing audiences. Continually innovating and coming up with the most creative marketing ideas possible is the only way to attract and engage customers in a competitive marketplace. All of this is easier said than done. In this article, we have listed 5 of the best creative marketing ideas that you can implement in 2022.

Design Content Specifically for Smaller Social Platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, and Snapchat

There is a trend in the industry of designing content for smaller social platforms, such as TikTok, Snapchat, or Pinterest. Designers and marketers alike need to pay attention to the layout and functionality of these smaller platforms and design their content with them in mind. This way we can provide an optimal, user-friendly experience for a broad range of users. Users that could ultimately end up converting on the company website.

TikTok has taken social media by storm in 2021. It is now the most popular live-video app among 13 to 18-year-olds, which is a demographic few other platforms have had success reaching over recent years. Assets for tiktok design should be vertical videos that are short, snappy, and successfully hook the user within the first 5 seconds.

Pinterest and Snapchat also continue to be large driving forces in the social media platform metaverse. Pinterest design needs to contain lots of pictures for viewers to see what's being talked about in a very literal way with any given topic. As an example, you could write a piece titled "10 DIY projects with supplies from Walmart" and include pictures of all the supplies you used to make the project.

Similar to Instagram, Snapchat design is most powerful when driven heavily by influencer campaigns or user-generated content. Marketing on Snapchat is tricky because it’s different from other forms of social media, but with over 11 billion daily active users the effort to create dynamic content will be well worth it. MarinOne’s paid social optimization tool can help you make the most of all social content optimization, especially when combined with a thoughtful paid advertising plan.

Invest in Short Form Video, Long Form Rarely Works (Except on Youtube)

We all know that video is a powerful medium that can be used to convey a message in an entertaining way, but what is rapidly changing in the video marketing space is the length of time that users will give video content the opportunity to be entertaining. A company may choose to use video marketing for a product or service release, educational assets, or even as a search engine optimization technique. A solid short-form video marketing strategy is something that should be included in every marketer’s optimization toolkit and should be considered as one of the top digital marketing strategies for 2022 and beyond. 

In terms of video length, as marketers, we must “prove” that the content is indeed engaging within the first few seconds. And even more than that we must embrace short-formSnapchatTikTokhow-to editing from beginning to end--be prepared to make video content 15, 30, or 60 seconds in most cases. 2-3 minutes is acceptable in some cases, such as an explanatory video describing how a complex SaaS tool works, but be prepared to make every moment of those 3 minutes informative and visually interesting.

The only exception to this rule in the digital marketing space seems to be Youtube. With over 1.5 billion users and more than 400 hours of video uploaded every minute, YouTube has become one of the most popular and influential channels for marketers. Here is a quick guide when determining the ideal youtube video length for your content:

• Short-form videos: Like other platforms, these videos are typically under 2 minutes in length, have higher watch rates, and have a low production value.
• Mid-form videos: These are around 2 to 5 minutes long. They have a moderate production value but average watch rates. The majority of content on YouTube falls into this category--common topics include “how to” guides, quick tips, and tutorials.
• Long-form videos: These are usually over 5 minutes in length and often promote a product or other content. Videos of extended lengths can be complex training, highly entertaining content, or lists featuring many different topics such as “The World’s Best 20 Cheapest Travel Destinations for 2022.”

Make Social Listening a Central Component to Content Planning

Social listening is the process of monitoring social media networks to find topics, trends, and insights. It's a great way for brands to find out what people are talking about them, what they are interested in, what their responses are to the brand's posts, and more. To stay relevant, content creators need to increase their social listening skills. 

Social listening tools provide a central place for data related to conversations on social media networks. The key is to listen in on conversations, gather data, analyze it, and use insights gleaned from social listening to generate relevant content. While social listening used to be only available as an expensive service offered by consulting firms or expensive software systems, now many tools allow you to do this on your own. A few popular software systems in this space include Sprout Social, and Brandwatch.

Push the Envelope in Graphic Design, Especially for Paid Advertising

Graphic design is an important element in paid advertising - a well-designed ad draws the attention of the audience to what you are trying to sell, increases clicks, and incites action from the user. While the main objective of graphic design for any medium is to convey a message or an idea through images, symbols, words, and colors, advertising graphic design takes communication through these same visuals even further. It’s common to go through many stages to create an advertisement that is highly likely to convert and become part of an evergreen performance marketing campaign.

2022 is likely to see popular design trends such as 1990’s nostalgia, anti-design, and parametric patterns. To make sure the advertisement looks attractive, vector icons are a great choice. There are plenty of free and premium vector icons that can be easily tailored to match the company's branding.

To still be effective in the competitive world of digital marketing today, graphic designers face a colossal task. They not only need to create strong visuals for websites but also graphics for a myriad of other assets like social media posts, email campaigns, and blog cards...all while maintaining a congruent user experience from channel to channel. The first stage for a designer to achieve the best possible ad is basic research like gathering textual information about the product, its history, and its target audience. A/B testing is the best practice for comparing ad creatives, and MarinOne’s display ad testing solution makes it easier than ever before. With the use of this tool’s sophisticated AI, potential ad campaign examples can be produced in mere minutes.

Complete the Customer Lifecycle with Marketing Automation

Marketing is no longer a one-time, short-term investment. Companies need to maintain a constant stream of marketing efforts to nurture their customers and maximize the lifetime value of their business.

The customer lifecycle is the process of interacting with a customer to satisfy their needs. It starts when a potential customer's need is just an idea and ends when they become loyal customers for your company. Connect by MarinOne has powerful data visualization and integration to get the full picture of your loyal customers’ lifecycle.

Marketing automation helps you in every step of the customer lifecycle by automating processes and providing insights about your customers’ preferences. More and more businesses are executing campaigns at scale using pre-configured workflows without requiring excessive manual input from employees. Some benefits to using marketing automation software effectively include increased efficiency in lead generation, higher sales conversions due to improved data accuracy, improved customer satisfaction by providing personalized interactions, and greater sales opportunities from targeted marketing campaigns. 

What is consistent amongst all of these creative new marketing ideas is the need for authenticity within the content itself. Unique marketing strategies that include fascinating statistics, great storytelling, and beautiful design are paramount to stand out amongst all the noise. Thanks to MarinOne’s comprehensive suite of paid advertising optimization tools, staying at the forefront of innovation is now quicker, easier, and simpler.

Google Sheets has changed the way people collaborate today. This web-based spreadsheet tool serves as a free alternative to Microsoft Excel, the digital marketer’s mainstay. Sheets allows you to create and edit your data within an online spreadsheet. Your spreadsheets in the cloud, meaning your data can easily stay up to date because information is automatically saved as it’s typed. Multiple team members can collaborate in real-time from their phone, tablet or computer (online and offline) and create a single source of truth for your data so that you can analyse and interrogate your data for your reporting needs. 

How can Google Sheets help my productivity?

• Use Comments - there may be instances where you’ll question your data, formula or just want clarification on something within a Google Sheet. Instead of having to connect directly with the originator you can quickly and easily leave a comment through the applications built-in commenting feature.
• Extending Google Sheets with Add-ons - You can extend Sheets with add-ons that build customised workflow improvements, establish connectivity to third-party systems such as Salesforce or Google Analytics, and integrate your Sheets data with other Google Workspace applications, like Google Slides or Google Forms.
• Stay informed of changes to a Google Sheet - Create Notification Rules to send you an email when a change has been made to a Google Sheet. You’ll find it under this menu: Tools > Notification rules.
• Create hyperlinks - It might sound simple but due to the nature of Google Sheets being online, hyperlinks are extremely useful to connect to other Google sheets / Docs / Slides within your shared Google Drive.
• Connect to live data - Using the IMPORTHTML function, you can import your data from MarinOne by creating Web Query reports and scheduling the data to refresh on a recurring basis, saving precious hours of the day by not having to manually create reports. IMPORTHTML can also be used in numerous other ways, an example of which could be importing live weather data or exchange rates.

If you’re wanting to maximize Google Sheets’ potential and enhance your productivity, then you must get acquainted with Google Sheets. It's definitely a learning curve, especially if you’re used to using Excel, but once you start using Google Sheets to its potential you’ll quickly see it’s worth your time and effort.

Ok, so what about automation?

Google Apps Scripts is a built-in coding language based on JavaScript that allows you to extend and manipulate Google Sheets (it also works with other Google Apps, like Docs, and Gmail). We have found Google Sheets to be a great tool for prototyping new features or extending the capabilities of MarinOne to meet specific customer requirements.

What type of things can I automate?

Marin has been able to help some of the largest brands in the world automate the management of their marketing campaigns directly from Google Sheets as well as build dynamic reporting dashboards in Google Sheets using multiple Publishers (i.e. Google, Facebook, Bing, ASA etc) and 1st / 3rd Party revenue and conversion data captured by Marin. Below are some of the Google Apps Scripts and solutions we have created to help support our customers’ day-to-day workflows. With these shortcuts, you can easily aggregate data in new ways. This is particularly effective when partnered with the MarinOne tool, as there is quite a bit of data that can be directly imported into, exported from, or copy/pasted bi-directionally between Google Sheets and MarinOne.

Templatize daily workflows to increase efficiency

As a marketer, it can be very time-consuming to add objects (such as keywords or creatives) to multiple different publishers at the same time in a collaborative manner. Think of Google sheets as all of your offline publisher editors rolled into one with a direct connection to our platform, negating the need for using multiple siloed tools such as Google Ads editor, Bing editor etc. Using a Marin - Google Apps Script, you can create or edit hundreds -- or even thousands -- of campaigns, groups, keywords, or ads with just a single click of a button directly in Google Sheets for multiple different publishers at the same time.

Cannibalization insights

When a search query pairs with multiple keyword match types, and there are various ads supporting these keywords, the flow of regular traffic for the original search term will markedly diminish as your control over the matched keyword behaviour becomes severely hampered. Using a combination of data imported into Google Sheets directly from MarinOne and a Google Apps Script we have created to analyse the data, we can quickly surface those keywords that are cannibalizing your search paid media traffic.

Create foreign language ads using your native language

If you are planning to expand your marketing activity to additional markets or regions across the globe and do not have the support internally with creating foriegn language adcopy, fear not, we have a Google Apps Script that will take your current AdCopy and create new Ads in the language of your choice.

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Why should you automate tasks in Google Sheets?

There’s the obvious reason that using Google Apps Scripts can save you a serious amount of time, allowing you and your colleagues to focus on higher value activities such as optimising your marketing campaigns. But there’s plenty of other less obvious reasons like: 

• Avoid mistakes by minimizing manual effort and letting AI-powered tasks automatically fire
• Quickly summarize and aggregate your data
• Universally apply styles and formatting
• Create completely new spreadsheets or tabs
• Use any Google Sheets function, feature, menu or toolbar
• Translate foreign language text en masse (but always be sure to have a native speaker review the translation for accuracy)
• Manipulate your spreadsheet to your liking with a single command

Once you've recorded a macro or created your Google Apps Script, you can link it to a keyboard shortcut in the form Ctrl+Alt+Shift+Number or even create a button directly within the spreadsheet to execute the task.

How can Marin help?

These are just a few of the solutions we have created, there are many other ways to save time and increase efficiency using the MarinOne tool in conjunction with other easily accessible tools.  if you are an existing customer of Marin and are interested in the above or have other mundane tasks that you would like us to support in automating within Google Sheets then reach out to your account manager today. 

If you're new to Marin, contact our sales team to get an analysis of how our platform can fit your needs.

If 2022 passes as quickly as the past two years have, it’ll be gone in the blink of an eye. Advertisers are paying close attention as Google is under pressure from regulators to meet its 2023 goal for deprecating tracking cookies. 

After drawing criticism from privacy advocates, Google recently walked back FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts), a form of interest-based tracking that identifies users based on their shared interests, or “cohorts”. The concern from critics around FLoC was that it could make it easier for advertisers to identify users with “browser fingerprinting”, which shares information about user devices, browsers, and potentially demographic information. 

Topics API is the latest proposal from Google for replacing third-party tracking cookies. Per Google, under Topics the browser identifies a user’s top interests for that week (things like “Fitness”, “Travel & Transportation”, etc) then shares them with participating sites and advertising partners. Topics are kept for three weeks on user’s devices and removed after that time. Google makes it clear that user’s Topics information will not be stored on external servers, including Google’s servers. 

A bonus for user privacy advocates: in Chrome, Google is giving users the ability to view the topics associated with them, remove topics if they wish, and even the ability to disable Topics altogether.

Google goes into more detail about how this works in their recent announcement.

While most would agree that this is a good move by Google for user privacy, where does this leave advertisers?

The general consensus is (justified) concern from advertisers, especially those who confronted Facebook’s deprecation in targeting capabilities post iOS14.5 adoption. Broader targeting inevitably means more challenges in reaching the intended users, so growing pains should be expected. 

In particular, marketers have raised concerns about Topic availability as a hurdle to targeting accuracy. The Topics API Github page lists only 350 “topics” so far, which some feel might not contain enough nuance to accurately target customers. Google maintains that this list is in an early stage of development, so this issue may be addressed in the coming months.

As compared with FLoC, Topics gives users more control and flexibility over how they receive targeted advertising. Both FLoC and Topics represent a step down in precision targeting, so advertisers will need to adapt.

Despite the uncertain future for Topics API and Cookie deprecation, there are steps advertisers can take to prepare:

• Prioritize First Party Data - Advertisers should maintain focus on collecting first party data which can be used to target customers directly or create lookalike audiences. Prioritizing strategies for developing brand-customer relationships can help with this.
• Leverage Cross Channel Audiences - Marin Software also offers proprietary audience targeting options such as Social Intent for Search, which seamlessly integrates social audiences to power search campaigns. Options like this that leverage existing intent will be valuable to adaptation.
• Keep Clients Up to Date - Nobody likes unhappy surprises, especially not advertising clients. Start communicating and developing a plan of action now and stay flexible as Google releases more information around Topics API in the coming months.

Test Marin Software for More Performance Power - MarinOne’s bidding algorithm consistently outperforms publisher bidding AND gives advertisers greater visibility into bidding. Advertisers will appreciate the transparency we offer as so many publishers reduce available optimization levers.

Digital display ad spending is on the rise, steadily increasing each year, with some estimates for programmatic digital display spend in the US over $115 billion by the end of 2022. 

So why is display advertising growing so quickly? The answer is, in part, due to increased device usage (mobile, tablet, and laptop) in the last two years as consumers stayed home during the pandemic.

But, display advertising via Demand Side Platforms also provides some distinct advantages for marketers. A look at Yahoo! DSP, one of the premier providers of programmatic display advertising, gives some clear insights into the benefits of display advertising for brands (and consumers too).

First party data

Yahoo has a user base of over 800 million globally through their owned and operated properties, so brands can leverage these relationships to understand and reach their audiences. In addition, they draw on 200 billion daily data signals providing insights for data-driven decisions. That being said, Yahoo puts privacy and consumer choice first, creating a trusted environment for their users. 

Unique formats

Yahoo! DSP offers advertisers many engaging ad formats to connect with customers.

Mobile Ads: With the increase in mobile usage, Yahoo mobile ads are a must, and they are designed for vertical executions and to accommodate swiping, scrolling and screen rotation.

Video Ads: Yahoo delivers 2.7B monthly video views, making it easy for marketers to bring their brand story to life with interactive and shoppable formats.

Advanced TV: Yahoo’s unified DSP means brands have access to cross-screen TV placement providing incremental reach across linear and digital TV. 

Audio Ads: Yahoo partners with the top music streaming platforms, and brands can also integrate into Yahoo owned and operated podcasts from TechCrunch, Yahoo Sports and more.

Other formats: Rounding out Yahoo’s omni-channel portfolio, Yahoo! DSP also provides access to solutions including digital out-of-home, brand integrations, and even immersive formats, like interactive video and AR-enabled ads, to make your ads innovate and your message resonate.  

Exclusive and comprehensive inventory

Yahoo! DSP gives advertisers the advantage of exclusive omnichannel inventory from Yahoo Media properties like: Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, engadget, and TechCrunch. 

Yahoo also has an extensive network of premium 3rd party connections delivering a wide range of touch points and consumer interests.

By reaching customers in the right environments, brands can unleash their advertising potential and build quality connections at scale. 

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MarinOne + Yahoo! DSP

Now that you know all the reasons Yahoo! DSP is such an effective marketing channel, let’s look at how MarinOne’s Yahoo! DSP integration can supercharge your Yahoo campaigns. 

Reporting

• Advanced analytical grids provide flexible reporting within and across Yahoo! DSP campaigns with unlimited data retention. 
• Cross-channel reporting puts paid media metrics from search, social, display, and e-commerce all in one place. Combined with powerful dashboards for easy data visualization, you’ll have everything you need for effective account management in one place.
• MarinOne for Yahoo also seamlessly integrates with your first party data like CRM and analytics tools as well as BI Tools such as Tableau and Google Data Studio so you have information when and where you need it.
• Automated alerts can be set to notify marketers of performance changes saving you loads of time by not having to manually monitor your accounts. 

Campaign Management

• MarinOne for Yahoo! DSP streamlines your workflows letting you adjust campaign status across multiple accounts and campaigns in just a few clicks.
• The same goes for budgets: adjust your daily budgets across accounts and campaigns to easily manage your spend across your digital programs. 

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If your marketing team is understaffed, they may not be up to fulfilling all of your business goals. While a small team could theoretically handle the bulk of your tasks manually, this can lead to mistakes, missed opportunities, and eventually burnout—not good for morale, your reputation, or your customers. 

Marketers need to evolve with technology that allows them to keep up with the fast-changing digital marketing landscape—and the customers driving those changes. 

It makes sense to benefit from automation tools that handle your campaign management and other marketing activities—this makes your job easier and means you get to provide a better service to your customers. 

To help you make the most of the tech out there, here are 9 ways automation can help out a short-staffed team while achieving your marketing objectives:

1. Automate workflows

Automating your marketing teams’ workflow saves time and money, allowing you to focus on the things that really matter. It’s not enough to just post for your company—competitors are vying for attention in any given area. Your accounts need content, promotions, advertising...in short, they need someone behind them constantly replying to queries and providing value across all channels. Automating this means the software can handle everything so you can focus on other business areas.

MarinOne lets you automatically adjust campaign bids using unique factors that impact your campaign performance, such as seasonality, ratings, new product launches, coverage in the media, and social media buzz so your ads are always optimized to perform well without you having to intervene. 

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MarinOne also automatically reviews search queries and adds keywords and negatives that meet user-specified criteria. We can track conversions associated with raw queries to provide better insight into whether keywords make sense to be added (or removed) based on their post-click success. 

Keyword expansion increases your reach and improves your campaign efficiency automatically. 

2. Increase the frequency of messages on social media channels

Increasing the frequency of messages on social channels helps to build rapport with your customers. They'll see a larger presence of your business on their social feeds and will assume you're very active—which means more trust.

Scheduling social media posts in advance used to be time-consuming. But now, automation tools can do many of the repetitive tasks for you, so it’s easier than ever to post relevant content on your social pages without needing someone there posting in real time. 

Automation allows you to create a posting schedule for your social media accounts and then let the application take care of everything for you! You’ll get the best engagement when the post goes live on the platform (and there won’t be any embarrassing mistakes). The same goes for your ads: you can use automation tools, like MarinOne’s paid social ads management feature, to track, manage, and optimize your ads with the click of a button.

Take it a step further with Message Booster, which analyzes the performance and content of organic posts and automatically transforms the best ones into ads. Automating this content promotion and campaign creation can save you hours of manual work.  By targeting specific audiences with Message Booster, you can reach people who are likely to purchase from you based on location, interests, and demographics that you define. And because your organic post has proven to be effective in engaging these types of customers, you can avoid using your ad spend on paid ads that may or may not interest your audience.

3. Work faster with bulk edits

With bulk uploads and inline edits, you'll have greater control over your day-to-day workflow. In MarinOne, you can use CSV or batch uploads to make thousands of changes at once. The campaigns, groups, keywords, or ads will appear on your account as soon as you complete all of the steps and push to the publisher within a few hours.

Unified bulk uploads allow you to work across accounts and publishers with a single action. Meanwhile, inline editing allows you to make adjustments or corrections without returning to Excel. This means less time hopping between documents and a lower chance of discrepancies and mistakes. 

4. Build campaigns from your product feed

Building campaigns from your product feed provides an easy way to integrate product information into campaigns for many different ad platforms at once. Everything is kept in one place, and updating product information is easy so you don't have to worry about campaign updates channel by channel.

MarinOne builds keywords and creatives from a product feed and campaign template. Get complete coverage of your product with no manual work. You can also mechanize pausing and resuming based on inventory levels.

5. Stay informed of changes to your account

Marketing teams are busy, and sometimes things slip through the cracks. To avoid negative ramifications caused by human error, set up preprogrammed notifications about changes to your account such as status updates, new campaigns and ad groups, and the addition of shared library items. Staying clued in to what is being done by other team members as well as natural changes happening in your advertising campaigns will help you to stay responsive, resulting in timelier analysis and action.

MarinOne's automated alerts bring changes directly to your inbox, saving the need for manual monitoring.

6. Get automated recommendations on performance opportunities

MarinOne Insights highlights recommendations for improved performance across your accounts. You can think of this as a continuous audit that evaluates the effectiveness of your organization’s digital marketing activity. In fact, Insights is updated every 24 hours and uses historical data to uncover opportunities to reduce wasteful spending and capitalize on volume in high-performing areas.

Insights also provides performance impact estimates for incremental spend, conversion, and revenue and examples to show you exactly what you stand to gain when implementing recommendations. So no need to worry if you don’t have staff to analyze your accounts every day!

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7. Integrate your data

Integrating your data into your ad management platform means you always have information at your fingertips without looking for it. Pull in data from your web analytics, mobile tracking, and CRM, and let the software take the strain.

Another benefit of integrating your software: you can more easily extract insights and create reports that incorporate all your data, not just some. This means you get better insight into your business, customers, and competitors and can use those insights to optimize your campaigns for the best performance. 

With MarinOne, advertisers can also export data to Excel, Google Sheets, data warehouses and BI tools so you have information when and where you need it. .

8. Automated spend pacing

Keeping track of your spend is a must—don't let it fall to the wayside just because you're short-staffed. Pacing charts track your spending over the month, quarter, or another period you specify and automatically adjust your bidding targets to keep you on track. MarinOne helps you plan your targets with advanced forecasting, and then you can sit back while MarinOne manages your bids to keep you on budget through the period. 

9. Consider managed services

If you are extremely tapped for resources and have the budget, you might consider partnering with an AdTech team that can manage and optimize your campaigns for you. This means that when you're busy or away, their team can run campaigns and optimize them for you, taking the strain off the rest of your staff. When they have questions, they can ping you with an email or DM so you can quickly provide the data needed to make informed decisions.

Interested in learning more?

Click here to learn more about MarinOne’s automation tools today. Or schedule a demo with the team to see firsthand how MarinOne can keep you operating at peak performance even if you’re short-staffed.

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