The media buying industry is constantly evolving, and staying on top of the latest trends and strategies is crucial for success. That's why events like the Digiday Media Buying Summit are so valuable. Industry experts and thought leaders come together to share insights, discuss challenges, and explore new opportunities.

The recent Digiday Media Buying Summit in New Orleans was no exception. Over the course of several days, attendees had the chance to hear from a variety of speakers, participate in workshops and panel discussions, and network with peers from across the industry.

One of the key themes that emerged from the summit was the ongoing challenge of data privacy and how it's impacting media buying. As more and more consumers become aware of the data being collected about them and the ways it's being used, there's a growing push for greater transparency and control. This has led to increased regulation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States.

Media buyers are having to adapt to these changes by being more transparent with consumers about how their data is being used, and by ensuring that they're only collecting and using data that's truly necessary. They're also exploring alternative ways to target audiences, such as contextual advertising, which targets ads based on the content of the page rather than the user's data.

Another topic that received a lot of attention at the summit was the continued growth of programmatic advertising. Programmatic has become an increasingly popular way to buy and sell advertising, as it allows for greater targeting and efficiency. However, there are still challenges to be addressed, such as ad fraud and brand safety.

To combat these issues, media buyers are investing in more sophisticated fraud detection tools and partnering with trusted publishers to ensure that their ads are appearing in safe and reputable environments. They're also exploring new approaches to programmatic, such as bringing programmatic in-house, which can give them greater control over their campaigns and data.

In addition to these challenges, the summit also highlighted some of the exciting opportunities that are emerging in media buying. One such opportunity is the growing importance of connected TV (CTV). As more consumers shift away from traditional TV and towards streaming services, CTV has become an increasingly important channel for advertisers.

Media buyers are exploring ways to take advantage of this trend, such as by using data to target specific households or by partnering with streaming services to create unique ad experiences.

Advertisers are being faced with new, ever-changing obstacles due to fluctuating budgets, varying company and industry objectives and unpredictable customer behavior. This creates tension between brand marketers and the platforms from which ads are purchased. 

This puts additional pressure on agencies and third party tools like MarinOne to bridge the gap and represent both parties well–ensuring marketers get the best possible return on their advertising investment, while the ad platforms' requirements are met to ensure their audiences are protected. Speak with one our expert consultants to learn how you can increase ad efficiency while remaining compliant.

We were glad to be apart of this years' Digiday Media Buying event in New Orleans, alongside our partner LinkedIn, to bring you, our clients and partners, the most up to date information possible. Continue to watch our blog for more insights that were gathered throughout this 3 day event over the coming weeks.

Meta, formerly Facebook, is one of the most powerful ad platforms on the planet. If you want to increase sales online with ads, the best place to start is with Facebook/Meta and their nearly 3 billion users.

Inside Facebook is the Meta Ads Manager system that was precisely tailored and designed by the social media giant for businesses so that regular accounts can be differentiated from personal ones.

Meta Business is the platform that lets businesses use Facebook and Instagram’s vast customer base to sell to. In short, Meta Business Manager is where effective monetization of your digital presence begins.

Meta Ads Manager simplifies life for digital marketing professionals with its capabilities of creating and monitoring separate accounts for each business they manage. This allows them to easily distinguish between different organizations and assign distinct roles based on the user's job function.

Furthermore, administrators can gain centralized control over multiple users' accounts by setting specific permissions from one easy-to-use platform. This article will dive into everything you need to know about Meta Ads Manager.

‍

What is Meta Ads Manager?

Meta Ads Manager is a platform that allows advertisers to manage and optimize their online advertising campaigns across multiple channels. It provides a centralized system for creating, launching, and tracking advertising campaigns, making it easier for marketers to manage their campaigns efficiently.

What Will You Get Out of This Guide?

This guide aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the best practices for using Meta Ads Manager to maximize advertising campaign performance. This guide will cover the essential steps for setting up and optimizing ad campaigns and provide insights into common pitfalls to avoid.

Overview of the Best Practices for Meta Ads Manager

This guide will provide a comprehensive overview of the best practices for using Meta Ads Manager, including setting up an account, creating and launching ad campaigns, optimizing campaigns for better performance, measuring ad performance, scaling campaigns, and avoiding common pitfalls. By following these best practices, advertisers can ensure their campaigns are performing at peak and delivering the best possible results.

Now, let’s dive into what you need to know about Meta Ads Manager.

Setting up Meta Ads Manager

You need to know here about getting set up on Meta Ads Manager.

Creating an Account

The first step in using Meta Ads Manager is to create an account. This involves

• Providing essential information about your business
• Name
• Contact details
• Setting up payment methods for ad spend

Once the account is created, you can start adding campaigns and setting up targeting parameters.

Adding Ad Campaigns

The next step is to add ad campaigns to the Meta Ads Manager account. This involves selecting the type of advertising you would like to run. You will then need to select the platform or channels where you want to run your ads. 

Setting up Ad Budget and Targeting

Once your ad campaigns are added, it's time to set up the ad budget and targeting parameters. The ad budget will determine how much you are willing to spend on each campaign, and the targeting parameters will decide who will see your ads.

Targeting can be set based on demographics, interests, behaviors, or other criteria. It's essential to carefully consider these parameters and set them correctly to ensure your ads reach the right audience and achieve the desired results.

Optimizing Ad Campaigns

Optimization is essential for your ads. You must ensure that your ads will perform as effectively as possible.

Ad Copy Writing and Testing

Ad copywriting is an art and science. Your ad copy should be attention-grabbing and relevant while including a clear call to action. It's also essential to test different ad copies to determine which ones perform best. A/B testing can help you determine which ad copy is most effective in achieving your desired results.

Artificial intelligence has recently come onto the scene in a big way. To create the best ad copy, consider using AI writing tools when appropriate.

Choosing the Right Ad Format

Choosing the proper ad format is another important factor in optimizing ad campaigns. Different designs, such as display ads, video ads, or carousel ads, have different strengths and limitations. Consider the target audience, message, and desired outcome when selecting the correct ad format for your campaigns.

Landing Page Optimization

The landing page is the first impression potential customers will have of your brand. It's vital to ensure that the landing page is optimized for conversions. This means it should load quickly, be easy to navigate, and include a clear call-to-action. Ensure that the messaging and design of the landing page align with the ad and that it's optimized for the target audience.

Measuring Ad Performance

Next, you need to know how to measure your ads. Like the stock market, you must learn how to ride the winners and ditch the losers. Meta has advanced analytics you can use to track all your ads' performance.

Understanding Ad Metrics

To effectively measure the performance of ad campaigns, it's essential to understand the critical ad metrics. Metrics such as cost per click (CPC), click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and return on ad spend (ROAS) can provide valuable insights into how your ads are performing and how they can be improved.

Setting up Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is a critical component of measuring ad performance. By setting up conversion tracking, you can see which campaigns drive the most conversions and optimize your campaigns accordingly. Conversion tracking can be set up using tools like Google Analytics or a conversion tracking pixel provided by Meta Ads Manager.

Analyzing Ad Performance and Making Data-Driven Decisions

Once you have a solid understanding of the vital ad metrics and have set up conversion tracking, it's time to analyze ad performance and make data-driven decisions. Regularly reviewing ad performance and making adjustments based on data can help improve the outcome of your campaigns over time. This can include adjusting the budget, adjusting targeting, or improving ad copy and landing pages.

Scaling Ad Campaigns

Now that you have found some ads that work, it’s time to scale them up to reach the most people and bring in maximum revenue.

Managing Ad Spend

As ad campaigns scale and reach a wider audience, managing ad spending is essential. You must:

• Set a clear ad budget
• Monitor ad spend regularly
• Make adjustments as needed to ensure that spend aligns with the desired results and priorities

Expanding Targeting and Geographies

Once ad campaigns are performing well, advertisers can consider expanding to new markets with updated targeting. This can include targeting new demographics, interests, or behaviors or reaching new geographic locations. By increasing the overall reach of ad campaigns, advertisers can increase impression share in their competitive space and drive more conversions.

‍

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

While the Meta Ads platform has many positive attributes, it does have some downfalls and things you should avoid, or consider using a third party tool like Marin Software to layer on top of Meta and push advertising possibilities even further.

Overcomplicating Ad Campaigns

One of the biggest pitfalls in Meta Ads campaign management is overcomplicating the account structure. Ad campaigns can quickly become complex, with multiple ad formats, several different audiences, and many important metrics to consider. It's crucial to keep ad campaigns focused and straightforward to avoid adding unnecessary complication that can negatively affect overall campaign performance.

Failing to Optimize Ad Campaigns Regularly

Ad campaigns need to be optimized regularly to ensure they continue to deliver the best possible results. Failing to optimize ad campaigns regularly can diminish returns over time as ad performance gradually deteriorates. Regular optimization can include adjusting ad budget, targeting parameters, ad copy, and landing pages and testing and refining strategies as needed.

Final Thoughts

Advertising is a dynamic and ever-evolving process that requires constant fine-tuning to maximize your ROI. That's why it pays off to be knowledgeable about best practices when using Meta Ads Manager, from setting up campaigns correctly in the first place to optimizing them continually for more efficient performance.

With careful attention paid to avoiding common pitfalls along with testing, refining, and analyzing data regularly - you can reach new heights of success by taking advantage of all this platform has to offer!

Whether you're a seasoned advertiser or just starting with Meta Ads Manager, it's never too late to optimize your ad campaigns. So take action today and implement these best practices in Meta Ads Manager.

‍

Andrew Dunn is a guest contributor to Marin Software's blog.

Overcoming challenges from recent changes and resetting your sights on scaling centers on the common themes of simplicity and increasing liquidity. We’re sharing actionable and accessible changes you can make in your accounts today to improve your outcomes. 

These changes are fairly universal in application, but if you’re a current Marin Software client you can also get personalized recommendations from your dedicated expert account team.

Simplify Account Structure

All new ad sets, or those that are treated as new by the system because their learning phase has been reset by a significant edit, start out in ‘Learning’. This isn’t necessarily a bad stage to be in - all ad sets will spend some time in learning, and typically anything less than 20% of spend (overall) being in learning is fine and won’t negatively impact performance. However, we want to spend as much of your campaign budget in an efficient way, and reduce time in Learning as much as possible. Simplification and consolidation are key to improving liquidity, in particular by moving spend past the Learning Phase more efficiently.

There are four key levers that impact the learning phase:

• Campaign and Ad Set Volume

• A simplified account structure will maximize signals in the auction to get you out of the Learning Phase faster. Ad Sets and segments that exist more for reporting over value or receive less than the 50 conversions/week threshold (88 installs/day for SKAN campaigns) should be consolidated.

• Manual Edit Frequency

• Each time you make a significant edit (such as to budget, bid or targeting, at campaign, ad-set or ad level) the Learning Phase is reset. As a result, hourly and daily performance metrics will be noisy and incomplete due to restricted and delayed reporting.
• Meta recommends waiting 72 hours to evaluate performance to allow for the reporting delay in opt-out conversions and to avoid editing an ad-set or ad until it has exited the Learning Phase.

• Targeting and Placement

• Gone are the days of over segmentation, especially in retargeting campaigns. Since user opt-outs from tracking will reduce the potential reach of retargeting campaigns, Meta recommends broadening placements and targeted audiences for more effective optimization over time. The “expanded interest” option is another great way to increase liquidity.
• In retargeting specifically, Meta also recommends monitoring for audience saturation and considering shifting more budget to Lookalike Audiences and Broad Audiences.
• When deciding on placements, Meta recommends taking advantage of their machine learning system, that will place your ad in the most optimal surface for you. Including more placements often helps you find a wider audience because our audience targeting works the same across all available placements. The more places your ad is displayed, the more chances your target audience has to see it and take the desired action.
• Bidding and Budget

• Ensure that your budgets are set high enough to reach 50 conversions per week. If you’re launching a net new campaign, take a look at the average account CPA for a good starting point, then multiply that number by 50 to get your ideal weekly budget.

• Conversion Event Frequency

• Are campaigns/ad sets failing to hit 50 conversion events per week? A quick analysis could be: “Of the X number of ad sets you are currently running only Y are hitting the requisite 50 events per week (or Z hitting 100 per week. Learning doesn’t stop at 50!)”. Watch out for very new campaigns/ad sets!

With all of this talk of simplification and liquidity, you may be wondering, can I simplify things too much? The answer is yes! 

Sometimes consolidating activity too much can do more harm than good. Generally speaking you shouldn’t consolidate when:

• The ad sets have different objectives
• The ad sets are targeting audiences with different values that the auction cannot detect
• There are differences in franchises obligations or shipping costs
• There are significant differences in performance - we don’t want to drown out good performing ad sets.

When considering scaling strategies for the new normal, our common theme is to increase liquidity. Take these steps to get your accounts to a place to scale:

• Simplify account structure

• Do you often see your ads stuck in the “Learning” stage? This could be a sign that it’s time to simplify. If the adset doesn’t reach the 50 conversions threshold needed (or is predicted to not reach this threshold), it will display as “Learning Limited” and won’t hit optimal performance. If this is the case, check for audience overlap using the “Inspect” tool in ads manager. If you have overlapping audiences in your account, learning will be split between multiple ad sets. This means you could be missing out on potential opportunities! If you don’t have overlapping audiences but still have ads stuck in the Learning stage, pick your strongest performers and pause the rest to allocate budget more effectively.

• Reduce frequency of manual edits

• Manual edits, while sometimes necessary, can push your ads back into the learning phase and prevent your ad sets from reaching optimal performance. Even if there is enough conversion volume to exit the learning phase, repeated manual edits will reset the learning process and keep your ads in learning longer. Try to limit manual edits post-launch or group together necessary edits, and find a list of manual edits that trigger the learning phase here.

• Broaden audiences

• Our inclination can be to be extremely refined in our audience targeting, but this can work against us by limiting the reach and thereby learning of our ads. Test out an expanded lookalike audience or even broad audiences to discover new scaling opportunities.

• Utilize CBO

• CBO, or Campaign Budget Optimization, is when you set one overarching campaign budget instead of setting budgets individually at the ad set level. This helps simplify campaign setup and helps reduce the number of budgets to manage manually, since the budget at the campaign level is flexible across all ad sets and prioritizes top performers. If you prefer to have more control over ad set budgets and leverage manual bidding, Marin customers can enjoy Social Rules that automate bid changes based on your internal KPIs to similarly automate with more granular control.

• Prioritize events with the largest, most diverse audiences

• If you’re looking to scale, you’ll find that growth in event optimizations that are further up in the funnel. For example, if you typically optimize for Sales you might test a Leads or Engagement objective in order to broaden your reach, then nurture those users to drive additional scale in your ultimate goal of Sales. Learn more about different Campaign Objectives in Meta here.

If you’re a Marin customer and would like more tailored recommendations, please reach out to your account manager for assistance. Our team members are seasoned experts in social advertising and can help you create a personalized scaling strategy. 

Marin social customers also enjoy time saving tools such as bulk uploading, bulk ad creation, and unified reporting. If you’re interested in learning more about Marin’s social capabilities, please reach out to us today.

Businesses all over the world strive to convert brand awareness into customer conversions and profits, but marketing and customer service efforts are only as effective as the principles that are driving them. Demand generation is the strategy that helps B2B and B2C companies create reliable brand interest that translates directly to high quality leads. 

Gordon Ferris, Director of Growth Marketing at Marin Software, shares significant insight to help us understand the principles that will define the success of demand generation strategies in 2023 and beyond. With more than a decade of experience in search, social media, and ecommerce marketing, Gordon generously explains the key tenets of demand generation that every marketer must understand to succeed in both B2B and B2C companies. 

The Core Tenets of Demand Generation

Understand Your Brand

Most brands believe they know what they stand for in a general sense but this does not always translate into effective messaging. A major reason for this disconnect is not knowing how the brand is perceived within the minds of internal and external stakeholders. Each brand makes a promise to their customers and these promises must be ratified through consistent, concrete behaviors. Businesses that successfully communicate their marketing messages consistently have seen a 33% rise in overall revenue.

Gordon shares that businesses must “understand the power of their product and what makes their brand unique because this is what people will respond to. This needs to be actively pushed through across marketing activities and channels.”

Understand Your Customer

Once a business defines the promise it makes to its customers, it needs to understand how those promises relate to each customer segment’s needs. Marketing can be viewed as one-way communication from a brand to its customers, but successful demand generation requires more than that. Businesses should actively collaborate and engage with customers to collect customer insights to better define and meet their needs. This can also help businesses create brand advocates that further amplify a business’ message through organic communication. 

Even if businesses want to listen to their customers, it can be challenging to define what they’re looking for. Gordon explains how businesses can break down a customer’s needs into two distinct categories. “Businesses need to identify a customer’s rational and emotional needs. Rational needs relate to the functional needs and attributes they want from your product. This can be quality, variety, efficiency, saving time, reducing cost and effort, and more. Emotional needs, on the other hand, relate to how your customers want to feel when interacting with your product. This could be a customer feeling confident or enjoying exclusivity through the ownership or use of your product.”

Understand Your Product Positioning

In an ideal world, the relationship between a brand and its customer would be enough to translate effective communication into active demand. However, brands don’t exist in a vacuum. Competing services, products, and brands present constant challenges. This has led to almost three quarters of people actively avoiding advertising with the use of ad blockers or other tools. To avoid overwhelming the customer, businesses must position themselves as a partner customers can trust. 

Gordon adds that “positioning can only be done appropriately when businesses know their brand and all its components. They also need to understand the competitors they share space with. Marketers should ask questions such as what are some of the brands in your direct category? What brands fall just outside the category, but have an overlap or affinity with your customers? Analyze competitor brand positioning; how do they want to be perceived by their customers?”

How to Generate Demand Effectively in 2023 and Beyond

According to Gordon, “Once you do those first three steps of understanding your brand, your customers, and your positioning, then you get into tactics and the tactics become easier.” 

The principles listed above should apply across all demand generation activity. They can help businesses be more proactive in learning about their customers, themselves, and their competitors. 

Remain Authentic to Your Customers 

Authenticity has been cited by 88% of customers as an important factor in determining whether they like and will support a brand. Even if marketing messages have a proven track record of success with a customer base, if the brand that is sharing those messages doesn't believe it, it will not resonate with customers. Businesses should identify and amplify the messages that lie in the overlap of the brand’s beliefs and the customer’s needs. 

‍

Learn to Make the Most of First-Party Data in a Cookieless World

Businesses have been trying to phase out the use of third-party cookies as major browsers and search engines ditch the information-gathering method in favor of first-party data. However, a staggering 83% of marketers still rely on third-party cookies to learn about their customers. Businesses must learn to extract actionable insights from the information they already have or are able to gather. 

Gordon explains that “once someone is on your site, you need to make the most of that engagement. Allow your customers to find what they’re looking for, but at the same time, by the way they click or navigate your site, find what’s important to them.”

‍

Make it as Easy as Possible for Your Customers to Buy into Your Messaging

Marketers can sometimes overlook the needs of the average customer when designing messages that seem eloquent to their own eyes. While there is value in including flair in a brand’s marketing, it should always be accessible and easily understood by the business’ most important customers – and the message must connect to the priorities of the intended audience. 

Businesses should actively “create bite-sized paths that are addressing specific value propositions or questions that your customers might have for your product or the industry you’re in,” shares Gordon. 

With MarinOne, businesses can gather information about how well each message is resonating with their customers, learn what their customers are actually interested in, and how their competitors are faring with different marketing tactics and messages. 

‍

To learn more about how MarinOne can help you reach your audiences more effectively, request a free demo of our solution now. 

‍

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.

‍

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. 

‍

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.

There is surely something in our collective consciousness that responds to well-produced persuasive advertisements. From the highly memorable “Mac vs PC” series of ads to Coca-Cola’s use of a classic song from yesteryear, most people have an ad they remember fondly. 

Businesses are constantly trying to gain the attention of customers through new persuasive advertising ideas and some have found more success than others. What’s their secret? Here are a few of the attributes that make some advertisements more persuasive than others. 

Persuasive techniques in advertising

The following are psychological triggers that can be used to nudge people toward making a purchase. 

Tell a Story

A persuasive ad should focus on telling a story that is hard for the viewer to forget. Research suggests that people are 20x more likely to recall stories than facts or figures. More often than not, people remember the story even more than the product, service, or brand being advertised!

How to do it: When you create an ad, use settings with characters that cause the viewer or listener to identify with a character's plight. Give your ads a narrative arc and watch as customers become more engaged.

Use Tailored Messaging

While there are a variety of persuasive advertising tactics that can work for your ad, focus on those that will resonate most with your target audience. Audiences respond better to tailored messaging that illustrates the benefits of what you offer and how it can improve their lives. 

How to do it: In addition to making your messaging emotionally impactful, strive to make it short and sweet. Keeping things simple is a marketing strategy that works best to keep consumers interested. 

Tap into Emotions

Emotions are responsible for the decisions we make in more ways than we realize and they play a far greater role in decision making than logic does. In fact, studies reveal that 70% of viewers are more likely to purchase a product after experiencing an intense emotional response. Connecting with your audience using emotional cues in your advertising — whether you’re making them laugh or pulling at their heartstrings — will make your brand more memorable. 

How to do it: Emotional persuasion begins with understanding your audience. Once you know your audience well, you’ll be able to determine which trigger words are likely to work best. Combining trigger words with storytelling creates emotional engagement. But to truly evoke emotional appeal and gauge attention, make sure to be authentic. 

Incorporate Celebrity Endorsements

The public is highly influenced by celebrities — what they say matters to a lot of people. Using celebrities as part of your promotion strategies will make your ad more persuasive. Tap into the ethos of popular people and online influencers and get them to tout your brand. 

How to do it: Look for celebrities that are relatable to your target audience and a good fit for your brand. Better yet, reach out to celebrities who are already using your product or service. Plan to work through a talent manager or agent. And remember, make your ask very clear and be sure to provide the details of your campaign goals.

5 Persuasive Ads to Inspire You in 2023

With a new year ahead, it’s time to look back and take stock of some of the most persuasive ads that launched during 2022 and why they worked so well. 

Dove “Toxic Influence”

Together with the marketing agency Ogilvy, Dove created this ad as a sequel to their previous campaigns such as “Reverse Selfie”, “Show Us”, and “Legacy” in pursuit of fighting for real beauty standards. 

As part of their self-esteem project, Dove has made it their mission to inspire young individuals to remove toxic beauty advice from their social media feeds. The ad features teenage daughters and their mothers discussing the disturbing promotion of false beauty advice through using deepfakes and face-mapping technology to expose the dangers of social media’s toxic influence. 

What they got right: By ensuring that their ad messaging is authentic, Dove has successfully reframed purchasing their beauty products for their audience. Beyond making people feel good about their brand, the ad focuses on connecting with others, evokes an emotional reaction, and expresses important values. 

‍

Pringles “Stuck In” 

During 2022's SuperBowl, the chip brand used its ad spot to highlight the 43% of consumers whose hand gets wedged at the bottom of the Pringles tube while trying to get to the last shattered chips. 

The commercial declares that any discomfort their customers experience is “worth it” by highlighting the misadventures a determined Pringle snacker faces as he goes through life with a chip can permanently wedged on his arm. 

What they got right: The brand took a comical approach to address a common pain point that Pringle fans encounter. Their sense of humor caters to the playful side of consumers by pointing to their brand’s heritage as a snack intended to be fun. They also appropriately combined the ad’s message with the perfect soundtrack: “Stuck on You” by Lionel Richie. 

‍

Specsavers “I Don’t Go”

The optical retail chain Specsavers uses a playful tactic to raise awareness around its home visit proposition. The ad’s goal is to challenge public perceptions around the variety of services the brand offers. It showcases a series of characters laughing off the idea of going into a store since they can experience the service from the comfort of their own home. 

What they got right: Through their ad, Specsavers successfully spotlights its home visits service while also driving brand reappraisal. It’s both powerful and emotive, and most importantly, aims to charm its customers while emphasizing the brand’s purpose of changing lives through better sight.

‍

Samsung “Love Hurts”

Cleverly crafted, this Samsung ad features a spider named Sam who falls in love with the Samsung Galaxy S22. The ad depicts the arachnid’s rollercoaster of emotions — ardor, pain, and joy — as it realizes the beauty of the phone’s camera lenses. The commercial closes with a happy ending and runs to the tune of “Love Hurts” by the legendary Scottish rock band Nazareth.

What they got right: Through the use of emotional storytelling, Samsung creates a memorable love story that is hard for consumers to forget. By doing so, the brand is able to shed light on its new camera innovation and also ensure a strong positioning in the highly competitive smartphone market. 

‍

Apple’s “911” 

Apple’s suspenseful ad revolves around how three individuals are conveniently able to call for help from their Apple Watch in the midst of an emergency. It’s as simple as dialing 911 from your wrist, by using Apple’s Emergency SOS feature. 

What they got right: By using real-life trauma to advertise their product and portraying how it can make the difference between life and death, Apple’s ad becomes relatable, effective, chilling, and dystopian all at the same time. It creates a strong emotional response from viewers by striking a balance of fear and goosebumps, illustrating how powerful it can be in saving lives. 

‍

These ads all attract and persuade viewers through emotional connection, relatability, and shared values — but above all, storytelling. These are the most powerful ways to create an ad that is sure to resonate with your audience.

How MarinOne can help you reach your audience

MarinOne can help you extract maximum value from your most persuasive marketing materials across different mediums, platforms, and channels. To find out how, contact one of our MarinOne experts today.

Marin Software has sponsored eMarketer's analyst report Retail Trends to Watch for 2023 as part of Marin's ongoing initiatives to bring the best possible retail media data to marketers across the US and Europe. Supporting content that helps marketers be more successful at their jobs completely aligns with Marin's mission to simplify and automate work for marketing professionals.

The report evaluated several areas of focus for Retail Marketers including economic climate and pressures, new revenue streams, trends in Gen Z’s spending growth, and opportunities in retail media.

eMarketer’s analysts also provide insights on how brands can drive more ecommerce sales, revamp direct-to-consumer strategies, and adjust marketing to widen their reach to acquire new customers while retaining loyal customers. 

Marin Software contributed an article to the report on Adapting your budgeting strategy for uncertain times providing key strategies for marketers to determine how to spend, where to spend, and how to improve performance to weather the storm in the year ahead. 

“eMarketer has long been a trusted source for advertisers looking for industry insights and recommendations. We are pleased to have the opportunity to support them in distributing this Retail Trends report at such a critical moment for Retail Marketers,” said Chris Lien, CEO, Marin Software. “We remain committed to delivering advertisers with the best solutions for analyzing, automating, and optimizing their retail marketing campaigns.”

Marin has been helping advertisers advance their digital advertising campaigns for over 15 years and has managed over $48 billion in advertising spend for some of the world’s top brands.

The self-serve MarinOne platform unifies industry leading optimization tools with flexible reporting to help advertisers maximize the impact and reach of their digital marketing investment across paid search, social, and ecommerce channels.

‍

Access Retail Trends to Watch for 2023 here.

‍

Affiliate content has skyrocketed in popularity alongside social media marketing and other digital marketing tactics. Since social platforms have inconsistent monetization policies, influencer content offers creators a way to vouch for their favorite brands while generating income. Lifestyle brands, in particular, can align themselves with creators whose audiences overlap with their own. 

Lauren Neels, Customer Engagement Manager and Marin Software’s resident expert on all things related to ecommerce, paid search, and digital marketing, shares some valuable insights about how lifestyle brands can use creator content to reach highly specific audiences more effectively. 

How influencer content can help brands reach their audience 

Shed the negative perceptions associated with advertising 

While advertisements used to be a popular way to reach large audiences, viewers seem to have had enough. According to research from Statista, 41% of people online find themselves regularly annoyed by advertisements. More than a quarter of web surfers went as far as installing ad blockers to make their browsing experience better. 

Advertisements are everywhere but Lauren shares that “people are more likely to trust influencer content since it comes from trusted creators that already have a relationship with their audience. This is evidenced by higher conversion rates experienced by businesses that leverage this type of content in their marketing campaigns.”

Allow your customers to engage with your content using actionable touchpoints 

It’s not enough for your customers to view your content. Businesses must be able to measure how their ads are performing and ensure that each investment is yielding the appropriate results. 

“Affiliate content is generally better than television ads for businesses that want to engage with the customer. This content is usually clickable or has some other CTA that customers can actively engage with,” Lauren shares. 

Encourage greater conversion rates compared to cheaper outreach alternatives

Businesses can sometimes show a preference for alternatives such as television or billboard advertising. However, each method of outreach has a place within a greater marketing campaign. 

Lauren explains that “paid ads work well for people who already have intent to purchase, but are less effective when people need convincing. Influencer content would be more effective at convincing or when trying to build a brand.”

Influencer content can be repurposed as paid social media posts or ads if needed

Some influencers have very niche audiences, but the reach of their content can be amplified when it is converted or repurposed as paid social media posts. However, Lauren warns that when creator content is converted to paid ads, “not all of that audience has chosen to follow that influencer so some of the trust won’t carry through to the new, wider audience. Conversion rates could go down but your reach is larger. This could help brand awareness, and boosted creator content would still have more trustworthiness than just a paid ad.”

Things to keep in mind while engaging creators for content

Social media trends often change before businesses can hop on them

All social media marketers are intimately aware of how quickly trends can change online. What is fashionable and topical today might be outdated next week. Businesses must always have their finger on the pulse of running trends and have employees that understand these trends to take charge of marketing campaigns that need to run alongside certain fads. 

“If trends change before your approval process is complete, you’re too late. Millennials, for example, have a good idea of how trends work online. Put them in charge and trust them when it comes to trends and how to use them for effective marketing,” Lauren suggests. 

Trends can differ wildly across platforms, content types, and audiences

Marketers often view social media as an effective channel for reaching younger audiences but each platform is unique. Trends, content types, audience demographics and more can differ significantly from platform to platform. TikTok, for example, is more likely to host a younger audience with a preference for short-form video content while Facebook is more likely to host a middle-aged audience with a preference for image-based content. 

Background checks should be conducted for every collaborator you work with

When businesses sponsor a particular creator, they connect the brand with the creator in the minds of the viewer. While this can be a powerful way to gain the trust of customers, it also means that any misdemeanor committed by the creator can be associated with the brand or can lead to backlash against the brand. 

“While apologies are more readily accepted now, it is always better to be in a position where an apology is not required at all,” Lauren recommends that you should “do your research to check the background of people you might be sponsoring to make sure they’re legitimate and not problematic.” 

Rates can vary greatly depending on a creator’s reach, engagement, and more

As audiences become more diverse and use more social media channels, marketers must be strategic in how they spend on each platform and each creator. Marketers must always measure how much a creator is charging against their reach, engagement, history, alignment with the brand, and more. Each of these factors can lead to great variations in asking price from the influencer. 

Affiliate or influencer content should be part of a larger marketing strategy

Affiliate content is a great way to reach targeted audiences and improve engagement rates with the brand. However, it’s not enough for a marketing team to rely exclusively on affiliate or influencer content. Like every other marketing method, creator content should be a smaller part in a larger marketing strategy designed to cover all of a business’ customer bases. 

MarinOne’s modern optimization solution helps marketers ensure that each dollar spent on partner content and other marketing strategies yields maximum results. Our paid advertising management solutions creates automated recommendations to optimize your marketing configurations that will improve return on investment. 

If you would like to reach your customers with relatable and likable content, reach out for a free demo of our solution today.

Marketers are commonly tasked with making educated guesses covering an array of topics, such as buyer’s journey, which accounts are worth targeting, what content will resonate best with their customers, and so forth. While these guesses help drive business decisions and are used to create marketing campaigns, they are not the best tactic for accelerating your business. 

To maintain a true competitive edge by making smarter, more informed decisions, marketers must stay on top of new technologies and trends such as predictive analytics. Let’s take a closer look to see what it’s all about and hear from MarinOne expert Joe Southin on how it can help you improve your business and increase your company’s bottom line. 

Understanding predictive analytics

Predictive analytics is the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, predictive modeling, and other statistical techniques to forecast behavior, trends, and activities by analyzing past and present data. Using these analytics, you can strengthen your marketing efforts, enabling you to respond to developments more strategically. Predictive analytics can be used for predicting:

• Which factors impact customer preferences and their buying decisions
• Customer behaviors and their purchasing journey
• Bidding
• Marketing strategies and forecasting sales

5 ways predictive analytics can optimize your marketing budget

According to Gartner, marketing budgets are steadily climbing across all industries in 2022, increasing from 6.4% to 9.5%. That’s why using predictive analytics is more important than before. 

‍

Predictive analytics can be immensely useful. Here’s how:

1. Analyze data to predict how your strategy will perform over the next few days and the immediate future

For enhanced marketing performance, applying predictive analytics is crucial. With accurate data, you can implement a marketing strategy that will generate the impact you need to be successful. When you use predictive analytics to guide your strategy, you'll be more prepared to make informed business decisions and deliver campaigns that drive the results you’re seeking with minimal risk. 

“Here at MarinOne we predict with confidence how an individual object is going to perform, not just tomorrow, but for the next few days,” says Joe Southin.

2. Use forecasts to manage, adjust, and optimize budget allocations 

Predictive data helps you determine where to focus ad spend. It identifies the advertising channels and times that warrant increased spending and resources, and it provides useful insights so you know when to reduce investments. Use your forecasts to pinpoint where adjustments need to be made and how you can allocate your budget more efficiently. 

According to Joe, “Forecasting gives you the opportunity to accurately project sales, revenue, and expenses. When you can map out how an object will respond with marketing spend, you can evaluate different price points.”

3. Respond to the latest trends to stay current and relevant

You can optimize your marketing budget by staying up to date with the latest marketing trends. Not only will it make your marketing campaigns more targeted and effective, but it will improve ROI, customer retention, and customer experiences as well. Competition in today’s marketing landscape is fierce. Understanding current market trends is key to remaining competitive. With predictive analytics, you can predict future shifts and plan your campaigns accordingly. 

“Keeping up with the most current trends is key to strategizing so you can make better business decisions,” says Joe. 

4. Use customer data to adjust campaigns

Provided it’s assessed and interpreted properly, customer data can be used to maximize the efficiency of advertising expenditure. By harnessing the power of predictive analytics, you can pinpoint everything from usage to customer buying behaviors. Customer data can help ensure that you don’t waste ad spend on irrelevant ad positioning or unnecessary communications. In turn, this can free up part of your budget for other revenue-boosting opportunities. 

“No matter what industry you’re in, predictive analytics provides you with the necessary insights you need so you can make your next move. With a deep understanding of customer data, you can change your course of action for your campaigns to be more successful,” explains Joe. 

5. Manage spend across different publishers to optimize effectiveness 

If you are looking to optimize your marketing budget and maximize profitability, it's essential to allocate every dollar effectively. To fine-tune your budget allocation across different publishers, focus on the ones where you can fully control targeting and cost instead of spreading your budget thin. This will condition you to get rid of what does not work and focus your resources on what does. 

Joe adds, “It’s essential to manage spend efficiently so you can yield the most optimal results. To do so, pay close attention to what’s actually working and what’s not by using predictive analytics to maximize value.”

3 Predictive analytics best practices

Managing and coordinating all steps in the analytical process can be complex. By following best practices, you’ll be well-positioned to glean the maximum benefit from predictive analytics. 

1. Define your objectives

Predictive analytics empowers you to optimize operations by predicting outcomes. The predictions directly inform the action to take such as focusing marketing efforts on those most likely to make a purchase or identifying those who may commit fraud. To get the most value out of your data, be sure to align your strategy with your business objectives. 

2. Organize your team

Before you determine your marketing spend, thoughtfully assemble your marketing and sales teams. By making sure everyone is on the same page, departments will be able to work together more successfully. Having a transparent approach is not only beneficial for collaboration, but it also helps generate useful feedback regarding marketing tactics from different teams. 

3. Plan for disruption and continue to refine your predictive analytics models

There will always be factors that change. As a result, as you develop your predictive analytics models, you must continue monitoring them, improving them where necessary, and refining them when needed. These steps ensure the accuracy of your analytics. 

MarinOne powers success with predictive analytics

No matter what industry you are in, the need for predictive analytics is more critical than ever before. Predictive analytics can help you make better marketing predictions so you can start to achieve real growth. By mastering predictive analytics, you will also gain a competitive advantage. 

For a deeper understanding of how you can put predictive analytics to work for you, consider MarinOne. 

When you partner with MarinOne for your predictive analytics needs:

• Your marketing spends go further and you can make effective use of your budget
• You can scale campaigns that are predicted to perform well and filter out those that are not achieving your desired results
• We can advise you on how to allocate your spend across multiple publishers and campaigns and much more.

Want to learn more about how our platform can help you integrate predictive analytics into your marketing campaigns and bring added value to your business? Schedule a demo with one of our MarinOne experts today.  

If you’re new to advertising on Meta, it can be a bit overwhelming. But never fear, Marin is here with a guide to set you on the right path. I’ll outline the process of setting up your Facebook Business Manager account. Then, I’ll provide a few strategic recommendations to help you get started. 

Creating Your Facebook Business Manager Account

Business Manager is a hub designed to help you manage all of your business’s pages and ad accounts in one place. Creating a Business Manager account is free and easy to do. Simply visit business.facebook.com, log in to your personal account, and then enter some info about your business.

Once you’re in, it's time to link your business’s page to your ad account:

Be sure to link all Facebook and Instagram pages you plan to run ads for. You will be given the option to add a page, request access to a page, or create a new page. Select whichever applies to you.

Next you’ll want to link an ad account to your Business Manager account:

You will be given the same options to add an ad account, request access to an ad account, or create a new ad account. Select whichever applies to you.

Next, you’ll want to grant your team members access to your Business Manager account. You have two different access levels to choose from:

• Admin access gives the team member full control, allowing them to add and remove other employees, edit settings for the business, and link pages.
• Employee access allows the team member to view (but not edit) settings for the business, and be assigned to manage pages or ad accounts.

You will also need to assign access levels for your Ad Accounts in Business Manager:

• Admin users can manage all account settings, add new team members, assign access levels, create and edit ads and campaigns, and have full access to the Meta reporting suite. This access level is a good option for your advertising program manager.
• Advertiser users are able to create and edit ads and can view all reports. This is a good option for marketing team members.
• Analyst users have access only to the reporting features. This access level is designed for the analytics team.

After all your roles are assigned, it’s time to set up your billing information, which can be done on the ‘payment methods’ page:

‍

Billing on Facebook can work in one of two ways. Automatic billing will automatically charge your card for advertising costs, while manual billing will allow you to add funds to your account that Facebook will then pull from as ad money is spent.

You can cap your total ad cost by setting an account spending limit, in which case your ads will be paused when you hit that limit and won’t serve again until you increase or remove the limit. 

Once you’ve got billing set up and your proper user roles assigned, you’re ready to start advertising! If you’re not sure where to start, check out these strategic recommendations.

Utilize Top Organic Content

If you’re new to buying ad space on Facebook and Instagram, the first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that the organic content on your social media pages is optimized to drive engagement. For example, a woman’s clothing retailer should make sure that their instagram page features their most popular pieces and that the posts on their instagram contain links to buy the items featured. B2C businesses can also benefit from creating an instagram ‘shop’ page. This way customers can click a link to shop at the bottom of each instagram post and be taken to your company’s shopping page within the instagram app. This makes the buying process easier than ever for customers, as you don’t even have to leave Instagram to make the purchase.

Once you’ve got your organic content optimized, start by promoting a few of your top organic posts. Analyze which posts received the best engagement. Once you’ve chosen your top organic content, Meta makes it easy to turn an organic post into an ad using Business Manager. 

Marin’s Message Booster makes this process even easier. Simply select the post you’d like to boost, choose a campaign and a few settings, and you’re good to go.

Creating Paid Ad Content

Once you’re ready to progress from boosting content to creating intentional paid ads, I recommend a top-to-bottom marketing funnel approach. 

Building an Audience

To get started, you’ll want to cast a wide net to fill your marketing funnel from the top down with potential customers. 

Video views are quite cheap with Meta, so that ad format is a great way to gain traction and build an audience. If you send out a video ad to a broad audience, for example targeting only by age range, you can then analyze who watched more than 5 seconds of your ad. Those who engaged with your ad for longer than 5 seconds are at least somewhat interested in your product. Users who viewed your top of funnel, broad targeting ad should then get moved down to the middle of your funnel so you can retarget them. 

You can also analyze these audiences to gain demographic data about what potential customers’ online profile looks like, and target lookalike audiences.

For example, let's say you’re a university trying to acquire more students and you know that prospective university students are likely between the ages of 16 and 35. Start with an ad targeting just that age range. Then you can study the demographic that engages with your ad, and build an audience of interested prospects from there. 

Retargeting Middle-of-Funnel Users

Now you’ve built your middle funnel audience from whom you see at least some intent to purchase, or learn more about your products/services. Retarget this audience with a click-to-website ad that leads to a landing page where they can learn more. Click-to-website ads are affordable but a bit pricier than video ads, so be sure that your landing page contains multiple calls to action so you can learn more about what your potential customers are interested in and then use that info to segment your audience further as you continue to retarget them, hopefully pushing them further down the funnel. 

In the example of a university marketing to new students, the advertiser would want to drive ad clicks to a landing page on which users can click different links to learn about each degree program. This way, the advertiser is gathering more information about each potential student. They can then push those who clicked on a link further down the funnel by retargeting them with an ad tailored to the degree program they showed interest in. 

Ad Customization

This retargeting audience is now towards the bottom of the funnel, and you can continue to serve them customized ads in hopes of pushing them across the finish line and getting that application.

Hopefully this guide helps you get started! Many of the recommendations discussed here can be implemented quickly with the help of MarinOne for social. Click here to learn more.

Businesses are increasing marketing spending in a bid to stand out in highly competitive environments. As spend increases, executives and decision-makers must ensure that each dollar spent on marketing generates proportionate revenue for the business. 

Click-through rate (CTR) is a metric that is regularly used by businesses to analyze marketing performance and determine future marketing strategies. However, understanding of CTR remains woefully inadequate. Read on to learn what CTR is and how analyzing it can help businesses achieve short- and long-term marketing success. 

What is CTR?

Businesses often track how many users view and interact with a particular ad or social media post. CTR is the metric used to measure the percentage of viewers who click the link embedded in that ad or post. CTR is used to determine how well an ad, keyword, or social media post is performing. 

CTR can easily be calculated by dividing the number of clicks that each ad receives by the number of impressions or views the ad has and representing that number as a percentage. For example, if 10 people click on an ad that was viewed by 100 people, the CTR of that ad would be 10%. 

Companies can evaluate their CTR against the performance of other ads from the same industry. For example, ads from companies in arts and entertainment average a CTR of 10.67%, while ads for legal services experience an average CTR of 3.84%. Knowing how your industry typically performs helps put your performance metrics in the right context to evaluate them accurately and effectively. 

‍

What marketers must know before they can effectively analyze Click-Through Rate

Higher CTR does not necessarily mean positive marketing results

Results generated by marketing efforts may seem difficult to measure, quantify, or link to specific business results. However, this is often due to a misunderstanding of how each metric reveals specific insight into marketing performance. 

Marketers must have specific goals and must choose the right metrics to evaluate if these targets are being met. Marketers who focus heavily on conversions might use CTR to view how effectively each ad is being used to increase visibility—but CTR does not measure how many of those clicks lead to conversions. 

Keywords are valued differently depending on their ability to directly generate profits

Keywords play a major role in the CTR of an online ad. The right keywords can encourage more clicks, higher conversions, and better engagement with the ad. However, every keyword has a unique value within each industry depending on how effective they are in generating profits, so marketers must carefully evaluate how keywords are valued in their specific industry. 

Industry research showed that marketers typically use keyword rankings, organic traffic, and time spent on the page in conjunction with CTR to measure the value of each keyword. This information can then determine how much of the budget should be spent on each set of keywords and how frequently they should be used in marketing campaigns. 

‍

CTR must be analyzed through the lens of affordability and relevance

CTR can provide significant insight into marketing performance for digital marketers. However, it should always be analyzed with the specific financial needs of the campaign. Even if an ad converts a customer, the profit generated by the customer must be higher than the amount of money the marketer spent to get that click. 

3 Ways to achieve consistently positive business results in an increasingly saturated online space

Segment keywords into groups to enable improved Audience targeting and segmentation

Businesses can use many keywords across different marketing campaigns and channels to better reach a wider audience. Each of these channels must be properly evaluated to truly understand their importance to the company. Marketing spending on each channel must accurately reflect its importance to marketers and their audience. 

Park ‘N Fly, an offsite airport parking company, used keyword segmentation and optimized paid-search spending to double their CTR to 6% from 3% the previous year with the use of Marin Professional. Effectively analyzing CTR helped them optimize spending across 65 campaigns that used 2,000 keywords across multiple channels and platforms. 

Ensure consistency in messaging across ad text, marketing collaterals, and landing page copy

Once you’ve figured out how each keyword performs, it’s important to use the same keywords to reach that audience effectively across different channels. This also ensures that the marketing message is not diluted or forgotten when viewed on platforms that deviate from the language that was determined to be effective. This consistency has to extend beyond ads to marketing collateral such as email blasts, promotions, and landing page copy. 

Regularly analyze the links between keyword usage and business results with modern attribution analysis methods

The modern customer demands that companies learn their preferences quickly and expects communication that aligns with their values, beliefs, needs, and preferences. This means marketers must always have their finger on the pulse to learn when customer preferences have changed. Attribution analysis can help businesses understand if their keyword usage and ad language have kept up with changing customer behavior and the extent to which certain keywords are still relevant to existing marketing campaigns. 

Manage your  ads with insights from MarinOne

Marin’s online ad management software makes it easy for marketers to learn how their ads are performing and place that information in the right context. Analyzing the yield generated by each keyword, ad, copy, and product can help marketers optimize their ad spend in a way that maximizes conversions and sales. 

Learn more about MarinOne today. Get in touch with one of our experts to see how we can help you get the information and tools you need to increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Pay Per Click advertising is a great way to generate leads and sales, especially for new e-commerce businesses. It can help you get instant results, whereas something like an SEO strategy can take months. Some of the benefits of PPC advertising are:

• Targeting prospective customers precisely based on location, demographics, interests, etc.
• Tracking ad campaign goals is simple. 
• It is easy to test what produces the best results quickly. You can A/B test keywords, headers, descriptions, etc.
• Paid ads provide a wide range of formatting options compared to SEO through ad extensions.

As an e-commerce brand, you can maximize your ad spend and improve your conversion rate through proper PPC campaign management. The challenges and roadblocks e-comm companies face are distinctive from B2B companies or brick-and-mortar retailers. To help you improve your e-commerce PPC management approach and get the best performance marketing results possible, we have put together some optimization tips to support your efforts:

Tap into Targeted Dynamic Ads

Google allows you to target specific website pages that reflect the search intent of your users. Google does this by crawling your website for things such as text phrases, headlines, descriptions, and other custom labels. These are called dynamic search ads.

If you are an e-commerce website with many product pages, a blog, and landing pages for your downloads or newsletters, you might want to set up targeted dynamic ads.

Google can crawl your website and automatically match the content to the PPC ad. Additionally, having an alternative to AdSense would help you set up dynamic ads based on different target types, custom labels, page types, content, or target URLs. An example of custom labels for different page URLs is shown below.

Remember that you can upload an excel sheet with all your custom labels and other product tags. With dynamic search ads, you will generally want to stick to demand gen ads focused on accelerating sales and leads. 

You should also split-test your headlines and descriptions to see which previews are best. For example, the image above shows a preview test of two different product descriptions.

Focus on Product Page Optimization

A product landing page for your paid search campaign is primarily designed to convert a lead. Your product pages should align with your PPC ads to reduce bounce rates and optimize conversions. 

On top of that, you’ll need social proof, compelling CTAs, and a fast-loading product page to convert most of the traffic coming in.

Let’s take the example of a keyword search for “IT solutions company,” and the Google ads pop up below. We click on the second “Freshservice” ad.

Clicking on this ad result takes us to the landing page in the next screengrab. This landing page does something effective; it provides social proof of the product (“trusted by global brands”) and has a strong CTA (“Get Started for Free” or “Request Demo.”)

So, how do you optimize your product landing page? Here’s how: 

• Use strong headlines, prominent call-to-actions, and an attractive design
• Make your landing page mobile-friendly and easy to navigate
• Add visuals showcasing your product
• Utilize social proof on your landing page

The use of relevant keywords is encouraged on your landing page. But make sure to maintain optimal keyword density to avoid Google treating your content as spam.

Leverage Google Shopping Ads

Shopping ads appear at the top of organic search results, but they pack a little something extra. Shopping ads are more visual and can also be enriched using ad extensions. 

Both Google and Bing offer shopping ads. An example of Bing shopping ads is shown below.

Numerous industry case studies support the effectiveness of Google Shopping Ads in driving traffic and boosting conversions.

You can optimize your Google Shopping Ads by applying the following useful tips:

• Fill out completely your Google Merchant Center shopping product data feed - this should include descriptors like product ID, description, category, type, availability status, sale price, etc. 
• Create different ad groups if you have a wide array of different products.
• Create a separate ad group for your best-selling items.
• Add promotional text to your shopping ads, such as “Get the Winter Sale Discount” or “Free shipping for all orders above $100”.
• Use HD pictures and use catchy titles and descriptions for your ads.

You have a greater chance of moving products quickly with shopping ads. For example, if you are dealing with products with a shelf life, you can pull an inventory aging report for all your products and list at-risk products on Google or Bing shopping ads.

Choose Keywords That Align

Most PPC campaigns focus on growing leads and sales since this is where you get the most ROI for your advertising budget. Thus, you should conduct keyword research that aligns with the campaign that you are running. You might want to identify target transactional or commercial keywords for a sales campaign.

Some tactics you can use to identify and implement rich PPC keywords include:

• Targeting long tail keywords with transactional search intent and low competition. 
• Targeting affordable branded keywords of your competitors.
• Conducting competitor analysis to identify their target keywords.
• Create ad groups for your selected group of PPC keywords.

You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs to get keyword ideas for your campaign. 

In the example below, a business is targeting the keyword “espresso machine.” From Ahrefs, it’s possible to know metrics such as the monthly search volume, long-tail variations of the keyword, etc. 

Important metrics to note as you do your keyword research include CPC (cost per click) and CTR (click-through rate) for each keyword.

Finally, include negative keywords in your campaign to eliminate similar but irrelevant or non-performing keywords that could impact your ad spend.

Improve the CTRs of Your Ads

Click Thru Rate refers to the number of people clicking on your ad from the total number of impressions. 

For example, a CTR of 5% for 100 impressions would total five clicks. This might seem small. However, for an e-commerce click that costs, say, $1 per ad, a return of $20/item can be considered a good ROI.

You can employ several tactics to improve your CTR:

• Use ad extensions to showcase additional information. You can use extensions like site links, product reviews, features, and structured snippets.
• Use relevant keywords for your headlines, product descriptions, and captions. Adding relevant keywords is good for both your PPC and SEO campaigns.

Here is an example of a well-done e-commerce PPC ad utilizing ad extensions (price, reviews) and keyword-rich product descriptions and captions. 

Finally, don’t forget to improve the quality score of your ad keywords continually. For example, you can test the same ad with slightly varied keywords and analyze them. High-quality scores will result in lower CPCs and better ad positions.

In Closing

E-commerce PPC management  that is streamlined, easy, and effective offers numerous benefits to your business by saving you time, headache, and precious internal resources. Make your life easier by automating parts of the PPC campaign management process, such as ad targeting, attribution tracking, budget pacing, and reporting.

To effectively carry out an e-commerce PPC campaign, use methodical strategies such as setting up dynamic search ads, doing intense keyword research, optimizing the product page, leveraging Google Shopping Ads, and improving your CTRs.

Most importantly, your business must have a clear e-commerce PPC management strategy in line with your business goals. Track your business metrics and campaign performance constantly using MarinOne, Google Analytics, and other tools. You can also hire e-commerce PPC management services or a digital marketing agency to help you make solid gains.

‍

Matt Diggity is a guest contributor to Marin Software. He is a search engine optimization expert and the founder and CEO of Diggity Marketing, The Search Initiative, Authority Builders, and LeadSpring LLC. He is also the host of the Chiang Mai SEO Conference.

On December 6th, 2022, we'll be offering a comprehensive webinar on budgeting strategies for the new year featuring Forrester. Anu Adegbola, an account director of paid media with Marin, and guest speaker Brett Kahnke, a principal analyst with Forrester, will cover how to approach your marketing budget for 2023 while also giving tips on how to adapt your budgets as needed ongoing. 

To get you started before the webinar, we've put together a "too long didn't read" guide on Forrester’s approach to budget allocation and what steps you should take when planning a long-term fiscal strategy. To get all of Forrester’s insights and tips, you'll need to download Forrester's report directly (available to Forrester subscribers or for purchase) and attend our webinar event, but this quick overview should help you start moving forward.

Summary of Forrester’s Strategic Budget Allocation Process

In the Forrester report, Kahnke explains how marketing teams are tasked with executing marketing and maximizing results while also dealing with a murky set of objectives. As a part of this process, execution teams must work with business priorities to find the best course of action. The Strategic Budget Allocation Process can be used by the central, regional or country-based field marketing teams or as a second business within an organization. The complete guide by Forrester outlines the benefits of creating a marketing program plan that aligns spending with business, marketing, and campaign objectives. Kahnke also highlights common mistakes that can lead to disconnected or habitual marketing.

The Five Steps of Forrester’s Execution Strategy Phase

Step 1: Review Budget Allocations And Prepare Guidance

Check if team goals align with campaign budget allocations; include campaigns, sub-campaigns, and targeted segments in your analysis.

• Review the top-down and bottom-up budget distribution.

• Define execution guidelines for marketing teams.

• Provide regular feedback on successes and failures, especially in communication with leadership.

Step 2: Layer on Specific Program Allocations and Ensure Totals Stack Up Against Strategic Targets

Step 3: Define Programs You Absolutely Need Within Your Marketing Strategy

Step 4: Identify the Right Tactics for Your Team at this Time, Build the Calendar, and Finalize Allocations

The program manager's primary deliverable in this step is a program calendar. This summarizes the duration of each program and its related tactics in a production schedule and includes the correlating spend for each tactic. 

Step 5: Check your Bottom to Top Overview, Get Endorsement, and Share the Plan

It’s important to communicate the priorities of marketing campaigns to other departments within the business. Confirm that your final plan is still aligned to the organizations needs in terms of objective, campaigns, and program allocations. 

We look forward to sharing more with you in December and hearing directly from Brett how the execution of this strategy will give you the best marketing plan for 2023 possible.

When retailers want the attention of a particular market segment, they use all kinds of strategies to effectively target their ads to specific audiences and increase conversions. The most effective one? A Google Adwords feature known as Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA). 

You have probably visited a website in search of a product, only to leave that site to be targeted with an ad for the exact product you were just researching. This happens because of remarketing lists. Once we’ve shown interest in a product, businesses want us to keep thinking about it—and hopefully come back for a purchase. 

What Exactly is RLSA? 

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) are a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy.  RLSA allows you to target users who have already been to your site with new ads so you can bring them back again and land a sale. This allows you to customize your search campaigns by tailoring ads and bids for related keywords on Google or other Google Display Network sites. By leveraging this tactic, you can connect with pre-qualified prospects to increase your conversion rates, revenue, and overall profits. 

How Does RLSA Work?

When shoppers are surfing the digital landscape for products, standard display remarketing catches their attention with ads. However, users are not very receptive to these kinds of placements, and many people use ad blocking technology to avoid them altogether. In fact, a study done by Statista indicates that more than 42.7% of people worldwide use ad blocking tools. 

RLSAs are different. They target audiences with search ads instead of intrusive display popups. In contrast to typical Google display ads, RLSAs only appear when a user has actively searched for a term.  

‍

5 Benefits of RLSA

When used correctly, RLSA ads refine your ad campaigns and help direct your ad budget into a highly valuable market. Here’s a look at some of RLSAs biggest advantages.

Compared to Other Targeting Strategies, RLSA is More Likely to Drive Conversions

Because you can customize content, you can increase customer engagement. Using search ads allows you to offer personalization and increases win-back potential. According to a ComScore study that analyzed 103 campaigns from 39 different advertisers covering seven industries, retargeting ads generated an average lift of 1,046%. 

‍

You Will Increase Click-Through-Rates (CTR)

RLSA enables you to target people who have already shown interest in your brand. Because these leads are considered qualified, they are more likely to return, giving you a higher CTR and a better quality score. With a higher quality score, your ad ranking in the SERPs is also likely to be higher. 

RLSAs Enable You to Trial Broad Keywords

Using broad keywords can lead to more conversions by expanding your reach. By using RLSAs, you can set up different campaigns or ad groups for the keywords you want to try so you can determine whether they improve conversion rates.

RLSAs Make Ad Spend More Efficient

With RLSAs you can choose to target only valuable and qualified users, excluding those who are not providing value, thus saving money. You can also adjust your remarketing lists so users who have chosen to disable ads are not targeted, making your campaigns more cost-effective. 

RLSAs Improve ROI

Remarketing lists allow you to segment your audiences into lists based on their performance. As a result, it can help you stay connected with potential customers who have previously shown interest, leading to increased sales and improved ROI.

The Do’s and Don’ts of RLSA

Do Understand Your Audience Before Beginning

For better results with your targeted ads, learn about your website visitors and their typical behaviors throughout their customer journey. Analyze the funnel steps they travel through before converting.

Do Start Slow

Conduct an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t work. 

Don’t Bid on Vague or Generic Keywords in Search Campaigns

Instead of selecting your #1 prospecting keyword, consider starting with your 2nd, 3rd, or 4th ranked prospecting keyword.

Do Reduce Your Bid Dramatically When Retargeting Past Visitors

Bid aggressively lower, not conservatively lower. Don’t be afraid to adjust your bid to be lower than what you are bidding on your current prospecting campaign. Doing so will allow you to realize the true impact of your retargeted search. 

Don’t Use Broad Value Propositions and General Claims When Retargeting Past Website Visitors

Remember that you are retargeting visitors who have already been to your site and are familiar with your brand or product. Instead of beating around the bush, be direct, clear, and bold. Write copy that hard sells, something that will encourage people to take immediate action on your offer.  

Do Match Messaging to User Action

Make sure that the ad copy you use is relevant to the action your users have already taken that got them on your remarketing list originally. 

How MarinOne Can Help

Interested in boosting your remarketing results or improving your search ad campaigns? Implement RLSAs to see your performance increase with less time, money, and effort. 

By partnering with MarinOne, you can improve your targeting efforts and increase your financial lift. With MarinOne’s platform, you can segment and target high value customers by audience across search, social, and display to drive your next wave of cross-channel optimization. To learn more, read our article on how to use RLSA.

Ready to get started? Contact one of our MarinOne experts today for a free trial.

PI LIVE London 2022 is done, and we're excited for many other events Marin will be attending over the coming weeks, including Amazon Unboxed in New York this week. But before we close this chapter, we wanted to highlight some of PI Live’s best moments and share what we learned.

Marin sponsored the Pyramid Stage, one of two areas where keynote presentations were shared. And we even had our own Anu Adegbola give a 30 minute session on budgeting strategies for 2023. She is an experienced and accomplished public speaker who shared great insights on budget planning.

Day One Speaking Session Highlights

Speaker Tina Judic, co-founder and Chairman of Tomorrow Group, talked about the importance of AI integration in advertising at the Rakuten Advertising Main Stage and also on the Marin Software Pyramid Stage. Shay Okelola, the Account Director for Neo Media World, described how programmatic has changed the advertising game. Both welcomed all attendees and exhibitors and outlined the schedule for day one.

Budgeting Strategies for 2023

Marin’s Anu Adegbola took the Pyramid Stage to share the best tactics for approaching a budget for the new year, as well as roadblocks that may affect how funds are allocated amongst marketing channels in 2023. Some of the key concepts Anu mentioned include:

• The 70-20-10 Methodology: 

• 70% of your marketing initiatives should be proven and tested methods that are almost certainly going to support your business objectives
• 20% of your marketing initiatives should be new methods or ideas that are somewhat untested for your business, but have had success in the market at large for other competitors
• 10% of your marketing initiatives should be what you'd call "wild bets," or tactics that are completely out of the box, creative, and untested. This is the best way to find new niche audiences for your products or services.

• Industry disruptors that will affect budgeting in the new year:

• Making way for new channel experiments - TikTok, Quora, Reddit and more all have new advertising campaign types that are relatively untested. Start with spending just 5% per month of the total possible allocation for a new channel and tie that spending to tangible deliverables. As you have data to optimize from, you can continuing scaling 5% month over month continuously.
• Covid-19 has changed consumer behavior for the long haul. One of the lasting effects Covid-19 has had is consumers have dramatically changed their behavior in terms of needs, timing, and what factors influence their purchase decisions. Buyers are still making purchases; but getting into the psyche of how, when, or where your target audience is likely to convert is more complex than it has ever been.
• The recession is here. Economists across Europe and the US project significant economic downturn in 2023, and many economists say we are already in the midst of a recession that could take several years from which to recover. Price point will be a very high priority for consumers in this next year and beyond.

• When in doubt…remember you're just frying chips

• Mark Ritson published an article this past week in MarketingWeek that really beautifully summarized what all budget allocation techniques boil down to. He describes in the article how back in the '90s famous chef Heston Blumenthal became obsessed with making the perfect chip. After hundreds of tests, Blumenthal found the best method for making delicious chips every time was simple. Boil the potatoes for 15 minutes, freeze, fry, freeze again, fry again. Perfect chips. Every time. Regardless of oil temp or seasoning or what have you…these fries always came out pretty great. 
• Planning your marketing budgets also should be simple. Here are the "brass tax" points Mark Ritson outlines that will make your budgeting strategy pretty great every time. Regardless of the market, the campaign, or the channel.

Brand-to-Brand Partnerships: The Ultimate Convergence of Brand and Performance

A panel of branding experts from various sectors shared their thoughts on brand-to-brand partnerships at the event. With trackable ROI and consumer trust, this partnership can be a fruitful collaboration for new startup businesses.

Some of the most compelling learnings from this session included:

• When you partner with someone you can use their content extensively across your different channels to drive ROI.
• Tech has progressed significantly in terms of carrying out successful brand-to-brand partnerships. Still, there's always that human element that brands can't use a computer for.
• Smaller brands are really useful for smaller niche audiences. For those clients with specific needs, why not get a partnership from the niche provider?

AT YOUR OWN RISK! 30 Mins Inside the Mind of an Integrated Creative

Jo Arscott, an award-winning Creative Director, shared her approach to storytelling. She made a compelling argument that sometimes shifting your focus away from data and research can actually lead to surprising new business opportunities.

According to Jo, the human imagination is what makes technology such a great asset for creativity. In her experience, digital data both helps and hurts at once - it’s good because it fuels creative ideas but also bad because of exposure and privacy concerns.

State of the Industry: 2022 Affiliate and Partner Marketing Trends

Have you ever wondered how advertisers feel about affiliate marketing? The IAB released a report with insights into the current state of affiliate marketing and presented the results during PI LIVE. Some of the main points that I took away from this talk was:

• Over the next year, affiliate marketers expect that editorial content will be their biggest source of revenue. Influencers are also very popular and came in second in the poll.
• Publisher diversity is a huge concern CMOs are currently facing when looking at continued investment in affiliate marketing.
• IAB saw a correlation between the worsening cost of living crisis and the importance of affiliate marketing, as reflected in survey responses. This suggests that as consumers must tighten their belts financially, buyers will be depending upon recommendations through marketing means they trust to make the best purchase decisions. 

Day Two Speaking Session Highlights

Tapx CEO, Luke Judge and the founder of PlanIt, Steve Cox, hosted a successful second day at the conference. All participants and exhibitors were welcomed and the program of the second day was outlined.

Influencers, Live Shopping & Social Commerce: Affiliate is the Ultimate Conversion Tactic

This panel discussion was an interesting dialogue based on the following statistic - 74% of consumers are making buying decisions based on social recommendations, a number that is worth paying attention to. Here are some of the most valuable learnings from the session: 

• Influencer marketing in social shopping has a lot of potential. To make the strategy work, you will have to plan everything beforehand and track each campaign individually.
• Don’t automatically go for influencers that have millions of followers. Often there are smaller accounts that share niche common interests with your brand because these influencers are more likely to drive better results.
• Humans are not like technology - they can be unpredictable. That’s particularly why you need to make sure contracts with influencers are spelled out and that the influencer is given enough freedom to do their thing.

Fireside Chat with Boohoo: The Value of Unlocking the App for Affiliates

Most affiliate campaigns drive traffic to mobile websites rather than apps, even though the app experience is much better for the user and converts at a higher rate. The content remains significantly lower on mobile sites. Some of the things we learned during this session included:

• Apps can produce different outputs for different businesses. Boohoo could make an app that's basically the same as their website with a more intuitive conversion process, whereas fintech brands may develop apps to address the need of their customers.
• Cracking the code to tracking is paramount when coming up with an app for your company. If you are great at explaining how seamless and accurate you app’s tracking really is to your affiliates, they will be happy clients and won’t stop promoting your company.
• If you're a business looking for some guidance, it can't hurt to use a tech company that offers training and advice when developing your app.

Lessons from 2008: What’s Next for the Recession-Era Affiliate Marketing Industry

This panel with professionals brimming with knowledge provides insights for current economic climate. After attending this session, it is clear that:

• Facing a decline in sales, luxury brands should consider paying more attention to more accessible products. As an example, consumers may look for a lipstick instead of the Chanel bag, so it's important to promote your products that are at a lower price point rather than the higher value items.
• Even during a recession, you should not cut your expenditure on marketing. Those who keep investing during testing times are those that remain strong and achieve lifelong brand value.
• Ensuring you're active on review sites is an excellent way to show your trustworthiness to potential customers. The key is to be sure you have a system in place that lets legitimate reviews through, while filtering out fake ones.

The Learnings Shared Were Compelling, but Networking Opportunities Were the Real Highlight

It was clear the event producers put a lot of effort into selecting an engaging agenda with keynotes, fireside chats and panels on two stages. As always, networking was one of the best parts of the day! On day one, DJ Viv May provided music during lunch. In the evening, there was a cocktail happy hour post-show on the terrace.

On the second day, as the crowd relaxed and got to know one another better, it was great to see that the event brought out so many meaningful marketing conversations. Between the Networking Village, impact.com's Prosecco Lounge, and Webgains' Sports Bar, there were plenty of places to share ideas, exchange contact information, and plant the seeds for potential partnerships. 

At Marin, we're enjoying the opportunity to re-engage with our clients and partners on a personal level. Reach out to join us at one of the other events we'll be attending in the near future. Our team of expert marketing consultants would be happy to host you for a dinner and discuss your marketing strategy for new coming year.

‍

Recently Google announced that Performance Max campaigns would be a more significant part of the Google Ads platform and therefore a greater part of paid media strategies for marketers at large. Since then, many questions have been raised as to what exactly this campaign type is and how it differs from other campaigns. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a few of the most common concerns coming up for advertisers and best practices to deal with the changes below.

First of all, what are Performance Max campaigns?

Performance Max (PMax) means you can now buy Google Ads across the entire inventory of products from a single campaign, with expanded coverage across a myriad of different placement types, including:

• YouTube
• Display
• Search
• Discover
• Gmail
• Maps

PMax uses a mix of automation and machine learning to help advertisers reach their conversion goals with all of these placement types all within one campaign. Performance Max campaigns should complement keyword-based search campaigns, as well as boost performance across Google's less competitive advertising channels like Gmail and Display.

If paid media marketers invest wisely, this could bring in a whole new set of customers who are not as familiar with online shopping. Previously in Beta and compatible with Smart Shopping and Local campaigns, Performance Max will be a replacement for Performance Max Offline and Performance Max for Retail by the beginning of October 2022, meaning paid specialists need to make the pivot now.

How do Performance Max campaigns work?

Performance Max helps you drive performance based on your specified conversion goals, delivering more conversions and value by optimizing performance in real-time and across channels using Smart Bidding. Performance Max combines Google's automation technologies across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more. They're all empowered by your specific advertising objective (for example, if you have a CPA or ROAS target) and the creative assets, audience signals, and optional data feeds you provide.

“Performance Max puts your business goals front and center, and prioritizes these above other signals by inputting your specific conversion goals,” 

-Rodney Ip, Global Product Lead, Google Ads

Performance Max are goal-based campaigns, designed to deliver the value that matters most to you. So, to get started, you choose the goals that are necessary for you to reach your marketing objective. Then Google asks you to provide a series of inputs that help the AI tool get campaigns started. These inputs include:

• Budget
• Creative assets (like text, imagery, and video)
• Geo-targets
• Optional feeds such as: 

• Google Merchant Center
• Google My Business
• Dynamic Ads Feed
• Other Business Data Feeds

• Audience Signals

• First party / remarketing lists
• Google Audiences / custom audiences

PMax campaigns are then able to take those inputs and invest your budget as effectively as possible, maintaining a core focus on the initial objective you set. Google’s automation goes to work finding the best potential customers and serving those customers the most relevant ad. Bidding and attribution technology then determine the most optimal bids to meet your goals. And of course, it’s all done in real time in the auction. 

Targeting technology, machine learning, and automated bidding all culminate to a campaign with the best possible ROI outcome. In fact, Google’s data thus far indicates Performance Max campaigns average a 13% lower cost per conversion than any other campaign to date. 

How to maximize the effectiveness of PMax campaigns

Because they leverage machine learning and automation to drive performance, Performance Max can leave advertisers feeling like they have given up some control over their campaigns. But there are still some levers you can pull to maximize your PMax campaigns. 

Audience Signals

Adding audience signals to your Performance Max campaigns enhances Google’s machine learning to help you reach the best customers. Google takes your audience data and looks at the audiences for signals to identify similar buyers likely to exhibit the same behaviors and interests. You can add audiences from:

• Your first party data (customer lists, website visitors, remarketing lists, etc)
• Custom segments based on search activity, websites visited and apps used
• In-market customers with interests in products like yours
• Demographics like age, income level, and family status

Google can then use the information you have provided to inform its targeting algorithms to find customers who are most likely to convert. This is a good way to help jumpstart your Performance Max campaigns and can also continue to inform throughout the lifecycle of the campaign, especially as your first party data changes over that time. 

Offline Conversions

Consider importing your offline conversions to help improve your PMax performance. By giving Google access to offline sales data in addition to your online digital attribution channels, you will give the algorithms a more comprehensive view of what’s working. 

The system can then interpret which leads have resulted in sales and also the assets being used in the ad groups that are ultimately driving conversions. Incorporating these valuable insights will help deliver the best content to the customers most likely to convert. 

MarinOne Engine + Performance Max Campaigns

The team at Marin has been hard at work updating the MarinOne Engine infrastructure which will deliver a powerful experience for advertisers. MarinOne Engine already powers MarinOne's newest and most advanced grids and enables new campaign types, more data, more flexible reporting, and enhanced processing for scalability.

MarinOne Engine will allow us to support additional campaign types from Google including Performance Max as well as local campaigns and additional data for video campaigns. 

As you start formulating your strategy for adding Performance Max to your digital campaigns, the marketing experts at Marin are here to help. Reach out today to schedule a demo and see how MarinOne’s advanced analytics, automation, and optimization tools can work for your Google Ads programs. 

Conversion rate is a crucial metric for digital marketers. It indicates how well your ads are working—since conversions are the main reason you're running ads in the first place. If your conversion rate is low, your advertising dollars are going to waste. But if it's high, you'll have much more money to spend on other marketing campaigns, like PPC. If you're running display ads and not seeing the results you want, it might be time to tweak your strategy. So, what exactly can you do to increase your digital ads’ conversion rates? 

In this article, we'll walk you through eight tips to help boost conversions so you can reach a larger audience and increase sales. Remember, there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to conversion optimization, but following these tips will help get you started on the right path!

What is conversion rate and why is it important?

Conversion rate is a tricky concept. It's not as simple as measuring how many customers you get out of each ad. Instead, it's a measure of how many people who see your advertisement actually do what you want them to do, like download an ebook or make a purchase.

By increasing your conversion rate, you can make the most of your digital marketing budget and maximize your return on your investment. 

A high conversion rate is a result of:

• A streamlined and appealing sales funnel
• A well-designed website that is formatted effectively
• A unique and compelling brand and proposition
• An effective call-to-action

A low conversion rate means your website’s performance or design may be lacking.  This could be as a result of slow loading pages, forms that are broken, or content that doesn’t accurately convey the offer’s value. 

Through conversion rate optimization (CRO), you can allocate your PPC budget more efficiently and persuade prospects to take action. 

How to calculate your conversion rate

To calculate conversion rate, divide the total number of conversions by how many visitors clicked on your ad. To get the percentage, multiply that result by 100.

Leads Generated ÷ Website Traffic x 100 = Conversion Rate % 

This formula can be used for every conversion opportunity on your site. Count only the number of visitors on the web pages where the offer is listed. 

8 tips for improving conversions

Identify your conversion goals

To optimize your conversion rates, create a robust conversion optimization plan. Consider what your prospective customers really want from you so you can make the conversion path as smooth as possible. Conversion goals help you optimize your advertising objectives more easily. With defined goals, you can also measure your marketing performance and set benchmarks for improvement. Clear objectives will lead to more successful campaigns. 

Make sure your landing page copy is clear and concise

There are a few ways to make your content more accessible and clear to readers:

• Your landing page copy must be short, simple, and easy to understand. 
• The tone should be conversational so it makes a natural connection between you and the reader, rather than sounding like an overly formal marketing pitch. 
• If possible, use bullet points to highlight key benefits that would appeal to the specific type of customer who is visiting this page. 
• Separate long lists into multiple sections so they don’t create readability issues when viewed all at once.

Create a sense of urgency to get customers to act now

“Accelerators” offer the extra push users sometimes need to convert. To increase conversions on short-lived deals and offers, use copy that provokes a sense of urgency such as “Limited time only,” “Last chance,” or “While supplies last.” As part of your ad creative, add direct call-to-action buttons to increase conversions. Offer limited-time discounts or free shipping for orders placed in the next 24 hours with no coupon code needed! This will help drive traffic and increase sales, especially for those final hours before major holidays. 

Add an interactive element like an online chat window or live demo for more engagement opportunities

By engaging customers with a live chat capability, you can increase both customer satisfaction and conversion rates. Live chat tools are perfect for consumers who are on the fence. This is one of the best ways to respond quickly when a customer has a question about your product or service, which can lead to increased sales. 

Offer content upgrades that are relevant to people who have already converted

If someone has bought a product, they might be interested in learning more about the topic or how to get even more value from the purchase. If someone has signed up for your email newsletter, they're probably interested in staying up-to-date on new products and promotions. Content upgrades can include: 

• More information on the same topic
• A free trial of a paid service
• A coupon code for a discount on future purchases
• A digital download

Use social proof such as testimonials from other satisfied customers

Social proof is a powerful persuasion tool that we've all seen in action—and reviews are one of the most instrumental forms:  89% of consumers read reviews before making a purchase. Social proof builds trust and when your customers have established trust in your brand, they’re more likely to convert. Here are some tips:

• Build  a strong online presence 
• Incorporate social proof into your digital ads by including links to where others have left reviews
• Include testimonials from happy customers 

Reading reviews and testimonials puts consumers at ease. If it’s not apparent that your customers have faith in your product or enjoyed using it, your conversion rate will likely suffer. 

Create a FAQ page so customers can find answers quickly and easily

Include a search button on each landing page where a customer can type in their question or issue so a link to the answer appears at the top of the page for them. Next, make sure you include links to the FAQ page from both your homepage and contact page, or wherever else is relevant. This ensures that anyone who uses Google to research your business before clicking on one of your ads will be able to find this valuable resource immediately after landing on one of these pages. 

Surround buttons with lots of negative space

When your button stands out from its background, it becomes more obvious and easier for users to spot when they're scrolling through pages of content or shopping carts filled with products. This means that more people are likely to click on the button than if it was surrounded by other things like photos and logos, which can make buttons less visually prominent or harder to see.

Get started improving your conversion rate today

There's no doubt that digital advertising is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. In fact, display ad spending is projected to increase by 20.9% in 2022 alone. So if you're looking for a new way to increase conversions and improve your bottom line, MarinOne can help. 

Knowing how to improve the conversion rate of your digital ads is critically important to the growth and development of your business. With MarinOne, you can create, manage, and measure your digital ads so you can gain insights into what's working and what's not, allowing you to make adjustments that improve your results. MarionOne’s automation tool enables you to track ad metrics and conversions automatically. 

Learn more about MarinOne’s ad automation tools. Or reach out to one of our MarinOne experts today to schedule a demo.

It’s no secret that the social advertising ecosystem (and the rest of the world) looks much different than it did just a few years ago. We know that many advertisers are searching for direction as they learn to navigate the constantly evolving landscape. 

Explaining the Ad Auction and Delivery System

Understanding how the Facebook ad auction works is the first step to adaptation. The ad auction formula consists of components that advertisers can leverage to increase their ad performance in the auction. The formula itself is a linear relationship between all components, making it easier to understand and predict how each variable will affect outcomes.

The Ad Auction

When advertisers create ads, they tell us who they want to show their ads to by defining a target audience. A person can fall into multiple target audiences. For example, one advertiser targets women who like skiing, while another advertiser targets all skiers who live in California. The same person (in this case, a female skier who lives in California) could fall into the target audience of both advertisers. When there's an opportunity to show someone an ad, the ads with a target audience that the person belongs to are eligible to compete in the auction.

To ensure that the winning ad maximizes value for both people and businesses, the winner of the auction is the ad with the highest total value. The total value is a combination of 3 major factors connected by the formula below:

• Bid: The bid placed by an advertiser for that ad (in other words, what the advertiser is willing to pay to achieve their desired outcome).
• Estimated action rates: An estimate of whether a particular person engages with or converts from a particular ad (in other words, the probability that showing an ad to a person leads to that desired outcome of the advertiser).
• Ad quality: A measure of the quality of an ad as determined from many sources including feedback from people viewing or hiding the ad and and assessments of low-quality attributes in the ad, such as withholding information, sensationalized language and engagement bait.

Together, estimated action rates and ad quality measure ad relevance. Because these are components of the auction, an ad that’s more relevant to a person could win an auction against ads with higher bids.

The Ad Delivery System

Because the ad auction and ad delivery system behave like a supply-and-demand system, there are seasonal fluctuations and ecosystem changes that will affect the outcomes and costs of ad performance. There are two main causes of CPM fluctuations you may have experienced before:

• Seasonal and Economic events:  The impact of seasonal and economic events on advertiser cost can be represented by supply and demand. Supply and demand typically have an inverse relationship, but multiple simultaneous forces on supply and demand can create different outcomes. Considering the impacts of seasonality and economic events in terms of supply and demand can help advertisers predict how this will translate into the ad auction. The examples provided by Meta below illustrate the expected impact of different macroeconomic variables and seasonality on the ad delivery system.

A positive economic event illustrates the typical inverse relationship between supply and demand. When supply (usership and user behavior) remains constant but we see advertisers competing for user attention by raising budgets, this leads to a flat level of impressions and thereby a higher cost per impression (impacting CPMs).

A relatable example of seasonality for advertisers is the holiday season. During this time, we see both supply and demand move as users are more actively searching for gifts to purchase, while advertisers are also spending more to capture this increased intent. In this example, purchases are likely to increase while CPAs remain constant.

A negative economic event in this example moves both the supply and demand curves. If users are spending more time on Facebook, the supply rises. But concerned advertisers also typically pull back spend during a negative economic event, pushing down demand. This resulted in increased impressions at a lower cost per impression, and subsequently lower CPM.

• Effects on reporting due to user adoption of iOS tracking updates: With iOS 14.5+ adoption ramping up since July 2021, there has been an impact on advertising delivery and reporting, and performance fluctuations. While these effects have been widely felt, it’s important to recognize that these known reporting gaps do not mean our platform is not driving real business value for advertisers, or that your campaigns are not resulting in a purchase or major event. These changes just make it harder for us to measure the outcome. After extensive internal analysis, we’re able to publicly share that we now estimate - in aggregate - that we are currently underreporting iOS web conversions by approximately 8%, which is down from the 15% estimate we reported last September.

In part two of our collaboration, we’ll apply these concepts to strategies advertisers can use to structure for scale. Visit Meta for Business, for more information on the ad auction and delivery system. 

When it comes to creating snap ads, the little ghost has your back. Snapchat distributes quite a bit of information to help advertisers find success on their platform. In this post, we’re consolidating their tips along with the insights from veteran users to give you an all-in-one guide to Snapchat ad strategy and campaign optimization. Let’s get into it. 

How to create a Snapchat Ad strategy from scratch 

When you start out, you’ll set up your campaign similar to how you would with Facebook ads. It goes like this: campaign > ad set > ad. You can have multiple ad sets in one campaign and multiple ads in one ad set. 

The Snapchat ads manager doesn’t save your work halfway through. If you start creating an ad, make sure you have time to finish it. The last thing you want is to waste time creating ads that only the Snapchat ghost will end up seeing. 

Instant Create vs Advanced Create

Choose your campaign objective

With Instant Create, you can build a single ad in under 5 minutes. It’s a solid option for beginners. 

For more detailed targeting options, you’ll want to opt for Advanced Create. 

Choosing a campaign objective in Instant Create is as easy as clicking one of the 5 options in the screenshot above. With Advanced Create, the options are a bit more thorough. Here’s what that looks like:

‍

When choosing your campaign objective, think about what you want your audience to do when they swipe up on your snap ad. Choose from the following options:

Awareness

• Awareness
• Promote Places

Consideration

• App installs
• Drive traffic to website
• Drive traffic to app
• Engagement 
• Video views
• Lead generation

Conversions

• App conversion: Drive specific actions on your app.
• Website conversions: Drive specific actions on your site.
• Catalog sales: Drive sales on your chosen product catalog.

You can find out which ad types are available for each objective here.

Once your campaign objective is set, choose a start and end date (or just a start date, if you plan on running the campaign indefinitely) and set your daily and lifetime spend caps. Campaign spend caps must be at least $20.

On the next page, you’ll name your Ad Set then attach Snap Pixel and Snap App ID Tracking. Snap Pixel is a tool that helps you measure your campaign’s cross-device impact. This means you’ll be able to track the actions Snapchatters take on your site after seeing this ad. Snap App ID tracks actions snapchatters take in your mobile app after seeing your ad. Using this feature unlocks additional targeting benefits like Mobile App Custom Audiences, App Re-engagement Optimization Goals, or SKAdNetwork. 

Right under that is where you pick your ad set budget and schedule. The daily budget minimum is $5. Then you have the option to pick your placements. Snapchat recommends choosing automatic placement, but here’s what it looks like to customize:

Instant Create Audience Targeting

Select the appropriate demographics for your campaign. Here, you’ll specify your audience by gender, age, and language. Next, you pick the location(s) you want to target. 

Click “Show Advanced Targeting” to view the final two targeting sections: “Interests and Custom Audiences” and “Devices”. 

“Lifestyles” and “Visitors” are the two Snapchat Lifestyle Categories within the Interests and Custom Audiences section. According to Snapchat, these are “Audiences that have been built and packaged using Snapchat and Third-Party Data, allowing you to reach people based on their online and real-world interests and behaviors.” 

• Lifestyle categories are created based on what the users are most interested in according to what media they consume.
• Visitors are categories based on where the users go on their mobile devices.

There are a lot of options to choose from, so spend a good bit of time scrolling through and designing the audience that best fits your target customer base.

Last up is device targeting. You can pick between android and iOS, cellular or wifi, and specific device makes. This is only relevant in some situations, like if your app is only available for iOS. Otherwise, clicking “All” is your best bet. 

Advanced Create targeting options

In addition to demographics offered in Instant Create, you also get to choose a household income, education level, and marital/parental status.

The biggest difference between the two is the Interests and Custom Audiences section. With Advanced Create, you can pick from Predefined Audiences or create custom audiences from scratch. Predefined audiences are the Lifestyle and Visitor categories available in Instant Create.

Custom Audiences can be created using Snap Audience Match (CRM Lists), Snap Engagement Audience, and Lookalikes. You can choose to deselect the option to expand your audience automatically to optimize performance if you want, but it’s automatically selected based on Snapchat’s recommendations. 

When you click the “Create Audience” button, you’re taken to a page where you choose from one of 3 options: 

• Custom Audience
• Lookalike Audience: Choose a seed audience, a location, then a Lookalike type. 

• Similarity: Matches your seed audience the best, but is smaller. 
• Balance: Mid-sized audience that balances resemblance and reach.
• Reach: Larger audience that prioritizes reach by broadening resemblance to the seed audience. 

• Saved Audience: This option takes you to the Audience Insights page. Here, you can customize your audience and then save or export. You can also click through a visual representation of the audience you create. 

In addition to the operating system, device make, and connection type, Advanced Create also allows you to target specific mobile carriers. 

Here are some best practices to keep in mind: 

• Keep your audience size under 20 million people per ad creative (be warned: a minimum audience size of 1,000 is required to run an ad). 
• Create one ad set per unique audience. 
• Use the Lookalike Audience feature to find new customers. 
• A/B test ad sets with a specific audience by running multiple ads with unique creative assets.

Choose your budget and goal

Now’s the time to pick your daily budget, goal, and bid. 

Auto-bid will get you the lowest CPC if you’re new to Snap ads. If you plan to choose a bid amount, go with whatever you’re willing to pay to get the action you want.

With Advanced Create, you’ll adjust your per-ad budget in the Delivery section. The options change based on your goal, but here’s what it looks like if you choose “Swipe Up”:

While Snapchat recommends auto-bid, you can play around with Target Cost and Max Bid and see how they affect your results. When you click the Max Bid option, Snapchat will offer a recommended range to choose from. You don’t have to pick within this range, however. 

Choosing Max Bid also unlocks the Pacing feature, You can pick Standard to spread your CPA organically across your set dates or you can choose Accelerated to deliver your ads as quickly as possible (best for time-sensitive campaigns). 

How to create a Snapchat ad

The next page is where you create your content. 

1. Choose your ad type/placement at the top of the screen. 
2. Create an ad name, headline, and make your ad sharable. 
3. Upload your Top Snap media (AKA your ad’s creative asset). Snapchat’s Instant Create has built-in templates for the Top Snap, but you can also create your own on a design platform like Canva. Alternatively, you can use a pre-existing logo from Wepik to give your ads a professional and recognizable look.
4. Select and customize your attachment (where you want your viewers to go). 
5. Select your CTA. 
6. Last but not least, add impression tags and swipe up tags for impression tracker verification.
7. Click next to review your ad, pay, and publish.

‍

You’ll also get access to additional features depending on where you send your viewers. For example, you might see the option to enable autofill for lead generation or smart prefetching to speed up mobile site load times. 

How to optimize your Snapchat Ads campaigns 

When it comes to optimizing your Snapchat Ads, it all comes down to trial and error. First check that your ad type aligns with your advertising goal:

• For example, single image ads are great for conversions. 
• Use filters and lenses for UGC marketing. These ads tend to inspire trust in your brand and are less intrusive than traditional ad formats. And when users in your chosen location use your filter or lens to send Snaps to friends in other locations, you get even more exposure. When creating a filter, opt for something artistic that doesn’t obscure the main part of the user’s Snap. That’ll encourage more Snapchatters to use your filter.
• Lenses are also a powerful AR shopping tool. Create a lens that shows users how your product will look when they bring it home and put it to use. 
• Story ads are good for snagging attention quickly.
• Commercials are only available to selected advertisers, but they’re super effective as they can’t be skipped.
• Collection ads are ideal for e-commerce stores looking to drive sales. To set yourself up for success here, choose the top-performing products on your site, optimize your photos, and add some enticing CTAs. 
• We all know how effective video ads can be. Keep your Snapchat video ads short and hook viewers by calling out their pain points from the start. Use audio and captions to make your ads accessible. Lay out your solution to the viewers’ problem, then end with a strong CTA. 

9 tips for optimizing your Snapchat Ad campaigns:

1. A/B test (aka split test) your ads.
2. Define strong KPIs.
3. Keep up with your audience insights and optimize targeting accordingly. Pay key attention to the purchase intent metric.
4. Familiarize yourself with Snapchat culture.
5. Only advertise to locations where your product is available for purchase (that includes shipping options for e-commerce).
6. Make your creative asset fun, snappy, and shareable. Shoot for 5 or 6 seconds.
7. Create Snapchat ads that feel like native content. That means throwing out the polished, professional vibe and going for a more casual, conversational ad. 
8. Launch a broad, data-gathering campaign; then study your Delivery Insights.
9. Try out goal-based bidding. It’s a strategy where you optimize ads toward a specific action you want viewers to take. You set a cost-per-action requirement, and Snapchat will deliver impressions to efficiently achieve your desired outcome.

Want to make Snapchat an integrated part of your marketing strategy?

Marin Software's team of marketing consultants are standing by to get you started. Our tool makes cross-channel executive perspectives easy to see, and helps you make the best tactical marketing decisions possible…which is especially important when testing new channels. When you integrate the management and analysis of all your social and paid search platforms together, you'll save time and energy for everyone on the team. Our experts will make sure everything is tied together properly at the start so you can automate the systems that slow you down.

There's no reason to put all your social media advertising eggs in one basket when there’s a whole world of low competition and high ROI advertising opportunities out there. If you’re ready to branch out, consider giving Snapchat a chance. 

Snapchat demographic statistics

With a recent resurgence in popularity, the platform is experiencing a new fleet of users among teens and young adults. As of the second quarter of 2022, the app had 347 million daily active users worldwide, which is an 18% increase from the previous year.

Snapchat reaches 75% of Gen Z. If you’re trying to reach a younger demographic, Snap ads might just be your secret weapon. Many of today’s teens even use Snapchat over their phone’s native messaging platform for chatting with friends. While these users might also use social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the fact that many advertisers sleep on Snapchat means less competition for your ads. 

Take the airline-booking app Hopper, for example. A recent case study from Snapchat’s inspiration page revealed some pretty impressive stats:

• Snapchatters were 37% more likely to watch a flight on Hopper vs users acquired from other social platforms. 
• Snapchatters had a booking rate 4 times higher than users acquired on other platforms. 
• The brand achieved a 50% decrease in cost per install (CPI) by using radius targeting on Snapchat.

What sets Snap apart from other social media platforms

Now that we’ve piqued your interest, let's find out what Snapchat ads are all about. Snapchat started as an app used solely for sharing vanishing images. Soon after, they added the ability to send direct messages and send short videos. They led the pack when it came to the Stories concept, lenses, and geofilters. 

Nowadays, they’ve expanded to include a Discover Page filled with news, articles, and stories by featured creators. That Discover Page is your ticket to advertising success. It houses Stories at the top. Scroll down a bit to see the featured content.
Snapchat ads are similar to the ads you’re used to on popular advertising platforms like Facebook and Instagram. They appear between Stories, on the Discover Page, and in the form of branded lenses and geofilters.

Ad types available on Snapchat

Below are all the Snap ads formats you can use to reach your target audience:

Single image or video ad

This is Snapchat’s basic ad format. It displays a single image or video full screen and can be used for most any brand objective. Videos can be up to three minutes long, but the platform recommends keeping them between 3 and 5 seconds for the best results. Snapchat’s images and videos are lumped together in the same category. This full-screen ad format enables users to take action by swiping up.

These ads take up the entire screen, meaning they don’t have to compete for the viewer’s attention with other content. They appear between content in the following sections: User Stories, Publishers, Creators, and Our Stories. 

Here are a few use cases:

• You can attach your website to the ad so that the CTA swipe-up link lets users make a purchase without leaving the Snapchat app. 
• Generate more app installs by attaching an “Install Now” swipe-up CTA to the bottom of the ad screen. This allows viewers to download your app without leaving Snapchat.
• Long-form video is also an option. Snapchat will play a 10-second preview of your chosen video. The bottom CTA will have a swipe-up link directing users to watch the full video. 

Collection

Perfect for ecommerce brands, Snapchat’s Collection ads allow you to showcase a series of products. If a Snapchatter is interested, these ads include four different tappable tiles that make it easy for them to buy and browse.

On-Demand filters

Create an On-Demand geofilter for users visiting your location of choice. This is a good option for brand awareness campaigns. There are a few different types of geofilters:

• Event geofilters: Become available at the time and location of your event.
• Shared Spaces geofilters: Appear to users in communal areas like malls, airports, parks, etc. 
• Chain geofilters: Available to your brick-and-mortar store customers.
• National geofilters: Available to everyone in your chosen country.

Filters can be made smart to serve ads with real-time updates based on the user's location, name, time, etc. 

Lenses

Snapchat really paved the way for TikTok and Instagram filters. I mean, how could we forget the OG puppy ears? Snapchat’s lenses are its AR filters. 

Lenses give Snapchat advertising a creative edge. Using these, advertisers can encourage viewers to participate in memorable interactive augmented reality experiences. With the platform’s Lens Web Builder, marketers can select from hundreds of animations, 3D objects, and effects to build a branded AR lens to connect with audiences in an engaging way.

Face lenses manipulate the user's facial features to make them appear different in some way or another. They can be used to transform users into a character relevant to your brand or as a way for users to try on your products without leaving the Snapchat app.

World lenses appear on the outward-facing camera (aka the back camera). They detect the user’s environment and allow users to interact with 3D objects overlaid on their world. These filters are also an effective method of showcasing products. 

Branded filters allow brands to advertise inside user interactions. Most of the other ad types offered by the platform live on the Stories/Discover Page. Branded filters show up when a user goes to send a Snap to a friend. Filters are, by far, one of the most fun things about the social media app because they can be applied to photos and videos as an extra, entertaining add-on. Brands can also develop their own unique filters for users to apply. Creating these filters is a great way to build brand awareness among users who might not have clicked your ad on the Discover Page.

Story ads

Story ads, part of Snapchat’s Discover feed, help you reach your target audience and drive brand awareness with a branded tile. Snapchat story ads are a series of images or videos that appear in between user stories or in the Discover Feed. They can display a collection of between 1 and 20 images or videos. These are pretty effective considering many Snapchat users watch their entire Story feed multiple times a day.

You can also advertise an article via the article ad format. It will pop up in the Discover section amongst other featured Stories and Articles. 

Product catalog ads

Display a series of products with this shoppable ad format. These catalog ads can display as collection ads, single image/video ads, or story ads. They allow users to purchase without leaving the Snapchat app. 

Commercials

Commercial ads are non-skippable 6-second video ads. The actual video can last up to 3 minutes, but the ad is only non-skippable for the first 6 seconds. They appear within curated content and for better or worse, Snapchatters can’t skip them. 

Dynamic ads

Marketers who are active users of Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram may already know that running dynamic ads is a great way to promote your brand. However, unlike other social media platforms, the Snapchat dynamic ads are only sent to users who’ve previously interacted with a brand. Offered in two formats — single image and collection — these dynamic ads are designed from pre-set templates and from your product catalog, eliminating the need to create them manually each time.

‍

Wrapping up

Now that you understand the basics of Snapchat ads, it's time to get to snapping. Snapchat's ads manager has a pretty nice suite of analytics where you can find what segments interact with your ads (including segments you didn't choose to include in your campaign). This is super helpful when it comes to improving your campaign relevance and reducing your advertising costs.

Paired with MarinOne's Snapchat integration, you can see all your advertising campaigns in one place, making it easier to identify budget by channel, successful products, and successful audiences that can be tested across various platforms. Speak to one of our marketing experts for a free consultation to get started with am omnichannel advertising strategy, featuring Snapchat.

Marin Software supports Snapchat ad optimization

Marin Software's repertoire of platform integrations continues to expand as we introduce a direct Snapchat integration into our suite of tools, available now to Marin users. 

Chris Lien, Marin's Chairman and CEO, said the following about this promising partnership: “‘Snapchat has an enormous reach with millennial and Gen Z shoppers who hold $4.4 trillion in global spending power. This gives brands an incredible opportunity to drive brand awareness and revenue with their future customers. We look forward to providing our customers an avenue to integrate our powerful reporting, advanced bidding, and campaign management tools to achieve the best performance on the Snapchat platform.”  

The combination of Snapchat audiences with MarinOne's bidding and automation will prove to be a winning duo for advertisers. Marin has been a leading provider of digital marketing software for performance-driven advertisers for nearly two decades, while Snapchat continuously innovates new and unique experiences for users.

Incorporating Snap more thoroughly into our software is a direct response to our clients's needs as well as market popularity of Snap continuously rising. With 18% YoY growth in users, Snapchat has proven that forging their own path in the social media landscape is a solid strategy. They continue to lead the charge globally in AR, avatar, and communication features for users.

With the assistance of machine learning and automated optimization, the MarinOne integration with Snapchat’s Marketing API gives advertisers the opportunity to analyze, monitor, and improve Snapchat campaign performance, while making one-to-one comparisons with other channels. Advanced analytics through MarinOne's grids provide flexible reporting, while AI bidding, budget pacing, and forecasting provide marketers with the insights they need to get the most ROI possible.

If you'd like to get started with a Snapchat strategy, speak to one of Marin's marketing consultants–we can get the MarinOne - Snapchat integration up and running for you in no time at all.

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.

‍

Amazon receives over two billion visitors a month. With such a large audience frequently visiting its platform, it’s no wonder the number of marketplace sellers has exploded over the last decade. The volume of online shoppers is making it harder than ever for sellers to make an impression and grab the attention of customers. If your goal is to expand your reach and attract new customers, Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) may be the answer. And there is no better time than now. Why? Amazon DSP is on track to make $17.6 billion from advertising this year and is expected to reach a staggering $46.6 billion by 2025. 

What is Amazon DSP?

Amazon DSP enables programmatic buying and selling of display, video, and audio ads. The demand-side platform allows you to reach audiences both on and off of Amazon and across leading publishers’ sites like Twitch.tv, IMDb, Audible, Zappos, and others. The ads often appear not only on Amazon and Amazon-owned websites, but across Amazon-owned apps, Amazon devices, and affiliate websites and apps within Amazon’s network. Through Amazon DSP, you can create more brand and product awareness to encourage shopper re-engagement and retarget lost or potential customers. 

The 4 Amazon DSP Ad Types

Dynamic E-commerce Ads

Dynamic ads automatically optimize which ad to display based on your campaign goal. Using machine learning, Amazon DSP can feed audiences relevant ads based on predictable behavior—delivering coupon code strategy tactics to incentivize impulse buyers and generating ads with customer reviews in them to engage customers who prefer to read reviews before purchasing a product. Since dynamic ads only direct to an Amazon product listing page, they are not a viable option if you use DSP to promote your direct website. 

Static Ads 

Unlike dynamic ads, static ads feature a call-to-action and a simple image. They can lead customers to an Amazon product listing, an Amazon Brand store, or directly to your website. 

Video Ads Through DSP

In-stream or out-stream video content can be displayed both on and off Amazon. Your video ads can link directly to your website or to a product detail page on Amazon. Video ads through DSP help you leverage Amazon’s audiences to target the right shoppers. 

Over-The-Top Video Ads (OTT)

These ads, displayed as full-screen videos on TV, allow you to create brand awareness in a separate medium. By using OTT, you can expand your reach to millions more people and target specific Amazon audiences. Keep in mind though: with OTT ads shoppers have no way to click and take action. 

Amazon DSP Targeting Options

With Amazon DSP’s thousands of customer segments and its insights into shopper history and intent, it can help support many of your advertising goals. Here’s a glance at the different targeting options available.

Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is often used for brand awareness purposes and enables you to set any number of triggers so you can target shoppers further down the funnel. 

Lifestyle Targeting

With Lifestyle targeting, relevant ads are served to people who buy from a particular category habitually. This type of targeting allows you to target customers who share similar characteristics with your current customers or are interested in brand-relevant categories. 

Demographic Targeting

You can target ads based on gender, age, income, or location.

Device Targeting

Target your ads based on specific end-user devices including Android or Apple phones, different operating systems, desktop users, or other niche devices such as the Amazon Fire tablet. 

In-Market Targeting

By using in-market targeting, you can build brand awareness and increase sales. Audiences who are “in-market” are those who have high intent with a greater likelihood of purchasing your product or services.

Contextual Targeting

Serve ads to users based on what they are browsing right now. Contextual targeting is a great option to encourage impulse buys and drive conversions quickly. 

Remarketing Targeting

For consumers who are on the fence about buying a product or a competitive product, remarketing targeting can help. The different types of remarketing targets include Pixel-Based, ASIN, Purchased ASIN, Brand Halo, and Similar Product remarketing. 

Audience Lookalike Targeting

Audience Lookalike targeting hones in on customers who share similarities with your existing customers. With this option, you can take advantage of Amazon’s unique data combined with its collaborative filtering that can create detailed consumer profiles. 

Advertiser Audiences 

Amazon DSP allows you to leverage third-party data so you don’t have to solely rely on the first-party data that Amazon provides. Through the use of pixels, CRM data, and/or DMP audience transfers, you can reach customers who have previously engaged with your brand. 

5 Reasons Amazon DSP Is a Powerful Tool for Advertisers 

By using Amazon DSP, you can take your campaign performance to a whole new level and achieve your programmatic advertising goals. Here’s how:

Audience Insights and Analytics 

One of the greatest benefits of Amazon DSP is that advertisers can tap into Amazon’s first-party shopper data. Every search, view, click, purchase, and other shopper action along the customer journey is tracked. With Amazon DSP’s robust data capabilities, you can glean more information about how, what, when, and why customers buy what they buy. You can also gain access to key performance metrics such as total purchases, product units sold, add-to-cart rates, and more to help you determine what’s driving results and what’s not.

Retargeting

Retaining your current audience is not only critical to sustaining your company’s success but is also a more cost-effective way to spend your ad dollars instead of attracting new customers. Using Amazon DSP, you can retarget potential customers who have already engaged with your brand or products. 

Dynamic Targeting

Targeting shifts over time. Amazon DSP allows you to adjust your strategy accordingly so you can move your ad placements, reroute your creative spending, or reposition your domain ads to reach customers who have expressed interest in your product.

Extended Reach

With Amazon DSP, you can expand your audience reach across a vast range of sites. An attention-grabbing display ad or video campaign can improve your brand perception and increase awareness by being displayed on a large number of websites simultaneously.

Time Savings

Amazon DSP enables you to have your campaigns up and running in just minutes so you don’t have to spend time playing phone tag, negotiating, handing off creative tasks, reconciling billing, and settling up payments.

How MarinOne Can Help

Looking to take your Amazon DSP to the next level? 

MarinOne integrates with Amazon DSP to help you better understand your customers on Amazon. Our platform goes far beyond what Amazon provides with a comprehensive suite of tools that activate and amplify your entire Amazon advertising campaign portfolio. 

With MarinOne, you can analyze paid search and social advertising as well as other retail media, shipping campaigns, and marketplaces, giving you a cross-publisher and cross-channel view of performance. 

Our alerts provide real-time updates on changes in activity so you can always be in the know and never miss an opportunity to improve performance. Use our marketplace signals to link your DSP performance to reviews, ratings, inventory status, price, and more. In addition, MarinOne features Amazon metrics like detailed page views and new to brand.

Ready to find out more about how MarinOne can help with your Amazon DSP campaigns? Get a personalized demo today.

Savvy digital marketers know that Google Ads is a great way to reach more customers and bring leads to your business. 96% of brands spend money on Google Ads, so this is Marketing 101, right? But while you know it's a must, getting Google Ads to deliver can sometimes prove tricky.

You could be making common mistakes that cost you money and reduce your ROI. 

So, to help you squeeze the absolute most from your marketing spend, we'll discuss some of the most common Google Ads mistakes to watch out for. Let’s get started. 

Mistake 1: Not Targeting Ads Correctly

Let's say Bob runs a small business that sells blenders online. He's been running ads for a while now, and he’s gotten pretty good at it. But there is one mistake he keeps making: he isn’t targeting his ads correctly.

Bob’s ad with the keyword “blender” is getting a lot of clicks from people searching for the 3D graphics tool. That’s a problem—he needs to target his ads to cooks specifically. To do that, he needs to use the right keywords.

For example, he could use keywords like “kitchen blender” or “smoothie blender.” Using these keywords, he can ensure his ad is shown to people who are actually looking for what he’s selling.

Once Bob's worked out which keywords are most likely to perform best for his business, he must weave these phrases into his product descriptions, website copy, and blog posts.

Our recommendation? Hire a conversion copywriter to help you. Writing with keywords can be a bit like playing Tetris—if you can’t slot them in naturally, it won't work.

‍

Mistake 2: Not Using Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are words or phrases for which you don’t want your ad to show. For example, if you sell blenders, you might want to add “software” and “3D imaging” as negative keywords. That way, your ad won’t appear when someone searches for the software development tool.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people forget to add negative keywords to their campaigns. As a result, they waste money reaching people who are not searching for their products.

Mistake 3: Not Bidding On the Right Keywords

You need to bid on the right keywords when running a display ad. If you don’t, your ad might not show up at all. And if you bid on the wrong keywords, you could waste money.

For example, let’s say you sell women’s clothing. You could bid on keywords like “women’s clothing” or “dresses.” But if you bid on the keyword “clothing,” your ad might show up for searches like “men’s clothing” or “kids’ clothing.” And you don’t want to waste your money on those clicks.

To avoid this mistake, use Google's Keyword Planner to research which keywords are most relevant to your business. Add those keywords to your campaign and bid on them accordingly.

Mistake 4: Not Using Ad Extensions

Ad extensions give your ad more space and include more information—like a CTA, phone number, address, image, or video. All this information can be beneficial to potential customers, and it can help you stand out from the competition.

To add ad extensions to your campaign, go to the “Ad extension” tab in your Google Ads account and choose which extensions you want to add.

Mistake 5: Not Tracking Your Results

If you’re not tracking your results, you won’t know if your ad is working, and you could be wasting a lot of money. Check the performance to see what’s working and what isn’t. To do this, you need to set up conversion tracking.

Conversion tracking measures how many people who see your ad go on to do what you want them to do. This could be making a purchase, signing up for your newsletter, or downloading a white paper.

To set up conversion tracking, you’ll need to add a piece of code to your website. This might sound daunting, but it’s pretty simple (check out the link for a step-by-step guide).

Mistake 6: Not Optimizing With Conversion Testing

If you’re not testing and optimizing, you could miss out on many conversions. Test different headlines, descriptions, and call-to-actions to see what works best. You might be surprised by the results.

To test different elements of your ad, create two (or more) ads that are identical except for the component you want to try. For example, you could test two headlines and see which one gets more clicks.

Once you’ve created your ads, run them for a set period (usually at least a week) to collect data. Then compare the results and see which ad performed better.

Mistake 7: Search Network & Display Network Default Campaign Targeting Options

When you create a new campaign, Google will automatically set your targeting options to the Search Network & Display Network. It might not be necessary to target both of these networks (though they often work well together), so be sure to get a sense of which is best for you if that’s the case.

To change your targeting options, go to the “Networks” tab in your campaign settings. You can deselect the Search Network and/or Display Network.

Mistake 8: Not Using Location Targeting

Location targeting helps restrict your ad to people in a chosen region so you can maximize your marketing spend and have your ads seen by those most likely to respond.

There are a few different ways to target your ads to a specific location. The first is to target by country, state, or city. For example, if you only want to show your ad to people in New York, you would select “Target” and then “Location.”

You can also target by radius. This is useful if you have a brick-and-mortar store and you want to target people who live nearby. To do this, select “Target” and then “Radius.”

Finally, you can target by zip code. This is similar to targeting by radius, but it’s more precise. For instance, you might want to advertise to residents in a suburb but not in the adjacent business park. Select “Target” and " Zip code " to execute this tactic.

Mistake 9: Ignoring Regional Trends

When you’re targeting a specific region, knowing the trends in that area gives you a tremendous advantage. For example, if you’re targeting the United States, you might find that there are certain states where your product or service is more popular than others. Or maybe you sell fans, and there’s a heatwave in one part of the country. Trends can help you spot these opportunities. 

Google Trends can show you insights about a specific region. Simply enter a keyword or phrase and select a region. Google Trends will then show you how popular that keyword or phrase is in that area.

‍

How MarinOne can help

Display advertising is a great way to reach your target audience, while search ads are the best way to get prospects down the sales funnel and help them convert. The fight to stand out is fierce, but by avoiding these common mistakes, you have a real shot at reaping the rewards. If you want to improve your search engine marketing or display ads strategy, MarinOne can help you identify opportunities and optimize your campaigns.

There are many moving parts to a GA campaign, from targeting to keywords to ad extensions. MarinOne gives you one platform to manage all of your paid search campaigns so you can avoid mistakes and save time. It integrates with GA so you can see your analytics in one place, allowing you to track your results and make adjustments as needed. Finally, you can automate and optimize your ads with just a few clicks. To get things rolling, you don’t need to be a technical expert—our platform is designed for non-technical users.

Would you like to find out what MarinOne can do for you? Schedule a free demo to learn more.

‍

Display advertising is one of the best ways for businesses to grow their online presence—and there are plenty of sites where you can promote your products and services. Unfortunately, many beginners make mistakes that impair their advertising efforts.

Several factors need to be considered to create a successful display ad campaign. This article will discuss display ads and why you should use them, and we’ll give you 11 tried and tested tips for standing out. 

Why You Should Use Display Ads 

It’s true that text-based search ads have their advantages when it comes to click-through rates and conversions, but there’s still an important place for display ads. Some important uses of display ads include highlighting products or services that are visual in nature, and cultivating and educating potential customers in the early stages of the sales funnel, regardless of whether they click on the ad. It’s no wonder, then, that companies in the US have been spending more every year on display advertising—and this trend is set to continue. 

Why else should you use display advertising? First and foremost, display ads can—when done correctly—put you in front of your target audience immediately. This is in contrast to the longer-term investment of time needed for organic content marketing—making it an excellent option if you’re trying to scale a newly established business quickly. 

Because you’re getting in front of more of the right people more quickly, display advertising is an excellent way to increase sales right out of the gate. Since you’re driving more traffic to your website right away, you’ll have more leads to send down the marketing funnel—enabling you to convert more of those leads to paying customers while you build your brand organically at the same time.

Here’s how you can get started with display ads so you can keep your business growing. 

Keep it Brief 

Regardless of the industry you operate in, you’ve probably got fiercer competition than ever. However, at the same time, you’re fighting for limited attention spans: research from Microsoft found that average attention spans dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds between 2000 and 2015. The rise in short-form video platforms like TikTok will likely have an additional effect, but the full impact won’t be visible for a while yet.

Your advertising copy must be brief if you want to engage users. Keep the text content to no longer than a few words, and make sure that every word adds something valuable. 

Focus on One or Two Benefits 

If you’ve never tried display advertising before, you might find it tempting to try and stuff as much information into your ad as possible. However, adopting this approach will confuse your target audience. 

Remember: your display ad is only an introduction for users. Focus on one or two key benefits conveyed through strategic use of words and powerful visuals and give interested users more information once they’ve clicked through. 

Reel Users in With Your Headline 

When you consume content online, you probably skim headlines—but how many articles, videos, or ads do you click on? Probably a small percentage. Users do the same with your ads, so your headline must reel them in. 

Ask yourself this question: Why should a customer buy from you instead of a competitor? Once you know that, you’ll have an easier time creating your headline. 

Avoid Vague or Metaphorical Words 

Since you don’t have much time to convince users that they should engage with your ad, this is not the time for symbolism. Don’t force viewers to struggle with a riddle—give them the straight goods using a clear and compelling message in simple language.

Use Positive Language and Avoid Negative Words 

When a sentence is a negative statement, the reader must perform an extra mental step to decipher it, so use simpler language to help your readers understand your message at a glance. A positive statement is more engaging—and more likely to be clicked on.

Additionally, a negative attitude can repel prospective customers, so adopt a light and entertaining tone when possible.

Create Scannable Copy

Display ads are not the place for lengthy descriptions—effective ones act like a hook to lure readers to your more detailed content. Make it clear what your offer is; it should be interesting and obvious at a glance. 

Use Powerful, Relevant Visuals 

Did you know that people remember 65% of what they see three days later, compared to 10% of what they hear? And according to Venngage, 52% of research participants said that visual content is “very important”: 

‍

You can include several kinds of visuals in your display ads, including still images and animated GIFs. Think about your audience's interests to ensure you choose visuals that appeal to them. 

Be Creative and Authentic

Users ignore boring ads, but ads that are too flashy are also best avoided. Strive to find a balance that's authentic to your brand. Use colors and messaging that are consistent with your branding. Be daring, but take calculated risks. Listen to feedback from others, as this will guide you in the right direction. 

Tailor Ads to the Platform 

Requirements will vary depending on where you place your ads. What works on Google might not work on Bing, and ads that have succeeded on LinkedIn might not be as effective on Twitter or Facebook. Before running campaigns, take the time to think about what interests users on the platform you're using to maximize your engagement rates.

Set Clear Goals Before Your Campaign 

Setting goals before you create ads is the most important thing you can do. A campaign without direction will look disjointed, so users won't know what to expect from your products and services—and they won't click through. Clear goals give you KPIs you can assess to be sure you’re on the right track.

Examples of goals you can set include generating leads, growing your audience, or earning a certain number of subscribers. Get clear on these, and everything will run more smoothly. 

Showcase your USP: Unique Selling Point

Making an impression is the most important goal of a display ad, so use the opportunity to become familiar to your audience. Define your USP—the attribute you most want to be known for—and express it in your ad using clear and impactful words. Consistency in your messaging will help make your ads more memorable.

Now you've got everything you need to create a successful display ad campaign

Running a successful display advertising campaign means considering many factors and adopting a strategic approach. Create ads that are clear, compelling, and scannable. A campaign with no defined goals is destined for failure, but experienced marketers have developed their eye through effort and testing—and using these 11 strategies, you can do the same. 

Also remember that display ads should be a piece of your overall omnichannel marketing strategy, and it’s important to see how they are performing in relation to your ads on other channels. 

Schedule a demo to learn more about how MarinOne’s cross-channel reporting and optimization platform can give you the insights you need to put your best foot forward on display ads together with search, social, and ecommerce to help you grow your business.

What’s the difference between Amazon CPC and vCPM cost models?

It’s important for brands to measure their digital marketing metrics, including comparing CPC vs vCPM (cost per thousand viewable impressions). CPC is based on the number of actual clicks the ad receives, while vCPM is based on the number of times an ad is viewed, regardless of whether shoppers click on it or not. Sponsored Display vCPM adheres to the MRC definition for an ad view: at least 50% of the ad should have been in the shopper’s view port for at least one second for it to be registered as a viewed impression.

CPC = Total Spend / Total Clicks

vCPM = Total Spend / ((Total impressions * % in-view) / 1000)

vCPM is often used for advertisers focusing on brand awareness or delivering a specific message, because this pricing model is more focused on exposure as opposed to a cost-per-click model. 

In Marin, brands can use both metrics, considering the implications of each, for a more comprehensive view of the performance of their ad campaigns. This information will help advertisers better understand the impact of their Sponsored Display campaigns, regardless of whether you are using click-based (CPC) or view-based (vCPM) attribution.

How does Amazon’s vCPM cost model work?

Conversions and Revenue for Sponsored Display vCPM campaigns are an ESTIMATED value that is attributed to BOTH viewable impressions AND clicks (because the cost type is based on viewable impressions - vCPM). To put it simply, alongside the actual Conversions and Revenue generated via the vCPM campaign, Amazon is also including estimated Conversions and Revenue when someone VIEWs your Sponsored Display Ad, but does not click on it.

It's also worth noting that the vCPM Conversions and Revenue are attributed to your brand sales and not the products in the campaign. For example if you run an 'Advertised Product Report' from Amazon you'll notice that the orders and sales do not match what is being displayed in Amazon's UI at campaign level. See below screenshot from a Sponsored Display Advertised Product Report:

‍

‍

• The 14 Day Total Orders (#) and 14 Day Total Sales columns reflect the Cost Type of a campaign
• The 14-Day Total Orders (#) - (Click) and 14-Day Total Sales - (Click) columns are based on click attribution (CPC Cost Type), regardless of whether your campaign cost type is set to CPC or vCPM

• Campaign A has parity across all 4 columns - because it’s campaign Cost Type is set to CPC
• Campaigns B to M, unlike Campaign A, differ because their campaign Cost Type’s are set to vCPM - the (Click) columns are your actual Orders and Sales, whereas your non-click columns are a combination of actual Orders and Revenue as well as Amazon’s estimated Orders and Revenue based on your ad being ‘viewed’.

Example

Campaign C generated 8 orders with a total revenue of £112.96 and to identify the estimated view Orders and Revenue, you subtract the (Click) column away from the regular column;

207 [14 Day Total Orders (#)]  -  8 [14-Day Total Orders (#) - (Click)]   =   199 estimated ‘view’ Orders

£2,564.39 [14 Day Total Sales]  -  £112.96 [14-Day Total Sales - (Click)]   =   £2,451.43 estimated ‘view’ Sales

How does this impact reporting of Amazon Sponsored Display campaigns in Marin?

Regardless of the cost type that you specify when creating your Sponsored Display Campaign (CPC or vCPM), Marin is able to report on both attribution models against that campaign.

For example, if you create a Sponsored Display campaign with vCPM as the Cost Type, Marin is still able to show you the Conversions and Revenue generated from the ad being clicked on (CPC Cost Type), alongside the ‘estimated’ view Conversions and Revenue (vCPM Cost Type) that Amazon is providing, and vice-versa. 

In the screenshot above you can see that, regardless of cost type, for a Sponsored Display campaign Marin is able to report on both traditional Conversions and Revenue (click based) and also the ‘view’ Conversions and Revenue - which is the combination of both actual and estimated Conversions and Revenue set by Amazon.

The table below shows the Conversion Types available via the MarinOne column selector that you can bring into view alongside your Sponsored Display campaigns.

How should I bid on this activity?

The decision is entirely yours. In Marin you have the option to either bid based upon actual clicked Conversions and Revenue or use the estimated ‘View’ Conversions or Revenue to target a CPA or ROAS goal - regardless of the cost model you’ve chosen to set up for your Sponsored Display campaign.

If your goal is performance (CPA / ROAS) Marin’s recommendation is to optimise towards actual clicked Conversion and Revenue and not ‘View’ Conversions or Revenue (even if your campaign is set to vCPM) because this is the actual performance of your Sponsored Display campaign and not an ‘estimated’ number of Conversions or Revenue. 

If you've used Marin's automated bidding tool to manage Bid Strategies for other publishers, then managing bids for Amazon Advertising accounts should be pretty familiar. Marin manages keyword-level and target-level calculated bids and supports all ‘performance’ Goals for your Amazon activity:

• Maximise Conversions to CPA
• Maximise Revenue to ROAS

If your goal is awareness advertisers and registered sellers in CA, DE, FR, ES, IT, IN, JP, UAE, UK and the US can set up an “Optimise for Viewable Impressions” strategy directly in the Amazon Ads UI to help create product awareness.

If you have any further questions related to the above please reach out to your Account Representative.

In 2021, more than 250 million items were purchased by Prime members worldwide over the two-day timeframe. This year, preparations for Prime Day should be well underway by now so that your brand can be ready when millions of consumers shop during one of the most significant retail events of the year. Here are a few tips so you can be prepared ahead of time.

Amazon Prime Day Tips:

• View your historical performance of past Prime Day events
• Create a ‘Prime Day’ page within your Amazon Store
• Start planning your budgets NOW. Remember, traffic to Amazon’s website is increased exponentially during the Prime Day event, so you want to capitalize on this. If you don’t have enough budget for your campaigns to stay visible throughout the day(s), your ads will be paused until the next day.
• Build brand awareness ahead of the event with Sponsored Display Ads and Sponsored Brand Video ads. Shoppers are more likely to purchase a product during Prime Day that they discovered during the lead-up to the event.
• During Prime Day, use Sponsored Display and Sponsored Product ads to engage with shoppers browsing similar products or even remarket to audiences that visited your product detail pages before Prime Day to stay top of mind on the day of the event.
• Use negative targeting to help prevent your ads from appearing on shopping results pages that don’t meet your performance goals.
• Check your inventory levels for your products, as well as understand your top-selling and least-selling products, so you know where to focus your efforts.
• Create and choose strong products to focus on in your Sponsored Product campaigns. Ensure their product detail pages are informative, have high-quality and detailed descriptions, and include four or more high-resolution images with a strong title.
• There are many more solutions for brands to reach audiences you might not be aware of. Consider diversifying your content before Prime day by streaming a video game on Twitch, listening to music through Amazon Music’s ad-supported tier, or streaming video via Freevee (formerly IMDb TV) and Fire TV…all of which are available via Amazon DSP ads.
• Use Sponsored Display Ads to target other products in your category to help reach new customers, or consider targeting your product detail pages to introduce shoppers to other products you sell. Let’s take ‘Computers & Office’ as an example: to engage new customers and ensure that your laptops are top of mind, you can target similar product pages within the Computers & Office category, or you can target your own product pages to promote your complementary products (e.g., laptop cases or external hard drives).
• Lastly, don’t forget, there’s the lead-up (- two weeks) and lead-out (+ two weeks) of the Prime Day event. Brands that advertise throughout all phases of Prime Day can better build brand presence with shoppers. According to Amazon’s internal data, “Brands that advertised leading up to and during Prime Day showed a 216% increase in awareness and 214% increase in considerations, compared to the week before.”

Amazon Prime Day Deadlines

Keep the following deadlines in mind for Prime Day as they are right around the corner, and some have already passed.

Prime Day Deals Deadline (for consideration):

• April 29

Lightning Deals Submission Deadline:

• April 29 (U.S. and Canada)
• May 13 (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and the UK)

Coupon Submission Deadline:

• June 10 (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, and the UK)

FBA Inventory Cutoff Deadline:

• June 20 (U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Portugal)
• June 29 (Japan)

Inbound Shipping Cutoff Deadline:

• June 2 (U.S. and Canada)
• June 22 (Mexico and Portugal)
• June 29 (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the UK)

Prime Member Promotions Deadline:

• April 29 (U.S. and Canada)
• May 13 (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Australia, Japan, India, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates)

Prime Exclusive Discounts Deadline:

• July 8 (the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Australia, and Japan) 
• July 19 (India, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates)

Prime Day:

• July 12-13 (U.S.)

As a marketer, you know that paid ads and organic social media traffic are both valuable. But how much effort and resources should you put into each? In this article, we'll explore the pros and cons of each campaign type to help you make smart choices. We'll also offer tips on how to measure the success of your campaigns. Read on to learn more. 

What are paid ads, and what are they used for? 

Paid ads are one of the most popular online marketing strategies for people and businesses to get their message out and drive traffic through their sales funnels. 

There are many types of paid ads, but the most common are pay-per-click (PPC) ads. As the name implies, the advertiser pays each time someone clicks on their ad.

Paid ads can be a great way to get your brand in front of an audience that’s already interested in what you have to offer. Since you're only paying for results (clicks), it can be a very cost-effective way to market your business.

Benefits of Using Paid Ads

• One of the biggest advantages of using paid ads is that they can quickly provide results. Unlike building followers through creating content and relying on SEO, which can take months to bring results, you can start seeing traffic from your paid ads almost immediately.
• Customers like them and respond well to them: especially social ads that feel native to the social media feed. Facebook advertising has been growing by leaps and bounds over the last few years and has many options for detailed audience targeting.
• In general, people like seeing ads that are targeted to their interests, and they're more likely to click on them.
• You can track and measure results: When you're running a paid ad campaign, you can track how many people are seeing your ad, how many are clicking on it, and what they do after they click through to your website. This information is invaluable in helping you to fine-tune your marketing strategy and optimize your campaigns.
• Paid ads can reach a large audience. For example, with Facebook Ads you can set your ad to appear to people in a certain geographic area.

Paid ads can generate a lot of traffic quickly and easily. Simply create the campaign, choose where you want it to show, and make it live.

Drawbacks of Using Paid Ads

• One of the biggest drawbacks of using paid ads is that they can be costly, especially if you're in a competitive market. The cost-per-click (CPC) can be high. You might also need to spend a lot of money on your ad campaign before seeing results. For example, the more your ads are served to potential buyers, the more data Facebook is able to collect. More data leads to better targeting and higher conversion rates down the line, but conversion rates may not be great starting out. 
• Campaigns need to be constantly monitored and adjusted to be effective. You need to keep an eye on your CPC and cost per action and ensure you're getting the results you want. If not, you may need to re-evaluate your strategy.
• Some people find paid ads to be disruptive and annoying. Paid ads have the disadvantage of being seen as a form of spam, and some may be less likely to trust your brand as a result.

What is Organic Social Media Traffic?

Organic social media traffic, on the other hand, is driven by unpaid posts, stories, and blogs, etc. that appear on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Organic social media content can be a great way to increase brand awareness and build relationships with potential customers. It’s also less disruptive than paid ads.

‍

Benefits of Targeting Organic Social Media Traffic

• The most obvious benefit of targeting organic traffic through social media is that it’s free. You don't have to pay for each click or impression as with paid ads.
• Organic traffic is also more likely to convert than paid traffic. This is because people who find your business organically may be further along in the buyer’s journey; they're actively searching for information related to your business, product, or service.
• Organic social media marketing campaigns are more sustainable in the long run than paid ads. Once you build a following, you'll continue to get organic traffic as long as you maintain the quality of your content. This is not the case with paid ads, which need to be continuously paid for.

Drawbacks of Relying on Organic Social Media Campaigns

• Organic traffic can be slow to build: One of the biggest drawbacks of relying on organic social media content is that it takes time to create quality content and build a following, and you may not get much traffic until you do so.
• To get the most out of organic social media content, you need to pair it with investing time and resources into search engine optimization (SEO). This includes keyword research, link building, and content marketing. The same principles that make your content valuable to search engines also make it valuable on social media, which in turn drives more traffic to your site and signals to search engines that your content is useful.

Organic Content vs Paid Ads: Which is Better for Your Business?

The answer depends on your business goals and objectives. If you're looking for a quick way to increase brand awareness or generate leads, paid ads may be the way to go. However, if you're interested in sustainable, long-term growth, organic ads are probably a better option. There’s a good chance that your business would benefit from both, but the relative resources you invest in each strategy can be assessed by looking at the pros and cons of each one.

Both options have their pros and cons:

• Both require ongoing management and optimization: Otherwise, your return on investment could be negative.
• Paid ads offer consistent and reliable returns: Since paid ads get more impressions from potential new buyers, they generally perform better than organic results.
• Organic content is free (aside from the time it takes to create, post, and manage it). 
• Paid ads can be disruptive: Ads can be intrusive and may put potential customers off your brand.

In the end, if you’re not sure where to start, try experimenting with both paid and organic social media campaigns to see what works best for you.

How to Measure the Success or Failure of Each Type of Campaign

An analytics program is needed to determine whether specific content from your organic social media campaign is performing well and the ROI you’re getting compared to your paid ads. To work out the best formula for how to divide your resources, use a combination of ad spend and organic content and analyze the results. The best way to do this is using an ad management platform like MarinOne. With MarinOne, you can see all your campaigns in one place, including performance data for both organic social media content and paid ad campaigns. This makes it easy to track the success of your organic and paid ad campaigns and compare the two side-by-side.

5 Quick Tips for Implementing a Successful Campaign With Both Types of Advertisements

1. Identify your goals before running a campaign. This will help you determine which type of ad is best suited to your needs.
2. Define your target audience. This helps to ensure you're targeting relevant users and not wasting ad spend on a demographic uninterested in your product or service.
3. Budget for both paid and organic campaigns. Don't put all your eggs in one basket—a mix of both can lead to the best results.
4. Monitor your campaigns regularly and make changes as needed. What works today may not work tomorrow. So, it's important to stay on top of your campaigns and keep tweaking them for optimal performance
5. Use MarinOne to simplify your efforts.

While paid ads can be very effective when done correctly, they do require investment, which might not be feasible, depending on your budget and the industry. To make paid ads work for you, be prepared to do A/B testing, reallocate funds if needed, and make sure to use retargeting strategies. Organic social media marketing is free, but it takes effort. You won't see results overnight, but investing in building a solid organic foundation can lead to great long-term exposure for your company.

Regardless of how much you put into each strategy, you’ll likely find that integrating both types of campaigns into your marketing strategy works the best. To fully take advantage of both types of campaigns, however, you’ll need a tool to automate and syncrhonize your efforts. This is where a platform like MarinOne comes in.

How MarinOne can help

With MarinOne’s automation tool, you can set up goals on your site using the programmable automation features in Google Analytics. You'll be able to track ad metrics, CLV, and conversions without having a full-time employee dedicated solely to analytics duties.

Analyze your organic traffic and paid ad data early and make changes according to your results, automatically boost popular organic posts, and build campaigns from your product feed. Since MarinOne works with Google Analytics, there’s no need for a separate tracking code or web property ID either.

Learn more about MarinOne’s ad automation tools today. Get in touch to speak with a team member to see how we can help you get the information and tools you need to increase the effectiveness of your paid ads and organic content.

Creating profitable banner ads is a non-negotiable skill in the marketing world. Like understanding Twitter and knowing your way around Google Analytics, it's just something you need to know. But mastering banner ads is no walk in the park.

Here are eye-opening stats to consider:

• Click-through rates for banner ads are .1% 
• The 468 x 60 banner has a .04% click rate
• Up to 50% of clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental 

It’s hard to get banner ads right. When done well, not only are they an effective way to generate leads and sales—but they can also be used to increase brand awareness and drive website traffic.

We'll take a look at what banner ads are, why you need to use them—and how to make them profitable. Keep reading to learn more.

What is a banner ad?

A banner ad is a digital marketing placement that promotes a product, service, or brand using a rectangular image, GIF, or video. Banner ads are typically displayed on websites, social media platforms, and email newsletters. 

Banner ads come in a variety of different sizes, and each size has its own unique benefits and purpose. Here are the most common banner ad sizes:

• Medium Banner: 300 x 250. This is a popular size for rectangle ads on websites, social media platforms, and email newsletters.
• Leaderboard: 728 x 90. This is the largest banner size and is typically used at the top of a website. It can also be used as a rectangle ad on Facebook and Instagram.
• Wide Skyscraper: 160 x 600. This is a popular size for skyscraper ads that appear on the edges of websites.
• Full Banner: 468 x 60. This is the standard banner size that's used on most websites. It's also the smallest size that can be used for a 728 x 90 leaderboard ad.

How do banner ads work?

Banner ads typically work on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-mille (CPM) basis. This means that you'll pay every time someone clicks on your ad (CPC), or every time your ad is displayed 1000 times (CPM).

When creating a banner ad, you'll need to consider the following:

• Your goals: What do you want your banner ad to achieve?
• Your target audience: Who are you targeting with your banner ad?
• Your budget: How much are you willing to spend on your banner ad campaign?
• The size of your ad: Banner ads come in a variety of different sizes. Choose the size that's right for you.
• The placement of your ad: Where will your banner ad be displayed?
• Your call to action (CTA): What do you want people to do when they see your banner ad?

Once you've considered all of these factors, you'll be ready to create your banner ad.

Advanced tips for creating a profitable banner

Here are some tips to follow:

1. Keep it simple

When it comes to banner ads, less is more. You only have a split second to capture someone's attention, so don't try to cram too much information into your ad. 

Stick to one message and make sure it's clear. CTAs surrounded by negative space see an increase in conversion rate of 232% compared to those surrounded by clutter—so remember: give your buttons room to breathe! 

2. Use strong visuals

People are visual creatures, and that's especially true when it comes to banner ads. Use high-quality images and videos that are relevant to your product or service. And make sure your visuals are attention-grabbing and visually appealing.

Pixellated pics, busy backgrounds, and generic stock photos are all big no-nos if you want your banner ad to stand out and look trustworthy. To add an extra layer of visual interest, consider using a high-quality black background to make your design pop. This can help your images and text stand out and grab the attention of potential customers.

In addition to choosing a good quality image, make sure your banner ad carries the blueprint of your brand: your colors, fonts, and logo should all be present and correct. Consistency is key to building trust with your audience—if they see a banner ad that looks like it belongs to your company, they're much more likely to click on it.

3. Make it mobile-friendly

More than half of all web traffic is coming from mobile devices—so you can't afford to ignore this crucial step. 

Make sure your banner ad is designed with a mobile-first approach. This means creating an ad that looks good and is easy to navigate on a mobile device. Use a large, legible font and big, bold CTAs. And keep the overall design of your ad simple and uncluttered.

4. Test, test, test

The only way to know for sure whether your banner ad is effective is to test it. Try out different versions of your ad and see what works best. Test different images, copy, CTAs, and layouts. Keep track of your results and continue tweaking your ad until it's as effective as possible. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to testing. 

When it comes to testing your banner ad, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• Test different versions of your ad: It may surprise you which designs appeal to people more than others.
• Keep track of your results: You won’t know what’s working unless you watch your metrics.
• Optimize your ad regularly: It's important to continually optimize your banner ad so it remains effective. As your business and target audience change, so should your ad. 

5. Use the right format

The display network you choose should have all the info you need on which sites your ad will appear. Make sure you read it!

Banner ads perform best when they're:

• Close to the content
• Above the fold
• On the left-hand side

It's unlikely you'll have a say over where your ad appears on the page, but you can target specific types of websites that align well with your brand.

6. Use persuasive copy

Your banner ad copy should be short, sweet, and to the point. You only have a few seconds to get your message across, so make sure it's clear and concise. Use persuasive language that speaks to your target audience and drives them to take action.

Remember, banner ads are not the place for long-form copy. Stick to one or two sentences at most.

Earlier this year, Google announced its updated partnership based on industry changes and user feedback. They fall into three key areas: education and insights, access and support recognition, and rewards. If you’re not taking advantage of Google Partners, it’s worth taking a look.

Updated Google Partner Program benefits 

Premier partner status is now offered to the top 3% of partners in each country. Premier partners can access the following exclusive perks:

• product betas
• advanced google ads support 
• Premier partner awards a new 2002 premier partner badge
• high value incentives

All google partners and premier partners get access to the monthly insights briefing from Think with Google. It contains the latest insights from Google on consumer behaviors and industry trends.

Additionally, all Partners and Premier Partners will gain eligibility for high-value offers ($500 Google Ads credits) for new clients. To qualify, the clients must spend $500 in the first 60 days. This is an upgrade from the program’s previous $100 credits and 30 day threshold. These offers will only be available for Partners and Premier partners. 

As of late February, all Partners are also listed in the new Google Partners directory, available to advertisers all over the world. With these new benefits come a new set of requirements that companies seeking partner status can meet at any time. They’re designed to help you maximize your clients' performance, identify new opportunities, and accelerate digital growth with Google Ads.

‍

Image Source

Updated Google Partner Program requirements

The requirements fall into three categories: performance, spend, and certifications.

According to Google, Partners requested two major alterations to the requirements as a result of the global economic situation and to make badge criteria more transparent:

1. Partners have the choice to apply or dismiss recommendations to achieve a 70% optimization score. While the optimization score requirement was due to take effect in June, it previously only allowed for the application of recommendations. However, Google listened to feedback regarding the ability to dismiss recommendations for clients in situations where it may not have made sense to accept. Allowing marketers to refuse suggestions by Google is a significant change.
2. Spend thresholds will stay at a 90-day spend of $10,000 US across all of a partner’s managed accounts. Pre COVID-19, the Partner badge requirements were set to increase to $20,000 every 90 days. However, Google listened to marketers and kept the requirement at $10,000.

Agency Partners also communicated to Google that not every Ads Manager within their agency teams should be eligible for certification. In response, Google agreed that advertisers will be able to tell Google the number of account strategists within their business, and “at least 50% of the account strategists you’ve identified will need to be certified in Google Ads” to meet the new requirements. Either update your number of account strategists if it’s out of date or encourage more strategists to get certified on Skillshop to comply. Additional details are outlined on the Google Support Page.

Image Source

Meeting the performance requirement 

With many agencies and search marketers being affected by the pandemic, the delay of these requirements from February 2020 to February 2022 was welcomed by agency partners. Google’s response to marketer feedback was also a refreshing change of pace. Now that the revamped program is here, it’s time to snag your badge status and start utilizing the new benefits.

The buyer journey is complex and digital marketers need to be able to connect with the right customers through the entire process. Different ad formats and placements can help brands make consumers aware of their product, push them into consideration for that product, and ultimately drive them to purchase it. Two key ad types to consider are search ads (served on search engines like Google, Bing, etc.) and display ads (served throughout the internet on various websites).

The main difference between display and search ads is that search ads are considered "pull" advertising while display ads are considered "push" advertising. So, search ads only appear to consumers actively searching for the required product or service. In contrast, display ads are considered paid placement and can appear anywhere on the web that a user may be navigating. These advertisements are based on several targeting parameters. Search and display advertisements are set up and run using various ad networks, from Google Ads to Amazon DSP, Criteo, and many others.

If your company's marketing budget is substantial enough to support various ad types, then you can (and should) test both search and display ads in your advertising strategy. But keep in mind that these ads are not interchangeable. Depending on the product or service type, you may have better click and conversion performance with one or the other. Think through the customer journey and how customers find your products. Is your product something that people need to seek out actively when the need for it arises, or maybe your product is something buyers might not know they need until they see an ad and the potential use case of your product? 

Advantages of Search ads

There are a lot of advantages of search advertising or search engine marketing (SEM). The first of many factors to consider is budget. If the available engine spend of the company is on the smaller side, say less than $10K per month, then SEM may be the best tactic for your business, as it allows more control over who finds your business and at what time. Targeting the right keywords is paramount in SEM for capturing users seeking your service or product. Getting focused and intentional in keyword targeting means that the business doesn't have to waste money on people that are not interested in the industry or are not yet ready to make a purchase decision. 

Another benefit is that businesses can easily cater to a local market via search engine marketing. Many targeting options can be paired with keyword targeting, so you end up with more niche and specific audience segments. Geographic, language, gender, age, and affinity (or interest) targeting are all available segments on Google Ads, for example.

In SEM, the sales cycle is typically short, and you are seeking to capture users at the bottom of the funnel or close to the point of purchase. Therefore, there is no need to continue advertising to individuals that have taken action or converted on-site unless remarketing is an essential tactic for your business. This strategy keeps audiences fresh and malleable. 

Advantages of display ads

Display ads are an effective tactic for any product that is visual in nature. Clothing, cars, beauty, pet care, and more are all excellent candidates for display as the customer offering can be summarized quickly and visually with a single image. 

In less visually friendly industries, like SaaS, insurance, education, or many B2B services…display can still be an effective ad type but with a different approach. In these sectors, short impactful phrases or statements, a key value proposition, or some kind of explanatory graphic (like illustrations) is the better way to quickly reach a display ad viewer. If the CTA and key message cannot be grasped in under 3 seconds on a display ad…your messaging is ineffective and needs to be revisited.

Another advantage of display advertising is that it provides unique access to niche or luxury buyers. With many demand-side platforms (or DSPs), segments can get as granular as a limited website list where you believe your potential customers would visit. Data mining paired with display advertising is also an effective method of getting your message to the right person at the right time, but be cautious that your data provider follows all privacy guidelines in your target geographical region.

Another technique for utilizing display ads is to focus on building brand awareness. If you want to build brand equity or get more top-funnel traffic to your website, consider display advertising a suitable medium. Simple company slogans or flagship product images ought to be utilized. If it looks like it belongs on the homepage of your website, it probably belongs in a brand awareness display ad.

Search ad considerations

We’ve established that display ads are shown on websites across the internet, but search ads only appear in search engine results. Therefore, the advertisers selecting a list of keywords relevant to the product or service must be incredibly judicious and strategic in identifying the right keywords to target. Suppose you are new to this exercise or working with the wrong advertising experts who don’t have enough know-how to develop effective keyword lists. In that case, your costs can become prohibitive quickly, and your overall ad account performance will suffer.

For search ads, each search engine advertising platform requires the advertiser to put a bidding type in place for each campaign. Identifying the right bidding type and optimization techniques for each campaign can be nuanced and sometimes a difficult task of trial and error. 

Display ad considerations

The primary consideration with display advertising is that the number of businesses using this method to advertise their business has increased. Due to this, for site owners, it becomes difficult to choose the right advertisers; from a competitive perspective, many verticals are pretty crowded. Expect higher CPMs (cost per 1,0000 impressions) or CPVs (cost per view) than what was once acceptable. 

Platforms like the Google Display Network make segments through categories and then offer them to advertisers as a package. Moreover, the ad networks are involved in taking bids from advertisers and working with the highest recommendations that will help them earn space on their chosen site. 

How MarinOne can improve display and search ad performance

Using a campaign management platform like MarinOne can help you automate mundane tasks associated with display and search ads. Our team has experts available to consult you on the most significant opportunities for improvement. And with machine-learning and automated bidding built directly into the software, we make omnichannel advertising as simple as possible. See how your PPC campaigns across all platforms are doing in a single place, and change bids or budgets according to performance with our all-in-one solution. Our advertising team is standing by today to give you a demonstration and get you on the path to easier advertising management.

What makes Pinterest different from other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., is that its primary use is not connecting with others. On the contrary, it is a search and discovery platform. People spend hours and hours looking at things they want to do, learn, or purchase. Most of the users on the platform are looking to purchase items of interest that will somehow help them achieve a goal or complete a project.

When it comes to marketing, Pinterest is an extremely underutilized platform. According to Hootsuite, there were almost 459 million users on Pinterest in 2021 per month. In 2020, almost 100 million users were added. This shows just how many people are using the application and the potential market. Read this “getting started” guide on how you can dive into the world of Pinterest advertising and bidding.

What are Pinterest Ads? 

The reason why Pinterest ads are so powerful is the fact that they are presented as normal pins. The only difference is that you will see a “Promoted by” tag on the pin that is an advertisement. These ads seamlessly mix in with normal pins and do not seem out of place like ads on other social media platforms. The ads are displayed on the home screen by an algorithm that tracks their historical activity on the platform, much like Instagram or TikTok. This means the ads target potential buyers and not just people at random. You can target different people based on the following criteria:

• Location
• Gender 
• Age 
• Interests 
• Categories

Pinterest allows you to choose from 5 different ad formats. The format you pick will depend on your brand and needs. 

• Standard pins 
• Carousel ads 
• Video pin ads 
• Shopping pins 
• App install pins 

How to Set Up an Ad Campaign 

So, how can you stand out with your Pinterest ads? Setting up a new ad campaign requires following a few simple steps. 

Make a business account 

The first thing you need to do is to set up a business account on Pinterest. You can set it up by clicking your user profile icon which is present on the top corner of the page. 

Describe your brand or business 

The next step is to describe what your business or brand is. You will be given some options you can choose from. Is your business beauty, home, travel, etc.? Make sure to click the most appropriate business category as this will greatly affect how your ads are listed to users. 

Create a campaign 

Once done, go ahead and create your ad campaign. Simply click on “create” and then on “create campaign”. 

Choose your goals 

What is the aim of your business? Why are you promoting your brand on Pinterest? Even though it seems complicated, this step is easy. It’s best not to overthink it, and keep in mind you can always test multiple campaigns with different goal settings. You will need to choose from the three options given. These include awareness, consideration and conversion. Are you looking to create awareness about your brand/business only? Do you want video views or content engagement? Are you looking for increasing traffic to your website or Pinterest page? Or, do you want to promote your catalog or brand? Start with the goal you’d most like to achieve and test variants from there. 

Set your budget 

Choose whether you want to set a lifetime or daily budget. Go ahead and choose a start and ending date for your campaign. 

Bidding 

The Pinterest campaign manager has two options for setting bids.

Custom Bidding: Here you will enter your maximum CPC bid amount via the Ads Manager or Bulk Editor. While you may have more control over what you are bidding at the ad auction, keep in mind this is a manual process which could be time consuming if you need to adjust your bid amounts over the course of the campaign.   

Automatic Bidding: With this option, Pinterest will manage your bids for you, working to get the maximum clicks for the lowest possible cost to maximize the budget you have prescribed. There is a learning period when you begin automatic bidding as Pinterest’s algorithms work to find the best outcomes for your ads, but once Pinterest finds the sweet spot for your bids, automated bidding can help get you the most for every dollar spent, not to mention saving you loads of time.

Pinterest also partners with various third party solutions to give their advertisers more options for better results. By layering a bid optimization solution over Pinterest’s bidding tools, you can take your results even further. A few of the added benefits of using a tool like MarinOne include:

• Advanced bidding algorithms that take in over 75 signals for the best responsiveness and accuracy.
• Custom bid modifiers to adjust to external market signals that are relevant to your business.
• Forecasting to help you find the right level of marketing investment and help predict expected conversions, revenue, and profit for your entire account or specific bid strategies. 
• Budget allocation that assigns spend levels to your bid strategies by setting targets and campaign budgets based on your campaign goals. 
• Budget pacing which tracks your spend over the course of the month, quarter, or custom spend period, and adjusts your bidding targets to keep you on track.
• Performance insights and recommendations that scan your accounts for any and every opportunity to decrease costs and improve results. 

Tips for optimizing your Pinterest ads

Get specific in how the ad is positioned

To make the ad more specific and ensure it reaches individuals who can potentially turn into customers, you need to provide details within the creative. One effective approach is to select who you are going to target and put together a “how to” or “tutorial” that directly addresses that target demos’ particular needs or problems that your product solves. It’s a good idea to use multiple keywords within the written content to make your ad impactful for many different searches.

Ensure the Pinterest tag is installed properly and firing

The Pinterest tag allows you to track conversions and optimize your Pinterest campaign budget. With the right setup, you can report conversions from nine different types of actions on your website and view them in Pinterest Ads Manager. Proper installation of the Pinterest tag is essential to get the most out of it. The tag can be installed manually on the website or through Google Tag Manager. To check that the tag is firing and fuctioning, you can utilize the Pinterest Tag Helper.

Use impactful visuals to showcase your brand

Your brand is only as good as you portray it to be. So, choose colors, imagery and videos carefully. Showcase your work and expertise through the aesthetic presence of your brand on Pinterest. Many businesses, both large and small, use Pinterest ads to create awareness about themselves. Therefore, it is important to share real-life pictures of your brand/business in action.

Make the most of your Pinterest advertising

If you have a product that you want to share with the world, Pinterest is an excellent platform to do so. The biggest advantage you will have is that it is still highly unexplored and still a fairly untapped marketing platform today. Most advertisers and marketers are not using Pinterest to its full potential, meaning the available audience is not experiencing ad fatigue. The likelihood your vertical has thousands if not millions of users ready to engage with your brand, without excessive competition, is very good. By placing Pinterest Ads, you can gain that competitive advantage that others don’t have. 

In addition to the bid optimization tools mentioned above, MarinOne can also help you measure the results of your Pinterest Ads with advanced analytics that detail performance within and across Pinterest campaigns and also side-by-side with other search, social, and ecommerce publishers. Pull in your customer data from your web analytics and CRM tools for a more advanced view of conversions and LTV. And once you have all the data processed in MarinOne, you can push that out to Excel, Google Sheets, your data warehouse, or BI tool.

Now that you know what a gold mine Pinterest is for leads and conversions, reach out here to get started with MarinOne for Pinterest. 

‍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. 

‍

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. 

Image Source

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.

Businesses often go to great lengths to build their brand, decide on a brand message, and craft a narrative around that brand message. This time and effort are only rewarded when that narrative is effectively communicated to a brand’s target audience. Businesses spent over $238 billion on internet advertising in 2021 and this number is projected to grow significantly in the coming years. 

Targeted advertising is the best way to ensure that the brand message reaches the right customer—but how do you make sure that you are paying a fair price to reach those customers? Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising allows business leaders to spread their message far and wide but only pay when engagement is registered. Here is how you can use PPC to amplify your existing brand message online. 

What is PPC and how does it work?

Pay-Per-Click marketing refers to an advertising practice where advertisers pay a fixed fee each time their ad is clicked by a visitor. This helps businesses to direct visitors to their website in a cost-effective manner. Companies typically use this method of advertising to drive visitor traffic to their website or social media page through search engines and social media share pages.

Why you should use PPC for your business

Improved brand recognition and recall

One of the major reasons to advertise on the platforms where your target audiences spend the most time is to improve brand awareness. PPC advertising on the appropriate platforms ensures that the advertising brand is always top of mind for the customer when it is time for them to make a purchase.

Search engine ads that appear on generic product searches can encourage customers to associate the advertising brand with the products that they search for, making it easier for them to remember and search for the brand the next time they wish to make a purchase. 

Works in tandem with existing brand material 

To ensure that marketing campaigns are effective across every platform and channel, marketers must create ad copy that amplifies the brand message consistently. PPC advertising allows brands to amplify existing marketing material such as posters and infographics on social media and search engines. 

Can attract new customers to the brand

Almost 60% of shoppers research a future purchase online before pulling the trigger. However, search engine results and social media pages are often saturated with marketing messages from competing brands. Successful brands can use PPC to ensure that their ad rises above their competitors’ by appearing at the top of their customers’ search results.

5 tips to help your business manage a successful ad campaign

1. Consider the keywords you want to optimize for and set your budget accordingly

The popularity of PPC advertising has led to numerous brands using the strategy to make their presence known online. To rise above the crowd and reach the right audiences efficiently, brands must choose the right optimized keywords to direct customers to the appropriate ad. 

Once these keywords are decided, brands must choose the right budget for their marketing efforts. Brands should consider increasing the frequency or reach of ads that serve a general audience to ensure that the ad receives the airtime that it deserves ahead of competing brands. 

2. Use ad extensions like sitelinks, location, callouts, etc., to make your ads more appealing

Ads should always be designed with the customer in mind. This is why it is important to make online ads as engaging as possible. This can be done by adding extensions to your ads. Extensions can come in many forms ranging from sitelinks to store locations and more. These extensions increase the likelihood of a customer engaging with the ad once they have read the accompanying copy or viewed the accompanying graphic. 

3. Include a clear CTA in your ads so people know what action you want them to take

In addition to extensions, brands should make it as easy as possible for a customer to continue engaging with the brand. Call-to-actions (CTAs) are a crucial part of this engagement. Clear CTAs allow brands to control the way customers interact with their ad by directing them to the appropriate platform or site that can help them receive a cohesive experience across marketing channels. 

4. Create different ads with different CTAs based on the audience you are targeting

A common mistake that marketers tend to make when drafting ad copy is creating generic CTAs that are copied across different ads and platforms. However, customer actions can differ greatly from platform to platform. For example, customers who click on a search engine ad are more likely to visit a website that is related to their search. On the other hand,  a customer who interacts with a social media ad might need more incentive to interrupt their browsing and interact with an ad. 

5. Track how well each ad is performing to stop or change ads that aren't working as well

Online advertising is a dynamic activity and businesses must be prepared to react to changing customer preferences promptly. Brands can track each online ad using a variety of engagement metrics and adjust ads that fail to generate the expected response from key customer demographics. Consistent evaluation of ad performance also allows marketers to optimize ad spend on ads that seem to resonate more with the appropriate target audiences. 

How MarinOne can help you effectively spread your brand message online

MarinOne helps businesses keep track of how each PPC advertisement is performing and presents this information through an easy-to-understand graphical interface. Businesses can receive a bird’s eye view of how their ads are performing across platforms or highlight individual ads to assess their effectiveness in reaching their target audience.

If you would like to learn more about how you can use software to reach your customers more effectively, contact us. We will be happy to schedule a no-strings-attached demo of our solution for you.

Competition is getting tougher in the world of eCommerce as more customers are shopping online and their expectations have never been higher. 

Here are some eye-opening web statistics worth noting:

• 68% of consumers have much higher expectations for businesses’ digital capabilities following COVID-19
• 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives due to COVID-19 

How can brands cope with the increased pressure to perform? Google Ads has proven vital for marketers looking to reach more customers, drive traffic, build brand awareness, and create a positive image for their business. 

To help you stay ahead of the pack, here are some tips on using Google Ads to outsmart your competition.

How COVID has affected eCommerce, social, and search 

The COVID pandemic has had a massive impact on eCommerce, social media, and search—in particular, on consumer behavior and expectations. More consumers are shopping online from the comfort (and safety) of their homes.

‍

COVID changed online shopping forever (Image Source). 

Social media usage has also increased as people turn to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok for news, entertainment, and shopping. In fact, a whopping 91% of marketing organizations now use social media as part of their strategy, the same amount using digital ads. More intangible products are also being purchased online (e.g., experiences, memberships, digital subscriptions). 

Since COVID-19 hit, we’ve also seen a massive increase in the use of Google Ads by businesses as it is now considered an essential tool for reaching more customers, driving traffic, and building brand awareness.

However, with so many businesses using paid search and Google Ads, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. This is why it’s more important than ever to ensure your Google Ads campaigns are optimized for success. 

What is Google Ads and why should you use it?

Google Ads allows businesses to create ads for their products and services. These ads are then displayed on Google search results pages and other Google properties, such as YouTube and Gmail.

The great thing about Google Ads is that it lets you target people who are specifically searching for what you offer. This makes it a much more efficient use of your marketing budget than other forms of advertising, such as TV or print.

In addition, Google Ads is a particularly flexible platform, allowing you to tailor your campaigns to your specific goals. For example, you can use Google Ads to drive traffic to your website,  increase brand awareness, and/or generate leads.

‍

How marketers use Google Ads (Image Source).

How to get the most out of Google Ads (and outsmart your competition) 

Google Ads can be an extremely effective tool for businesses looking to reach more customers and drive traffic to their websites. However, to ensure success, it's important to understand how the platform works and optimize your campaigns accordingly. In this section, we'll discuss some tips on how to outsmart your competition.

Create a memorable ad

When creating an ad, it's important to make sure that it stands out. Use eye-catching copy and good quality images—and make sure it’s relevant to your target audience. You can do this by using specific keywords that people are likely to be searching for.

Use Google Ads Editor to make changes faster

Google Ads Editor is a tool that allows businesses to quickly and easily make changes to their campaigns. It's particularly useful for those who are managing multiple campaigns. One of the best things about Google Ads Editor is that you can make changes to multiple campaigns at the same time.

Use ad extensions to increase your visibility

Ad extensions are a great way to increase your visibility and improve your click-through rate. They also allow you to add additional information to your ads, such as your phone number, website address, product images, or customer reviews.

Split-test different versions of your ads to find the most effective combination

One of the best ways to find the most effective combination of ad elements is to split-test different versions of your ads. Split-testing, also known as A/B testing, is a method of testing in which two or more variants of an ad are shown to users. The performance of each variant is then monitored and the variant that performs the best is chosen as the winner.

Use negative keywords to weed out irrelevant search terms

Negative keywords allow you to weed out irrelevant search terms that are not related to your business. This ensures that your ads are only shown to people who are actually interested in what you have to offer. To find the right negative keywords, you can use the Google Ads Keyword Planner tool: simply enter a list of keywords to see a list of related terms. You can then use this information to add relevant negative keywords to your campaign.

Experiment with different bidding strategies

There are a number of different bidding strategies that you can use with Google Ads. The most popular bidding strategy is CPC (cost-per-click), which allows you to set a maximum amount that you'll pay for each click on your ad. There are other bidding strategies you can use such as CPM (cost-per-impression) or CPA (cost-per-acquisition).

‍

Top tip: Set limits on how much you're willing to spend and stick with it.

Include Keywords in the Ad as well as the Landing Page

One way to speed up your Google Ads campaigns is by ensuring that they are well connected from the first engagement to the call-to-action to the messaging on the LP or product page. For example, if you have a certain keyword, then your ad copy should mention it and the landing page should also mention that same keyword. If someone searches for your eyeshadow brand on the search engine, you would want them to end up on a landing page that features only that particular eyeshadow palette.

Don’t Combine Search and Display Campaigns Together

You should make sure to only set up campaigns using a single campaign type. Some Google Ads managers will try to use different campaign types at once, but this can be limiting to your campaign’s performance. By focusing on one content type, Google will give the best AI-powered recommendations possible for mixing and matching different variables and creating the best performing ad possible. 

Keep up with what's trending 

One of the most effective ways to keep up with what's trending is to check out blogs. Some blogs provide tips on how to improve your Google Ads campaigns.

Some of our favorites include helpful tips on a wide range of topics:

• PPC Hero: Read about keyword research, ad copywriting, and bid management.
• Hubspot: Learn content strategy, lead generation, and sales.
• Moz: Find ideas about SEO, link building, and content marketing.

Track your progress 

It's important to track your progress so you know what changes need to be made along the way. Google Analytics is a great tool for monitoring your website traffic, conversions, and much more. For a more all-in-one approach, ad management platforms are a great option: get insights, manage ads, and let the software do the heavy lifting when it comes to bidding—all from one platform. 

How MarinOne can help

MarinOne is an all-in-one ad management platform that allows you to track your ad performance, conversions, and much more. It provides smart insights into how you can improve your campaigns, minus all the manual work. This makes it a valuable tool for businesses that want to get the most out of their Google Ads campaigns, and more out of their marketing team.

• Use MarinOne’s Analyze features to understand the competition and find opportunities. 
• Customize, optimize, and automate in MarinOne to streamline your operations and secure your number-one spot. 
• Get more out of your marketing budget with smart insights and automatic bidding.

Learn more about MarinOne’s automation tools today. Get in touch and speak to one of the team.

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. 

‍

‍

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. 

‍

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. 

‍

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!

‍

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.

‍

This is the first post in our three part series where we’ll dive into TikTok advertising and how you can leverage the platform to get in front of new audiences with unique and engaging content.

TikTok is a marketing gold mine. This hub for starting conversations and sharing ideas lends itself strongly to virality, creating the perfect storm for boosting a company’s brand awareness and revenue. 

Getting your products in front of the right TikTok audience creates a domino effect. The more users engage with, share, and respond to your post using Duet and Stitch, the more favor you garner from the TikTok algorithm. The platform might even expand your reach by featuring your video on the For You Page (FYP). 

Brands just delving into the realm of trendy dances, weird challenges, and life hacks galore can use TikTok ads to find their audience (and jumpstart their success). Ready to get started? Here is everything you need to know about TikTok ad formats, explained. 

In-feed ads

In-Feed ads are your go-to ad format. They place your videos right on your target audiences’ FYP. This format embeds your video onto the FYP as an ad, making it look native. Users can interact with your ad the same way they do with any other TikTok by liking, commenting, sharing, and reusing the sound for their own content. 

In-feed ads are a good pick for quite a few campaign objectives. You can use the clickable CTA button to send users to the destination of your choice, whether that be a landing page, your app, or your TikTok profile. For the best results, make your videos around 9-15 seconds long. Make use of popular effects, filters, and sounds, and keep up with the trends to ensure your videos will resonate with TikTok’s user base. 

Top-view ads

Top-View ads are more attention-grabbing than In-Feed ads. Your target audience will see these ads at the very top of their FYP. The videos can last up to 60 seconds and have less competition than In-Feed ads. 

The Top-View ad format guarantees high reach and impressions, making it a solid strategy for building brand awareness. For the best results, prioritize creating an engaging video. This will help users remember your brand, even after they’ve scrolled past your ad. 

Brand takeover

The Brand Takeover ad format displays your video full-screen as soon as a user opens the app. While similar to the previous format, due to the lack of direct competition surrounding your video, users cannot engage with Brand Takeovers. The upside is that they can’t be skipped. The best Brand Takeovers are short videos or images that display for 5 seconds or less. 

Branded hashtag challenge

The Branded Hashtag Challenge format inspires users to create their own content using your hashtag. This format has three placements: In-Feed videos that inspire users to join in on the challenge, featured banners found on the “Discover Page” that drive users to the Hashtag Challenge placement, and lastly, the Hashtag Challenge itself. This last placement acts as a landing page for the challenge. It pulls all the challenge’s video submissions into one centralized hub, making it easy for users to connect and engage with other participants. 

This format combines traditional digital advertising with TikTok’s user-generated content focus to create the ultimate ads for driving engagement and boosting brand awareness. 

Branded effects

The Branded Effects placement allows brands to create their own effects for their audience to use when creating content. 

This format is special for two reasons. First, it allows users to engage with your brand on a deeper level by using your effects to create content of their own. This content will have a home on their profile, acting as a constant reminder of their relationship with your brand. 

Second, users all over the world who have no idea what your brand is all about will have access to your effect. If your effect becomes trendy, your reach will expand beyond your target audience. Users who might not need your products now will still be loosely aware of what you have to offer and, chances are, your brand will be the first they think of when the need does arise. 

Wrapping up

Like the platform itself, TikTok’s ad formats are unique. When used in tandem, they can create an all-powerful ad strategy that boosts brand awareness, sparks engagement, and drives sales. You can check out more examples of each of TikTok’s ad formats here. 

Brands using MarinOne are now able to add the unique value of advertising on TikTok to their digital campaigns. The MarinOne integration with TikTok means advertisers have better insights and improved performance of their TikTok campaigns.

Ready to learn more about how MarinOne can expand your reach and drive growth on TikTok?

Click here for more info.

Facebook (or Meta, depending on who you ask) is simplifying how campaign objects are set, and simplifying them in the process. 

ODAX is an acronym for “Outcome-Driven Ad Experiences”, signifying Facebook’s consolidation of campaign targeting options that is rolling out throughout 2022. Per Facebook, expected completion of the rollout is Q3 2022. 

Once Facebook automigrates affected campaigns, you won’t be able to create campaign types with the objectives that are not included in the consolidated list. Not to worry, the team at Marin has you covered! Read on to learn everything you need to know about Outcome-driven Ad Experiences (ODAX) and how to handle the migration.

What are the new ODAX Objectives?

Under ODAX, Facebook campaigns will migrate from the original 11 available objectives to 6 campaign objective types. We can see how these will be mapped below.

Facebook explains that this change is designed to better align campaign objectives with widely accepted marketing objectives, reduce confusion in campaign setup, and help advertisers discover on-site solutions to use in their campaigns. In short, this change will make campaign setup more accessible for advertisers of all experience levels. 

Facebook also teases cross-channel campaigns, stating that their mission is, in part:

“Once cross-channel conversion optimizations are available (e.g. website + app, website +shop), communicate the value of, and default advertisers into, these solutions make it easier for advertisers to adopt.”

How will ODAX affect Facebook campaigns?

The impact for advertisers will vary based on the campaign objectives in use. Facebook advises that advertisers using Messages, Video Views, and Conversions campaign objectives will be most affected by this change, at least partially because these campaign objective types will no longer exist under ODAX. Facebook provided the below chart with their announcement to show marketers how the new objectives will align with various goals and initiatives.

Advertisers running campaigns that will be affected by this change won’t need to take immediate action - Facebook assures advertisers that legacy campaigns will continue to run after implementation of ODAX. However, post-implementation there will be limitations to duplicating legacy campaigns and new campaigns will need to align with the new campaign objectives. After 100% rollout, Facebook plans to share an update about the eventual deprecation of legacy campaigns. 

Though immediate action is not required, affected advertisers should begin to consider a strategy for transitioning to this new objective mix. Advertisers should also plan to monitor the performance of both legacy and new campaigns throughout the ODAX transition.

Marin Software is proactively working with Facebook to ensure that advertisers using MarinOne will have a seamless transition to the new campaign objective mix.

Click here for more on how MarinOne can help you drive campaign performance and growth for Facebook and other social publishers. 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably heard about Facebook’s announcement that certain detailed targeting options will be sunset in early 2022.

Here’s a quick review of the news straight from Facebook:

“Starting January 19, 2022 we will remove Detailed Targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as options referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion, or sexual orientation.

Examples include:

• Health causes (e.g., ‘Lung cancer awareness’, ‘World Diabetes Day’, ‘Chemotherapy’)
• Sexual orientation (e.g., ‘same-sex marriage’ and ‘LGBT culture’)
• Religious practices and groups (e.g., ‘Catholic Church’ and ‘Jewish holidays’)
• Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, and figures ”

While some are supportive of this change, other marketers are concerned about the implications for companies that leverage this targeting in light of an already rapidly changing advertising landscape. Cause-based organizations, political parties, healthcare brands, and many others will need to change tack in how they communicate with their audiences.

In the same announcement, Facebook also teased that they’re working on additional Ad Controls to enable users to see fewer ads related to gambling, weight loss, and other unspecified categories. They also reminded marketers that users currently have the ability to see fewer ads related to politics, parenting, alcohol, and pets.

So why’d they do it?

This latest announcement comes on the heels of escalating public scrutiny, FTC antitrust suits, and steadily increasing concerns around consumer privacy. Not to mention a huge rebrand. Facebook, er, Meta has had a busy few years.

In the announcement, Facebook states that they “heard concerns from experts that targeting options like these could be used in ways that lead to negative experiences for people in underrepresented groups.”  While this move might pose a challenge for advertisers who use these detailed targeting options benevolently, Facebook’s move also removes the possibility that they will be misused.

Especially in a time of heightened scrutiny, it makes sense why Facebook would prioritize reducing the possibility of perceived negative experiences on the platform. Continuing to make Facebook an attractive option for social media users works in advertisers’ best interests as well.

What Advertisers Can Do (And How Marin Social Can Help)

Facebook’s announcement comes with several suggestions:

• Leveraging Engagement Custom Audiences to capture relevant intent on Facebook-owned properties. Targeting users who currently like your page or users who watched one of your videos in the news feed are a few examples. Facebook also suggests using these audiences as a seed list to create a lookalike audience.
• Remember the 2-Second Video Viewer audience that is no longer available on Facebook? Marin Social still offers this option so you can get even more out of your Engagement Custom Audiences.
• Website Custom Audiences can still be used to target customers who interact with a company’s website (and can also be used as a seed list for a Lookalike Audience).
• Want to take your custom audiences to the next level? Marin Social offers Enhanced Website Custom Audiences, which integrates rules to automatically segment your audiences based on parameters you build. Save time and find your most valuable audiences seamlessly!
• Location targeting is suggested to help brick-and-mortar retailers reach customers around their locations.
• Marin Social offers “Location Clusters”, which lets you group together your target locations in one fell swoop for easy use in campaigns. All of the marketers who spend hours quality checking location groups can breathe a sigh of relief.
• Customer lists are a great way to connect with customers (if you have their permission to do so). Try segmenting your customer lists and customizing messaging to get the most out of using customer lists.

For marketers whose campaigns are impacted by Facebooks’ upcoming targeting changes, Marin Software’s social marketing experts are here to help you through the transition. Click here to schedule a demo with us and learn more about what Marin can do for you!

‍

You’ve likely heard that Google is sunsetting the Expanded Text Ad (ETA) format in favor of Responsive Search Ads (RSAs). It’s Google’s next big push for automation in its advertising platforms. While this may seem like a big change, it’s nothing to worry about as long as you prepare. Luckily, the sunset isn’t happening until June of 2022, and Marin’s industry experts are here to answer some commonly asked questions:

What Exactly Are Responsive Search Ads (RSAs)?

Traditional Google text ads consist of static headlines and descriptions, so advertisers provide specific headlines and descriptions which remain constant within an ad. Google then rotates that version with your other static ad versions according to your campaign settings.

When creating an RSA, you’ll input a variety of different headlines and descriptions. Google and Bing will then rotate through different combinations of assets, serving the combination that seems best based on the demographic data of the person who is searching. The purpose of RSAs is to improve the personalization of search ads through automation. This personalization should lead to improved performance, and eliminate the need for you to run lots of ad copy tests as the engines are basically doing the testing for you.

How Many Headlines and Descriptions Can I Include in an Ad?

You can input at least 3 and no more than 15 potential headlines.

You can input at least 2 and no more than 4 potential descriptions.

The publishers recommend using at least 8 Headline Assets and at least 3 Description Assets.

What Will Happen to My Expanded Text Ads?

You will not be able to create new ETAs. Your current Expanded Text Ads will continue to serve, but you won’t be able to edit them. You can still play, pause, or remove them, but the ad content will be unchangeable. Reporting for your current ETAs should not be impacted in MarinOne or the platforms.

Will I Have Any Control Over Which Headlines and Descriptions Serve?

Yes, you have the option to pin assets to certain positions in the ad. For example, if you have a top performing headline that you’d like to display as Headline 1 every time your ad serves, you can pin that headline to position 1. You can also pin descriptions.

For example, if you pinned “Low Prices” to headline 1, the every time that ad serves, “Low Prices” will be the first thing people see.

But that being said…

Should I Pin My Top Performing Assets to Position 1?

My natural instinct was to pin top performing headlines and descriptions from my ETAs to my RSA positions 1 and 2. However, this often hurts the ad’s quality score, sometimes even knocking a ‘good’ ad down to ‘poor’ quality, therefore limiting its ability to serve in the SERP.

In order to avoid a decrease in quality score while still maintaining control over your ads, Google recommends pinning 2 or 3 headlines and descriptions to each position. This allows Google to rotate those assets, and may prevent decreases in quality score.

For example, if you pinned “low prices” and “shop now” to headline 1, Google will rotate through those options, so every time the ad is served people will see one of the two headlines in position 1.

How Will I Analyze Performance in MarinOne?

MarinOne users are already accustomed to the performance benefits the platform provides for all their search programs, and RSAs will be no different. The digital marketers at Marin have already made changes to help you measure, manage, and optimize your RSAs and are always prepared for future changes from the publishers.

Responsive Search Ads should flow seamlessly into any workflow you currently utilize for analyzing ad performance. These ads will be automatically added to any automated reports just like expanded text ads are.

We have also added two new columns to our creative grids, titled Headline Assets and Description Assets. Select these columns in the column selector to see a list of all headlines and description variations for an RSA.

Note that in the Headline column in the grid, you can see a preview of what your RSA might look like in its completed form. This does not necessarily represent all Headline or Description Assets that have been entered. You will simply see the first three Headline Assets in the order they were entered. This is the same behavior as in the publishers.

You will also see the ads’ creative type listed as Responsive Search, and you can filter for Responsive Search in the Creative Type column if you want to see a readout of performance for RSAs only.

If you export your ads grid into a report, you will see separate columns for each Headline and Description asset, with Headline 1 simply called Headline and the remaining Headlines numbered 2 through 15.

How Will I Bulk Create RSAs in MarinOne?

You can create RSAs in bulk in much the same way you do for other ad types in Marin. To specify the creation of an RSA in a bulksheet, you should include the value Responsive Search in the Creative Type column.

You can edit your RSAs in bulk by including the Creative ID column. To find your creative IDs, simply run a report from the main Creatives grid with the relevant columns included.

When building your bulksheet for either creation or editing of RSAs, you can use the following bulk headers:

• [Headline 1] through [Headline 15]
• [Description Line 1] through [Description Line 4]  
• [Headline Pinned to Position 1]
• [Headline Pinned to Position 2]
• [Headline Pinned to Position 3]
• [Description Pinned to Position 1]
• [Description Pinned to Position 2]

I hope this all eases your mind about the transition from ETAs to RSAs. The idea behind RSAs is basically constant, dynamic AB testing and ad personalization, which sounds great in theory. I expect this shift to lead to improved ad performance and easier management through automation.

The paid search experts at Marin are always eager to help clients, new and old, navigate the ever-changing search landscape. Click here to schedule a demo with us and learn more about what Marin can do for you!

‍

Organic Instagram posts provide your followers with a stream of free content that can help establish and strengthen your brand identity, build your social community, and hopefully, engage customers interested in buying your products.

Of course, the limitations are that your organic content has a limited viewership of your followers, the followers they may share the post with, and people searching for or following your brand or particular hashtags you may have used in your posts.

But one key advantage of organic content is that it can be very insightful into the type of content that resonates with people interested in buying the products you sell. Inevitably, some posts will perform better than others with more likes, more comments, and more shares. So how can you capitalize on those posts to help drive your business?

Using organic content to reach new audiences

Now that you know the content and creative in a post is popular with people interested in your products, why not convert it to a paid ad to expand your reach to new audiences? Instagram allows you to “boost” a post you create on Instagram and turn it into an ad. You’ll be able to choose your advertising goal (more profile visits, website visits or messages), your audience (who you want to reach), your budget (how much you want to spend daily) and the duration (how long you want your ad to run).

Targeting specific audiences is an efficient way to 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.

Automating message boosting with MarinOne

Promoting organic content is a great way to leverage well-performing posts to reach more prospective customers, but tracking your engagement on Instagram can be very time consuming, especially if you are managing multiple Instagram accounts.

MarinOne’s Message Booster for Instagram 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.

Just like Instagram, MarinOne lets you set the criteria for your boosts based on engagement, duration, and budget. But with MarinOne’s Rules engine, you’ll be able to create paid ads at scale across multiple clients and accounts.

For example, you may want to boost all posts within the last 24 hours with an engagement rate higher than 5%. You might choose to boost these posts for a duration of three days, and ask MarinOne to pause any boost if the engagement rate drops lower than 2%. You can set your budget to a daily budget per rule, or a fixed budget per post, and then set your bid strategy and optimization goals. Then sit back while MarinOne takes care of the rest.

MarinOne’s advanced automation features are designed to save advertisers time, while driving performance at scale across accounts. Click here for more on Message Booster for Instagram with MarinOne.

Say what?

Yes, you read that correctly. Since the start of digital advertising, there has been a thin line between organic and paid search data. There have been many tests and studies conducted on how organic data can influence paid search data and vice versa.

With MarinOne, you can add a bit of control to the mix by automatically bringing in organic metrics alongside your paid search keywords. These include ; organic average position and organic clicks, which come from the Paid & Organic Search Results report in Google Ads.

Off the back of that data, you have the ability to leverage MarinOne’s powerful bidding solution, which lets you automatically assign custom bid modifiers based on factors outside of the auction (in this case, organic data), and thus increase or decrease bids based on the criteria specified by you.

Lucid Software Innovates with Marin Bidding’s Custom Modifiers, Boosting Registrations by 20%

You can set up specific rules, such as:

Similarly, if organic position is better than 2, then lower bid by 35%.

Imagine all the possible strategies this approach could introduce and how it could boost your paid advertising efficiency, improve your keyword coverage, and reduce ad spend waste.

Last but not least, from a reporting perspective, Marin has got you covered.

When adding organic data to the mix and having it alongside your paid search data, Marin’s powerful dashboards and reporting capabilities can help you find synergies and let you slice and dice your data however you see fit.

If you would like to find out how this strategy could work for your business, get in contact and one of our account team members is more than happy to help.

MarinOne Insights generates over 5,000 recommendations for our customers daly, identifying millions of dollars in potential performance improvements from their digital marketing programs.

Insights are automatic, tailored recommendations that help advertisers get more out of digital marketing campaigns and provide them with the tools needed to quickly implement those recommendations.

This week, we have added these four new Insights to MarinOne:

Landing Page Errors

Sending traffic to a broken web page is a waste of spend and a terrible experience for your customers. MarinOne automatically crawls your top landing pages by spend, and surfaces issues such as a 404 error codes.

Marketers should either fix the landing page or pause the keyword until the landing page issue is resolved.

Bid Strategy Performance

The bidding tools in MarinOne help you get the best performance for a given target (e.g. ROAS or CPA) but did you know they can also help you understand what your performance would look like at a different target.

This Insight identifies MarinOne Bid Strategies where adjusting your target would yield improved performance. In other words, we look for situations where a different target would increase the overall profitability of your campaigns. Marketers can then adjust the Bid Strategy targets if the forecasted outcome aligns with their campaign goals.

Disapproved Ads

With the publisher’s rules for what is permitted in ad constantly evolving, it’s easy to lose track of policy violations that can result in ad groups not serving. This Insight identifies ads that have been disapproved within the last 2 weeks.

Marketers should then either submit a policy exemption request to the publisher or add a new creative to the group that is within policy.

Duplicate Keywords

On a large account, it’s inevitable that you will have duplicate keywords creating clutter and complexity in your accounts that should be avoided. This Insight identifies duplicate active keywords.

The marketer can easily pause the keyword with a lower quality score. If the Quality Score is the same, pause the keyword with less spend in order to preserve the keyword with more historical data that can be leveraged by an automated bidding solution.

Marin customers can check out their Insights today, or if you are interested in learning more, click here to connect with a sales representative.

In light of recent news on COVID coming out of the UK and US, such as plans for re-openings and increase in vaccine distribution, travel companies have seen a much-needed surge in vacation bookings.

The Guardian reported that Easy Jet flight bookings from the UK jumped 337% and package holidays surged 630% when compared with the previous week. In the U.S., a recent survey from TripAdvisor found that 80% of consumers planned to take at least one overnight domestic trip in 2021, with over 1/3 of respondents planning at least three.

A term coined in recent weeks, “revenge travel” is the latest buzzword for travel marketers to know about. Surveys suggest that people will want to travel as soon as they can, and this pent-up demand will likely result in similar booking surges around the world as each respective country communicates their road to recovery and timelines of normality.

How to Win:

• 
  
• Leading with Data
• 
  

In April 2020, I wrote that Business Intelligence and First-Party Data was the vaccine to neutralize competitors. This is even more important now, as advertisers scramble to recover lost revenues. Airline marketers should be leaning on their Data & Analytics teams, requesting access to route codes, profitability metrics, and flight details to automate the creation and optimization of search and social campaigns. Similarly, those marketing the supply of accommodation should be leveraging internal catalogues, occupancy data, and room value to balance the supply & demand of bookings. This data offers little value in our current world, however, as we begin to see countries emerging from restrictions, and life returning to normal, using this data to power your performance channels will be pivotal.

The travel ecosystem is dictated by supply & demand. Marketers, all the more, need to integrate the supply & demand equilibrium to their performance program to ensure efficiency and competitiveness.

• 
  
• Enhanced Automated Optimization
• 
  

The unknown ahead will likely lead to peaks and troughs in performance. Auction intensity will increase. Impressions and CPCs will rise. Firstly, advertisers need to get back to basics with account health and do this quickly.

Marin can collaborate with advertisers and agencies to find the ideal solution that leans into publisher optimizations while also leveraging first-party data, flexibility and control.

• 
  
• Cross-Channel Audience Alignment
  
• 
  

Integrating your performance channels and viewing your data in a unified way is a start, but advertisers need to do way more to get ahead. Your audience data, and how you use it, is incredibly important.

By combining data with digital audience solutions, savvy travel marketers can connect with travellers better – and drive more bookings. Advertisers should be reviewing lifetime value (LTV) to understand how to communicate differently to varying value customers and optimize throughout the entire customer journey.

• 
  
• Reporting & Visualizing Data
• 
  

As we see travel reopen, it is likely that we’ll see new “Top Routes” emerge and it’s pivotal that marketers stay on top of these changes. A great way to do this is to lean on a solution like Data Studio, Tableau or Looker. Customized dashboards in these tools can give you the data you need, right when you need it.

Did you know that Marin can easily send data to these tools?

Travel advertisers certainly have a mountain to climb to execute a recovery plan, and success is ultimately tied to each country’s reopening timeline. However, advertisers need to be agile and ready to capitalize on the recovery of travel.

Speak to a member of the Marin Team to understand how we can help you prepare for the return of travel today.

We’ve added nine new bidding and setup Insights to help advertisers get the most out of digital marketing campaigns and provide them with the tools needed to quickly implement those recommendations.

Here are the new recommendations:

• Enhanced CPC Identifies Google campaigns using Marin Bidding or Manual Bidding without Enhanced CPC and allows you to easily enable the Enhanced CPC setting
• Bid Caps: Identifies keywords, ad groups, product groups, and placements performing above the bid strategy efficiency goal whose bids are limited by the Bid Cap setting. Users can then disable or raise the Bid Cap setting unless there is a specific business case to maintain a maximum bid
• Bid Floors Identifies keywords, ad groups, product groups, and placements performing below the bid strategy efficiency goal whose bids are artificially raised using the Bid Floor setting. Users can disable the Bid Floor unless there is a specific business case to maintain a minimum bid
• Keyword Bid Overrides Identifies keywords on Bid Override that are in active Bid Strategies. Users can disable these Bid Overrides unless there is a specific business case for manual bid optimization
• Bidding Reactivity Identifies Marin Bidding Strategies that are not using the Limit Bid Changes under X% setting. Users can enable the Limit Bid Change setting and set it to 25% for affected folders.
• Keyword Count Identifies ad groups with more than 100 active keywords. Advertisers should segment keywords into multiple ad groups to improve keyword/ad relevancy
• Ad Count Identifies ad groups with less than 3 active ads. The publishers recommend maintaining at least 3 active ads in each ad group.
• Invalid Credentials Identifies publisher accounts that require a password update in Marin.
• Sync Errors Identifies campaigns that have fallen out of sync with Marin.

All Insights are available under the top-level Insights tab, next to your Home tab. For more details about Marin’s Automated Insights check out our original launch announcement.

We’re well underway in the holiday season now with just about a week left until Christmas. Here are a few quick tips to make the most of these last days before the holiday and prepare for the days following.

Budget Planning

Budget planning using the What-If functionality has been around in Marin for a while. We have now improved the tool to allow you to forecast and scenario plan at the bid strategy level. This means that at the individual bid strategy level, you are able to see the total spend you are trending toward for the end of the month, as well as the total number of conversions and revenue.

The What-If functionality is a great way to keep track of your budget, but an even better way to make sure you’re getting the most out of that budget. You can leverage What-If to see what would happen to your conversions or revenue if you were to increase or decrease spend, and the platform will automatically recommend updated targets for your bid strategies. After that, you can just sit back and enjoy the holidays! You can read more about it here

Scheduled Actions

While you may be off from work in the coming days, your search activity will probably continue to run. Marin allows you to schedule work that still needs to get done while you’re off using Dynamic Actions. Scheduled Actions enable you to pause or resume campaigns, groups, or creatives at a specified date and time in the future. This means that you can take your Christmas ad copy offline and reactivate regular creatives through a scheduled task, rather than having to come into the platform to make adjustments. Need to change landing pages once Christmas is over? Schedule a bulk upload over email to process changes while you sit back and relax.

Bid Override

Christmas shopping has been underway for a while--and now it’s crunch time. A great way to increase volume is by looking for keywords or product groups similar to your historic/current top performers, and pushing the bid for similar keywords. Using change columns and filters, look for keywords and product groups that performed well for you last year but are seeing little traction now, and increase their bid:

Don’t think a simple increase will suffice? Switch the keywords to Bid Override for a couple of days, allowing them to gather data with a static bid before Marin Bidding takes over and sets the optimal bid for your targets.

Want to track the impact of what you’re doing? Create a Dimension and tag the keywords so that once the holidays are over, you can analyze how your actions contributed to your results and learn for next year!

Scheduled Boost

Scheduled Boosts are another great way to control and optimize your campaigns from your couch. A boost is a percentage increase or decrease of your bids, meant to align with sudden changes in the market. Depending on your industry , you can probably expect traffic to be less competitive from the 24th through the 26th, for example. Marin allows you to schedule a decrease in your bids to account for that lull.

Excluded Dates

Marin’s algorithms work hard to optimize your advertising spend every day, making sure you get the most for your budget. But sometimes even the algorithms could use some help. Excluded Dates are your way of telling the algorithm which data to disregard.

See that tick box next to Excluded Dates in the above screenshot? This means that we're able to tell the algorithm not to consider certain dates for future bid calculations, based on the dates that were set for a boost. Excluded Dates are important around the holidays when performance varies more than usual. Enter them through a bid strategy, at either the strategy- or account level! You can even set future Excluded Dates, so it’s something you can do ahead of the holiday break.

Automated Alerts

Automated Alerts are another great way to stay on top of your account activity without having to sign into the platform! Alerts allow you to receive an email notification of, for example, campaigns with a strong increase in cost week-over-week, keywords with large drops in conversions day-over-day, or any other change you’d like to be notified of. Alerts rely on filters and recurring reports.

Setting these Automated Alerts up is now easier than ever, as many of the filters required are already built out for you in Marin and available in the Marin subcategory when looking at your saved views.

We want to wish a happy holiday break to all of you and don’t worry, Marin Software has got your back!

Shopping campaigns and managing the feeds that power them is often cumbersome, time consuming and resource intensive. To help with these challenges, Marin has developed an innovative solution called Smartfeed which manages your feed and also updates your account’s structure -- the Marin platform serves as an intermediary which automates the build based on your feed.

So, what is it? How does it work? And how to use it to the fullest?

What is Smartfeed?

Marketers are always looking to improve their feed and shopping activities’ performance, and most solutions available are expensive and solely feed-focused.

By including Smartfeed within your Marin account, marketers not only have the ability to optimize, create and maintain their feed automatically based on their business’ needs, but they are also able to do this in combination with optimizing, creating and maintaining their own shopping structures, with the aim to maximizing reach and efficiency.

While having all this activity in one place saves marketers’ time, Smartfeed also tailors optimizations for each channel’s requirements (such as Google Shopping or Facebook Marketplace). This allows marketers to use rules and other optimizations to apply to the feed at scale, before they are submitted or scheduled to multiple shopping platforms on an automated and recurring basis.

Marketers will also be able to analyse their feed’s structure and performance, report on those numbers and receive alerts based on product performance to understand when and where optimizations are desirable.

What does it solve?

Many of the challenges faced by marketers today revolve around time consuming setups and maintenance of low quality feeds, which also then need to be maintained and optimized in each shopping or marketplace platform.

As seen before, Smartfeed deals efficiently with the time consuming piece as everything sits under the same platform, while low quality feeds can be enhanced by using multiple and new sources to upgrade your feed’s data. Finally, building out and managing your shopping structures will happen straight within Marin on a daily basis, allowing you to tweak your feed’s information and see this change reflected into the Shopping campaigns shortly thereafter.

Maintaining a clear and consistent shopping campaign structure can be tedious and time consuming. Marketers need to spend a lot of time creating all the different objects, only to then spend additional time optimizing the structure itself, as well as maintaining it and removing and adding objects as relevant in order to improve performance.

With Smartfeed, Marin Software takes the heavy lifting out of a marketer’s day to day workflow by automating the build and edition of shopping campaigns as well as automating their optimization.

Smartfeed can use a feed to build out entire shopping structures to include all or specific SKUs in the feed. Multiple level objects can be built, such as campaigns, ad groups, product groups and creatives. Building out the campaigns, for example, can be as simple or complex as required, with Smartfeed’s ability to adjust settings such as budgets, device modifiers or status to name a few.

In addition, Smartfeed integrates fully with Marin’s dimensions feature. This allows marketers to assign dimension values to specific objects, such as ad groups or product groups, with a view to adjust the bids via our Dynamic Actions feature or simply run a granular report across multiple publishers such as Google and Bing.

Finally, ad groups and product groups can be automatically assigned to bidding folders based on information within the feed such as custom labels or product categories. Smartfeed can be set up so that if these are modified, the changes are reflected automatically in the structure in order to make optimizations as precise, custom and easy to implement as possible.

Ready to know your best-performing tactics across the consumer’s journey and optimize every marketing dollar? Schedule a demo and learn more about Smartfeed!

What are Automated Insights?

There are a lot of moving parts to a digital marketing campaign. So many that it’s hard for even an experienced marketer to know what they need to do to get the best results from their campaign. Collecting data, recognizing the trends for optimization and other paid search strategy efforts often do not come as quickly as advertisers would like. That’s where we come in.

Marin has been providing account insight to our customers for over 10 years and now we are delivering these powerful, actionable recommendations directly in the MarinOne platform.

Insights are automatic, tailored recommendations that help advertisers get more out of digital marketing campaigns and provide them with the tools needed to quickly implement those recommendations.

Automated Insights in MarinOne are designed to

• uncover opportunities to reduce wasteful spending
• capitalize on additional volume in high-performing areas
• Implement learnings from one channel to another

How Insights Work

Each Marin Insight is a customized, cross-channel recommendation designed to increase your campaign’ performance. Unlike recommendations from the publishers, Marin Insights look across channels to identify the most efficient areas of improvement or to highlight where a learning in one publisher can be implemented in another. We also focus on recommendations that align with your business goals, not just increasing spend.

To help you prioritize your work, Marin Insights are always presented with a corresponding performance change. With this information you can easily tell how your account may change as a result of implementing and insight. These performance forecasts are built by analysing recent performance of campaigns, ads, keywords, and products and benchmarking that against the overall account performance.

If your account is tracking revenue data the forecasts will be reflected in terms of predicted change in Revenue and Spend. If your account does not currently track revenue, the prediction is in terms of Conversions and Spend.

Insights are updated daily based on performance data over the most recent four weeks so you never have to worry about wading through old materials.

What Insights Help You Do

Each Marin Insight is presented along with a downloadable report that enables you to go from insight to action. Each report can be uploaded back into MarinOne to apply the recommendation. This workflow gives you flexibility and the ability to accept or reject each recommendation at the most granular level.

Examples of our Insights Include:

Ad Copy Optimization - Identifies the individual word with the most clicks across an ad group's keyword set and determines if that word is included in the highest-traffic creative.

Ad Optimization - Identifies underperforming ads using the KPI and statistical confidence in your A/B test settings.

Budget Capped Campaigns - Identifies high performing campaigns limited by their daily budget.

Keyword Expansion - Identifies non-exact match search terms performing at a lower cost-per-conversion than their parent campaign based on Google conversion tracking.

Keyword Match Type Expansion- Identifies high performing keywords that do not exist on more specific match types.

Keyword Publisher Expansion - Identifies top-performing keywords that are not being leveraged in Bing.

Negative Keyword Expansion - Identifies non-converting search terms based on Google conversion tracking with a statistically significant amount of clicks.

Single Keyword Ad Groups - Showcases which keywords have significant mobile performance to move each into their own ad group so it can get its own mobile bid.

Top Performing Products - Identifies shopping products performing above average within their product group and should be moved to a dedicated product group for additional control.

Key Benefits:

Highly Qualified Recommendations - Volume and performance criteria result in recommendations that are expected to provide meaningful impact to your bottom-line performance.

Performance Predictions - Incremental spend, conversion, and revenue estimates allow you to prioritize your time on recommendations that will have the most impact.

Platform-Ready Exports - Downloadable reports allow you to review Insights at the most granular level. We've also made it easy to implement the recommended changes using a bulk upload.

Click on the Insights tab in MarinOne to see your personalized recommendations today!

If you aren’t yet a Marin customer, reach out today to learn about everything Marin has to offer.

We recently wrote a blog on The Power of Web Queries, a type of scheduled report in MarinOne that is hosted on a URL and automatically updated with the most recent data. These are fully customizable reports, right down to the date range, activity type and even how often the data is refreshed.

The flexible nature of Web Queries means that marketers can automatically import their data directly into Microsoft Excel instead of having to manually download their data and then import into Excel, saving you endless hours of time spent generating reports manually. You can even create dashboards and templates in Excel, which get updated with the most recent data at the click of a button.

The New and Improved Web Query Reports

Since our earlier blog post, we’ve made further enhancements to our Web Query reporting capabilities to not only allow data to be automatically imported into Excel, but now into Google Sheets too.

You’re probably asking why use Google Sheets? What’s the benefit? Well, here’s a few…

• Due to the cloud-based nature of Google Sheets, collaboration between multiple users makes a marketers workflow easier and faster
• Built-in revision history
• No need to constantly press “Save” due to Google Sheets’ auto-save functionality
• Real-time chat window with colleagues
• Access to your Google Sheet and data from any computer/device
• Refreshing of data is automatic on an hourly cadence - no manual intervention needed
• Ability to control access levels to the data, i.e. Read-Only, Edit or Comment access
• Share the data easily with management and stakeholders
• The data can also be synced into big data tools from Google Sheets for enhanced customization and reporting i.e. Google Data Studio
• Pricing – Google Sheets is completely free to use

Setting Up Web Query Reports for Google Sheets

Once you’ve generated your Web Query report from MarinOne, copy the URL and open up a Google Sheet then follow the steps below.

Click into a cell and type =IMPORTHTML(

• This function / formula imports data into a Google Sheet from a table within a HTML page such as Marin’s Web Query reports that are hosted on a URL

The syntax format is =IMPORTHTML("url", "query", index)

• url – The URL of the page to be examined, including protocol (e.g. https://).
  This is where you paste the Web Query report URL that you generated in MarinOne
  
• 
  
• The URL must be enclosed in quotation marks
• 
  

• query – Either "table" or "list" can be used, depending on what type of structure contains the data
  For Marin’s Web Query reports, it will be the query "table", and make sure to also enclose it in quotation marks
  

• index – The index, starting at 1, which identifies which table or list (as defined in the HTML source) should be returned
  For Marin’s Web Query reports, there are three tables to choose from (as shown in the image below)
  

Your formula should look like the example below. Make sure that each syntax is separated with a comma.

=importhtml("https://one.marinsoftware.com","table",3)

• Once you hit enter, the data will be imported into the Google Sheet from the Web Query report
• Once you have the data into the spreadsheet, you’ll need to set the criteria for the data to be refreshed;Click File >> Spreadsheet settings >> in the pop up, click Calculation >> change the recalculation to ‘On change and every hour’ >> click Save Settings

Google will now automatically refresh the data on an hourly cadence, so you can be sure that the most recent data is up-to-date - There’s no need to manually refresh like you have to in Excel

Why not give it a try and enhance your workflow with our latest update? And if you haven’t already, check our earlier blog on Web Query reports: The Power of Web Queries.

Reporting is often a mundane and repetitive task. How much time do you spend on reporting? If that answer is too much, then keep on reading.

Every marketer's dream is to spend as little time on reporting as possible. The fact is that the less time you spend on reporting, the more time you have to spend on your marketing strategy, campaign optimization or perhaps testing something completely new.

One of the key benefits of using MarinOne is its web query functionality.

In a nutshell, web queries enable you to pull data from a website's URL straight into Microsoft Excel. The web query format creates an automated report that is posted to a static URL every time the report is processed.

Web query reports in MarinOne are designed to let users take advantage of their existing reports and have the application update the data on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, saving you literally hours a week by not having to pull reports manually.

As you can imagine, the possibilities with web queries are endless. Below we have outlined a few examples of the web query alerts and reports that we tend to recommend.

Performance-based alerts and reports:

• Poor performing campaigns, groups, creatives or keywords
• Strong performing campaigns, groups, creatives or keywords
• High potential keywords and search queries
• Campaign, group, keyword coverage change
• Low CTR/conversion rate creatives, keywords
• Performance by match type
• KPIs that have been achieved by certain objects in a given timeframe
• Mobile vs. desktop performance

QA-based alerts and reports:

• Disapproved creatives
• Missing Google Analytics parameters
• Active groups with less than two creatives

Example: Cross channel Dashboard build by using Web Queries

Setting Up Web Query Reports

Now that you know when to use web queries, how can you create one?

If you are using Windows, you can follow the below steps:

1. Create a recurring report in MarinOne and select Excel Web Query as the format
2. You can then run your report and click save.
3. Right-click on the URL for the Excel link and select Copy Shortcut.
4. In Excel, open the workbook where you wish to import the data. From the Data menu, select From Web under Get External Data.
5. Paste the link you copied into the address bar and your report will be loaded into the window.
6. You can choose which section of your report to import by checking boxes placed next to each table in the report.
7. Click Import and you will be asked to specify the location for the report and you will have to enter your Marin credentials when prompted. If you wish to have the data in the report, refresh automatically when the file is opened, click Properties and select the Refresh Data When Opening File option.
8. Click OK and your data will be imported into the workbook at the location you specified. This data range will be refreshed whenever you select Refresh All from the Data menu (or automatically, if you choose that option). Simply link your existing output report to this data section and your report will be updated.

As mentioned, web queries will help you save time and hopefully enhance your day-to-day workflow. If there are any questions or you would like to know more, don't hesitate to contact us.

From spend monitoring to ad ranking, keeping tabs on your campaign performance across your different marketing channels can be a lot of work. And because optimization is the key to a successful campaign, it’s good to stay in the know. However, most of us are not on our computers all the time, so we need an easy and efficient way to stay on top of it all, and be notified of any major changes immediately.

With Marin’s Automated Alerts, you can stay in the know with automatic monitoring and notifications for all your marketing campaigns. These alerts bring changes directly to your inbox, so that you can be notified as soon as they happen. This means timelier analysis and action, so that your campaigns can continue running smoothly even while you're away.

Check out these 5 alerts that you can set up in Marin to stay productive, optimize strategy, and make the most out of each advertising dollar.

1. Monitor CPA

This may feel pretty standard. But as a reminder, the cost of an acquisition or conversion is important to ensure not only that our ads are converting, but that they are doing so at a profitable rate. It is important to modify an alert like this one with an impressions count to be sure that an ad or campaign has reached enough users to properly determine an ideal CPA.

Example: Alert me if impressions are greater than 1000 and CPA is greater than X.

2. Getting Close to Spend Cap

This can help you monitor your budget pacing, and view the rate at which your campaigns spend. Take action before your cap is hit so that you make adjustments to achieve your performance goals.

Example: Alert me if total spend > $950 (where spend cap = $1000).

3. Impression Share is Dropping

If your strategy includes top or absolute top impression share, this alert is for you. By receiving a notification when an ad’s impression share drops below your target, you can take the appropriate action (improve ad ranking, evaluate keywords, expand budget) before falling too far behind.

Example: Alert me if the impression share drops by more than 10%

4. Check Keywords

If you’re testing out some new keywords for your campaigns, use this alert to monitor their performance and iterate when necessary. This alert is great for keyword strategy

Example: Alert me if CTR is less than 3% for selected keywords.

5. Ads Not Converting

Your ads may not be converting because of audience targeting, ad copy, or user-experience on your landing page, you want to be notified about ads that don’t lead consumers to the end goal of a purchase or sign-up. This helps you save money and optimize your campaign for success.

Example: Alert me if I’ve spent more than $1000 and conversion rate is less than 10%.

Once you’ve created these alerts, you can breathe a bit easier knowing that if something dramatically shifts in a campaign, you’ll be notified and can take action immediately. Automated alerts in Marin are customizable and can be set up in just a few minutes. Schedule time with an account representative today to learn more!

These are unprecedented times. Whether you have cut your advertising costs and are making tough budgeting decisions, or are gearing yourself for an unexpected increase in traffic and conversions, the marketing programs you need today are different from what you were running last month.

According to eMarketer, 38% of US Agency and Marketing Professional’s advertising efforts have been paused until later in the year.

The answer to the question “What should I be doing now?” is going to be different for every company. We want to help you make the right decisions by asking the right questions about your business, your marketing programs, and your customers.

We’ll be joined for this conversation by Jake Renter, Chief Operating Officer for Intertwine Interactive. Jake has seen a broad range of impact across the companies he helps manage and he’ll be sharing what he’s hearing from his customers.

Together we will help you answer the ten questions that will make sure you’re continuing to get the most out of your marketing investment, including topics like:

Is my messaging correct?

It’s a sensitive time for creatives, you might need to review and refresh your existing copy and revise anything that may be misconstrued as insensitive given the current climate.

Should I change my bidding strategy?

Paid search is very measurable, the first thing you need to look at is if your conversion rate has changed? We’ll elaborate on that during the webinar but as a start, one way to save yourself a lot of time and worry as long as circumstances continue to change day by day is leveraging tech for alerts. Demand and volume shifts for products can be dramatic, swinging up or down.

Should I be reducing my budgets and how should I be spending?

First, you may want to shift budgets into those products or services that have more relevance during this national emergency. Now might be a good time to do some incrementality testing and see the impact, especially at the top of the funnel.

Are there strategic projects I can be working on that will set me up for success?

If your mandate is to essentially “keep the lights on” now may present a good time to do the deep cleaning.



Sign up today to join us on Wednesday, April 15th, 2020 at 9am PST | 5pm BST

These are challenging times. Fortunately, as a group of experienced performance marketers, we have a set of tools that we can rely on when supply and demand greatly change. Whether it is Black Friday, National Pizza Day, or the CEO emailing you a screenshot of Google search results with your ad nowhere in sight, we can help you make quick adjustments.

COVID is certainly a unique event, with no clear timeline--so how do you adapt? The answer uses the same techniques as any other promotion or event. The following list of strategies and tasks will help update your account for the current climate. Get the fundamentals right and your search campaign should stay healthy.

Campaigns

• Automated Alerts - Performance changes daily. Receive an email from Marin showing Campaigns/Groups/Keywords that have realized a significant change in spend and conversions across all of your channels Google, Bing, Amazon, Facebook.
• Negative Keywords - New events can trigger new searches. Ensure to keep a close eye on Search Query Reports. Marin provides your Google and Bing search query results in the same view and allows you to add negatives to both publishers at the same time. Go to the Keyword Expansion tab in Marin to view and manage.
• Day Parting - People’s schedules have changed, which may also impact online behavior. Review recent data and implement a day-parting strategy or revisit any pre-existing bid multipliers. Marin will make a recommendation with a click of a button.
• Scheduled Actions - New announcements are made daily, often days before they go into effect. Stay tuned into events affecting the geo locations your campaigns are opted into. Schedule the Activation or Pausing of Campaigns/Groups/Creatives.
• Sitelinks - The most efficient way to adjust your messaging or highlight a new offering is to add a new sitelink. These can quickly be added across campaigns.
• Budgets - Because search patterns have been changing, you might be running into budget limits on parts of your accounts. Please keep an eye on campaigns maxing out their daily budgets and make adjustments where necessary.

Bidding

Marin bidding will consider the most recent data and calculate bids for each keyword based on the recent performance performance accordingly, allowing for quick responsiveness during this volatile climate. The following detail bid strategies and features we can leverage if anticipating significant changes in performance:

• Targets - Marin bidding will automatically adjust for changing conversion rates, but if a conversion today is not worth the same as it was yesterday, you should also consider adjusting your targets to match the current environment.
• Boost - Set a bid multiplier across the folders. This will allow you to quickly bid down or bid up KWs in the folder while keeping your original bid in place. When the event is over, simply remove the boost and bids will return to normal. Calculate the boost by calculating the difference between the historical conversion rate by the anticipated conversion rate ((Historical CVR - Anticipated CVR)/Historical CVR).
• Folder Forecasting - You may have been asked to reduce spend for the month or next. Marin will recommend and implement performance targets based on budget. If reducing spend, use Marin's What-If feature to input your budget and Marin will make recommendations on how to change the target and hit your target spend. You can then select "Apply Recommendations" to quickly apply those targets. This can be found in the Optimization>Select "Forecasting" slider button area.
• Dynamic Actions - Similar to boost, a unique bid multiplier can be applied to a Campaign/Group/KW by assigning values to a Dimension and applying a bidding rule. This can be useful for making targeted adjustments on specific parts of your account without having the change your folder structure.
• Bid Override - If there are certain keywords to be managed manually, a keyword can be placed on bid override from the key tab while the remaining keywords in the campaign or group remain on automated bidding.

In addition to all of these strategies, Marin is happy to announce our “Expert Assist” offering, providing our customers with account audits that will provide 50+ insights and health checks. Whether your marketing program has cut budgets, adjusted your headcount, is in the middle of re-evaluating your strategy, or in some cases, is seeing new trends with your sales, please consider us an extension of your team. Our decades of digital marketing experience can help you navigate through this unprecedented time. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you need further help!

When I first started working in digital marketing, part of my training process was learning about best practices, campaign structure, and all kinds of additional tools provided by publishers and third party vendors to drive success for brands.

As discussed in my previous posts, it’s important to know your brand and your customers, and to understand what makes them tick (and click) to convert on your website.

One way is to continuously run tests on your activity and learn what works and what doesn’t. Or, you can switch on and off tools like audiences and bid adjustments, explore new campaign types and channels, etc.

This article is dedicated to bidding—automated bidding, to be more precise. However, it would be wrong to look at this topic separately from everything else that’s happening in your accounts.

Much like in your home, wi-fi wouldn’t work with no electricity. Or, how can you enter the living room without a front door?

Let’s walk through our house together from room to room to see how every component makes our environment cozy and inviting to our guests—in other words, our customers who we’re driving to convert and come back for more.

Let’s start with the hallway (a.k.a., data source)

When thinking about your account optimization and bidding (whether it’s manual or automated), it’s important to identify your trustworthy data.

Some advertisers have developed their own tracking and attribution systems in-house. These systems provide them with first party data, and all the insights they opted into their product to track user journeys and interaction paths with the brand.

Another option is to pick a third party vendor or publisher tools to execute tracking for you. Here, it’s important to review the packages vendors offer and understand which ones suit your business needs the most.

Remember, the digital world is changing every day. Online customer behaviors simply aren’t the same as they were five to 10 years ago.

For instance, social networks now have more influence on a consumer’s decision making process. When someone’s in their exploration phase, reviews and feedback are important. This assigns higher revenue share from sales to publishers like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

The question here: as an advertiser, are you taking cross-channel user interactions into account, and is the value you assign to your social media or affiliate advertisement fair?

There are various vendors that consider these factors in their attribution model and share the conversion data between the channels fairly—whether it’s a click from Google or impression from Facebook that contributed to a conversion.

Marin Software has developed an attribution model called TruePath, which helps advertisers see the impact of other channels on their search campaigns and vice-versa. This allows you to better understand the value of campaigns that don’t necessarily convert on their own (e.g., prospecting), but play a key role in the user journey.

Sugar, spice and everything nice (a.k.a., audience
kitchen prep)

In past posts, we discussed the importance of understanding your audiences, how they affect performance, and what it takes to bring home that extra conversion.

When you’ve identified a list of audiences that convert better than others, you can add these and their similar audiences to specific or all campaigns. As these are best performers, you can add specific bid adjustments to these.

With one of my clients, we created audience rules to cover their top product categories and certain pages—like What’s New? After running these audiences for a month, we saw that after visiting the What’s New? page, people were 32% more likely to convert on the website, even if they purchased long-existing stock. The next step was obvious: increase the bids on audiences that visited the page and reap the results.

There are tools that offer automated bid adjustments for audiences tagged across campaigns. For instance, the Google eCPC model takes audience behavior into account (Google conversion pixel data only) and adjusts bids for you based on audience performance in the campaign/group.

Marin Software also measures audience performance when it comes to automated bidding. Here, however, the app can use your preferred source of truth. You can select a list of conversion types that are important when it comes to bid adjustments and performance and the app will do the rest—calculate and execute.

At Marin, we’ve also come up with the concept of search and social intent. Here, we help our clients to reach social prospects and leads in search engines and vice-versa.

For example, we ran a test on social campaigns using search data. The result: CPA for these campaigns was 65% lower in comparison to traditional social campaigns, while conversion volume spiked by 388%. The client also saw a 100% increase in their daily appointment requests.

The living room (a.k.a., device performance
and adjustments)

According to many marketing sources, every year is The Year of Mobile. :)

And yes, every year, we witness how mobile search share is growing, as mobile devices become more versatile and occupy every part of our lives. This may or may not be the case for you, but I feel lost without my phone, as it’s such a huge part of my life—all of my contact information is there, not to mention the easy ability to call for food delivery or an Uber in just a couple of swipes/taps.

And yet, when it comes to conversion rate and return on investment, desktop keeps showing higher, better results.

Why is that?

SmartInsights and many more research companies compiled research on this topic to prove that even though most of the initial searches on the product/service/ideas are coming from mobile, conversions are more likely to happen on desktop.

A key takeaway here is that it’s important to review device performance not only against each other, but also from a cross-device perspective.

Marin has created a special solution for this—you can set separate targets to devices. Then, based on the targets and their performance, our solution adjusts bids to meet the desired goal.

Home office (a.k.a., additional rules in Marin bidding)

Marin bidding equips you with a list of additional rules to augment your usual strategy. You can apply these on top of your target. These include:

• Bid cap
• Bid floor
• Minimum daily bid change
• Match type boost
• Publisher boost

Is your new promotion about to start outside of your working hours? You can set up your schedule to boost bids for a fixed time period.

Or, is your finance team keen to stay on top of the maximum bid values? Not a problem—just set up a bid cap and Marin won’t assign bids above your desired value.

The app uses these rules as advanced triggers to keep your performance in check. It also provides the calculation used for every object on bidding to show what was used in the process, and why.

When it comes to adjusting your target/strategy, the app makes everything very transparent and easy to understand.

Behind closed doors—what else can we do with our campaigns?

Device, audience, geo-targeting, time-of-day and day-of-week—these are the first adjustments that come to mind when reviewing a bidding strategy. But can we do more?

You bet! Our Marin analytics and product teams have worked hard to bring extra zest to your mix-and-match bidding approach.

For instance, do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• Your top-selling shoes are out of stock but your campaign is live
• Impression share has dropped but you’re trying to stay ahead of competitors
• A list of objects needs an extra push because of a new product launch or seasonality

Who you gonna call? In this case, not Ghostbusters—but, feel free to pick up a phone or email account and contact your Marin team.

Marin’s Dynamic Actions is your secret weapon when it comes to bid adjustments based on your unique situation.

With Dynamic Actions, you can tag objects in Marin with certain labels, whether it’s product stock or a certain performance metric. Marin will then recognize this tag, and based on your preferences, bid down or up for selected objects. Or, you can even stop the bidding altogether if you run out of stock.

This comes in handy when you have additional metrics you want to consider for bid optimization.

Making the place comfy (a.k.a., the importance of
bidding target)

Whether it’s revenue or exposure, every organization works towards certain goals, and it’s important to hit them to grow your business.

With automated bidding, your main responsibility is to identify the desired target and to experiment with adjustments and data points. This maximizes the benefits of machine learning for an optimal bid calculation.

When you’re assigning a target to a group of objects, bear their current performance in mind. For example, is the target too aggressive? If so, perhaps it’s best to start +/-20% of the current performance and adjust the target every couple of weeks. This allows the final bid to change smoothly over the given time period, and avoids performance spikes.

If you use the bid adjustments above wisely, they’ll bring great value to your advertising programs. To test them out, start with one to measure the impact, and then add or remove as you go.

As we mentioned in our audiences article, it’s important to have statistical proof that a certain element is bringing your performance to the next level before you add it to your initial target. Also, remember the importance of your budget—sometimes, a higher bidding budget for your test can bring in incremental revenue at a low extra cost.

For instance, during a bidding test with one of our clients, Marin managed to increase lead volume by 600%, while the average CPL in their account dropped by 20%. The team also saved 25% of their day-to-day time by letting the app handle bid optimization.

If you have a little extra budget on hand for the test, it can lead to excellent results.

Last but not least—cleaning house (a.k.a., bidding can’t work on its own)

Some advertisers ask us: why is it important to continue optimizing campaigns, when automated bidding is switched on?

Even the most modern and automated house—where Alexa and Google Home answer the door and adjust the lights—needs a human touch.

Automated bidding can indeed help you save tons of time when it comes to keeping tabs on performance and updating bids. However, we have to remember the world around us is constantly changing. Therefore, digital campaigns continually need fresh ad copy and images. And, with our ever-expanding vocabulary and trend shifts, search engines see +15% new search queries every year.

So, dust the surfaces, make them shine, and be able to show off your best performance to date.

P.S. look at our beautiful garden (a.k.a., bidding
test example)

Hope you’re still with us on our home maintenance metaphors!

Like any other top performance marketing company, at Marin we continuously run bidding tests with our clients. Let’s take a look at a test we performed against Smart Bidding, where the goal was to maximize leads to a set target cost per lead/acquisition (tCPL).

Within Marin’s bidding folders, the team activated portfolio bidding functionality. This functionality allows the app to use Bayesian data blending to help the algorithm identify the best bid for the given keywords. On top of this, automated mobile bid adjustments accommodate performance differences across devices. They also ensure placement on the first page of the SERP, and a high position and impression share at competitive levels.

In Google Ads, the client set the Smart Bidding tCPA model for a set of campaigns they used in the test.

During the test, the client didn’t create any new creatives or updated keywords. This kept the data as fair as possible across the campaign buckets that were in competition.

A month after the test started, the team compared results to the time period before the test. We ran the test during a low seasonality timeframe to avoid any external factors that might interfere with the results.

The post-test results were stunning—while running pure automated bidding activity in the account, both solutions showed an increase in conversion volumes MoM +51% with Marin’ bidding solution and +44% with Google Smart Bidding. The CPL also dropped, meaning that not only did the client gain incremental conversions from the automated bidding, but they also did so at a lower cost.

CPL in Marin dropped -47% MoM and -28% in Google Smart Bidding.

When all is said and done, when it comes to bidding, it’s important to evaluate all tools an advertiser can and should use. Once you identify areas of performance, you can use them as a layer to your bidding strategy. Automated tools help with the process of calculation and execution for hundreds or even thousands of keywords—with no time or effort from your team.

So, agree on the strategy, set it up, sit back and relax, and let the machine deliver the best bids possible.

Now that you have the perfect automated bidding home—go take that much-deserved vacation!

Audience targeting is much like cooking—with the right ingredients, a few adjustments, and seasoning to taste, you can create something hearty and enticing. Like any good online recipe, we’ll start broad and dive into the details, and cover the options you have for building an excellent mixture of audience-enabled advertising campaigns.

And, while you can look at the faces of your dinner guests to assess the success—or failure—of your culinary handiwork, we recommend a more analytical approach for your ad campaigns.

Read on.

What Is Audience Targeting?

Audiences are buckets of your users or customers, grouped based on your preferences. As an advertiser, you can create these buckets across every publisher where you sell your ads (Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, Facebook, etc.).

Once you build audiences, you can utilize them in different ways:

• Reporting: This allows you to better understand consumer behaviors, e.g., which web page is driving the most traffic/revenue.
• Bidding: Based on the data you’ve gathered, you can adjust your CPCs for advanced bidding.
• Prospecting: You can create similar audiences based on your existing lists to target new users.

In this article, we focus on Google Ads audiences—however, you can use this audience approach across all search publishers. The main difference is usually the naming convention across Google Ads, Bing, Yandex, etc.

Where Do I Start?

Option one—RLSAs

If you’ve never worked with audiences before, the best way to start is to create Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) and add these to all or top campaigns in Observation mode. This will allow you to gather data on your audiences, while keeping reach open for everyone performing a search query on your keywords.

You can set up RLSAs for specific pages of your website and based on rules—for example, a customer added items to the shopping cart, but didn’t complete the transaction in the last seven days. Generally, it’s a good practice to retarget your cart abandoners with a slightly higher bid, to remind them about their incomplete purchase.

Another good set of audiences are ones based on your top/desired web pages, for example:

• New arrivals
• Sales
• Specific category / product line
• Blog sections like “what to wear,” ”inspiration,” or “what’s trending this season”

Look at your website structure to determine the audiences to create.

Option two—category audiences

If you don’t know which pages to target or your business is still very new, publishers have an option to use pre-created audiences based on user interests. These are called in-marketaudiences, and represent the people interested in something specific such as travelling, cars, a particular industry, etc.

There are also demographic audiences that allow you to focus on gender and/or age range.

Option three—Customer Match

If your business has been in the market for a while and you have a list of loyal customers you’d like to retarget, all you need to do is upload your CRM list to the publisher and apply these audiences to your search campaigns.

Note that for legal and confidentiality reasons, all publishers encode user data upon upload.

Okay, I Have My Data—What’s Next?

Once you’ve identified which audiences deliver the most revenue for your campaigns, you can:

1. Start using them in bidding: Based on the most successful conversion rates (CVR), you can add bid adjustments for these audiences proportionally in your campaigns/groups.
2. Create specific retargeting campaigns: You can duplicate your existing campaigns, while adding top audiences to your campaigns and setting them in Targeting mode instead of Observation. This will restrict who sees these campaigns to people who fall into your audience buckets.
3. Create similar audiences: The publishers generate these audiences—they include people whose behavior is similar to the one identified in your existing audiences (RLSAs or CRM).

Piece of Cake… Or Is There More?

There’s always more! ;)

You can create and retarget audiences based on the people who spend above your average order value (note that this requires additional analytics tools like Google Analytics or Yandex.Metrica). Or, you can retarget search users who interacted with your social campaigns. Yet another option is combining your audiences with “competitors” campaigns, to drive people back to your website when they enter a competitor’s search term.

Good luck! If you have any questions or want more information, reach out to your Marin CS team. Or, if you’re new to Marin, schedule a demo today.

Omnichannel marketing causes many brands to look at their programs as a set of disparate disciplines—SEM, SEO, content marketing, social marketing, email marketing, etc. And, each discipline often has its own department, budget, and strategy, even though customers only see a single brand.

Advertisers are increasingly coming to understand that a good way to tackle the challenges inherent in omnichannel marketing is through a unified strategy, one that combines search and social into a single blueprint. Here are what our survey of digital advertisers identified as the top obstacles to overcome in reaching the goal of an integrated program.

1. Search and social silos

Separate departments for search and social mean separate staff, managers, budgets, and strategies—resulting in teams that rarely communicate, even when they might be sitting right next to each other in the office. This lack of collaboration can result in mismatched or conflicting campaign messaging, and lead to internal battles for shared resources, such as IT, engineering, budget, or creative.

2. Attribution ‘turf wars’

When search, social, and other marketing channels operate in silos, it creates organizational knowledge gaps and makes it more difficult to agree on how to attribute credit to each touchpoint on the conversion path. Social tends to benefit from a first-click attribution model because it’s typically used to create awareness at the top of the funnel.

A last-click model, on the other hand, will provide search with most of the credit for a conversion. Changing to an attribution model that applies equal or partial credit to each channel could threaten each department’s budget or organizational standing.

3. Lack of a shared budget

As the saying goes, ‘follow the money.’ Successful paid search and paid social marketers operating in different departments and with separate budgets are understandably protective of their dollars.

Search may enjoy the largest share of the digital marketing budget. However, social is increasingly carving out a larger share. As long as search and social strategies and campaigns are isolated from each other, the competition for budget dollars will continue.

4. Incompatible metrics and goals

Search and social marketers each speak their own language around key performance metrics (KPIs) and campaign goals. A social brand awareness campaign may use Facebook to increase the number of followers or the length of time followers spend on the brand’s Facebook page.

Conversely, an AdWords campaign may seek more conversions by increasing click-throughs to the website or improving the cost per click (CPC) of specific keywords. It’s difficult to measure a unified search and social campaign’s ROI when metrics don’t line up.

Learn more

To learn the emerging best practices that brands are using to solve these challenges, download Unifying Your Search & Social Ad Strategies. Or, if you’d like to learn how Marin can help, request a demo today.

The “big three” publishers—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—operate as walled gardens by design. Sadly, they have zero incentive to share data across channels. This siloed approach is totally at odds with your goals as an advertiser—you need a single view of performance to run effective cross-channel ad campaigns.

There’s an answer—our next-generation advertising solution, MarinOne, unifies your search, social, and eCommerce advertising. Within a single platform, you can:

• Get a unified view of your true customer journey
• Amplify your search, social, and eCommerce campaigns
• Gain campaign insight with a single, customizable dashboard

We’d love for you to see it in action. Sign up for our webinar on Tuesday, July 10th at 10am PT / 1pm ET for a preview and to learn how our customers are using MarinOne to save time and increase conversions.

Speaker Bios

Wes MacLaggan has over a decade’s experience developing and delivering analytical enterprise SaaS applications, including four years with Applied Predictive Technologies working on the company’s platform to help retailers maximize the return on their promotional spending. He is currently SVP of Marketing at Marin Software, and has been with the company since 2008.

Rob Emery has been part of the product team at Marin Software since 2015, where he has honed and delivered features serving Search, Social, and Optimization. He’s currently Director of Product Management and taking a lead role in the development and release of MarinOne. Prior to joining Marin, Rob worked in digital marketing for brands including Hilton Worldwide and Bonnier Corporation.

This is a guest post from Ashley Aptt, Account Director at 3Q Digital.

A marketer’s data is as good as gold. Certainly, there are number of ways to collect data via internal and external sources.

The most common data sources are first party and third party—first party data is essentially your data. It’s the information you collect directly from your customers or your website. In contrast, third party data comes from other sources—it’s data aggregated from a variety of sources.

Due to changes that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires, the future of third party data is uncertain. Under the GDPR, companies are required to inform consumers about the data they’re collecting, such as how they intend to use it and with whom they intend to share it. Given this change, there are concerns that this can lead to the end of third party data as we know it.

What Does This Mean for Marketers?

With all the shake-up around third party data, now’s the time to rethink your marketing strategy and utilize your first party data as much as possible. If your website is already tagged with a remarketing pixel for your various media platforms, then you’re off to a good start. Remarketing pixels are considered first party data since they capture the user’s behavior and activity while they’re on your website.

If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) system to help manage your customer information, then you likely have details about your customer’s past purchases and other interactions with your business. When used properly, you can leverage your remarketing audiences and CRM data to create targeted marketing lists to re-engage site visitors and past purchasers.

Incorporating First Party Data into Your Digital Media Strategy

Most advertisers are already familiar with the basics of remarketing and the importance of segmenting your data to re-engage users with relevant messaging across search and social platforms to increase conversion prospects. But by using your remarketing and CRM data, you can take your strategy to the next level by analyzing customer data and trends to home in on customer retention and repeat purchases, while also using that data to expand your reach to a targeted audience.

Here are some ideas to leverage your first party data and up your remarketing game across paid search and social:

• Push upsells and cross-sells: Once a visitor converts, leverage CRM data to determine complementary products they may be interested in. For example, if a customer purchases a swimsuit, follow up with ads to sell them a beach towel or swim cover-up.
• Re-engage seasonal shoppers: If you have a set of customers who only purchase during a certain time of year (such as holidays or summer), that’s okay! Create lists for these purchasers, and ramp up your marketing efforts for them during the time of year they’re most likely to convert. Also consider if there are other holidays or promotional events when it might make sense to re-engage these visitors.
• Don’t forget about video: Video advertising is becoming more and more popular and it’s a great way to reach your audience. Consider using a sequential messaging strategy to build a story and keep users interested in your brand.
• Expand your reach with lookalikes or similar audiences: Google and Facebook both have the ability to build a new audience based off your first party data. This is a great way to expand your reach and find users who are like your current customers.

Conclusion

While first party data may not offer as much opportunity to scale your marketing efforts as third party data, there’s still a lot of potential to leverage first party data to increase revenue and improve ROI. Put your customer data and insights to good use to refine your remarketing, retention, and acquisition strategies.

Lookalike audiences are the Facebook feature when it comes to audience targeting. If you’re looking to scale your campaigns and more, it’s a must-consider option.

The Basics: What Is It and How Does It Work?

You can use lookalike targeting to find similar users to your core audience based on interests, click behavior, and conversion habits. The smaller the percentage of your core audience, the more similar your lookalike audience will be.

A lookalike percentage says, “Give me x% of the selected country users who are most similar to my seed audience.” For example, if you create a 1% lookalike in the US, the output will always be around 2.1 million profiles, since this is more or less 1% of the total number of Facebook users in the US.

However, depending on the seed audience, the profiles may greatly differ—for example, a 1% lookalike of your most valuable lifetime users will be different from a 1% lookalike of all website visitors. Therefore, seed quality is the most important factor for success.

You have several options from which to generate lookalike audiences:

• Your custom audience (email lists, phone numbers, etc.)
• Website Custom Audience
• Page fans
• Campaign data (API-only feature)

A Few Size Guidelines

When segmenting/choosing seed audiences, think quality over quantity. Although quality can be subjective, there are a few generic size benchmarks (guidelines) for your seed audience.

• Keep it under 50,000, since anything above this may see a drop in performance.
• Keep it above 1,000.

For example, let’s take our previous 1% US lookalike. Our audience has 2.1 million people. When we create our lookalike audience, Facebook compares the people in this audience against how similar they are to our seed audience of less than 50,000. In other words, we’re magnifying the seed 40 times. If the seed isn’t high quality, then the magnification won’t produce the best audience.

As you can see, you have a lot of choices to test different audience types and associated performance. The key challenge is to segment and structure the audiences to avoid overlaps and achieve the best delivery.

Something to note: Since frequency caps limit the daily number of times you can deliver an ad to a user, lookalike audiences won’t increase your overall reach. And, you’ll have less predictability when it comes to which ad wins each auction.

There’s a way to overcome these challenges, however. Make sure your strategy includes nested lookalikes and smart exclusions. Let’s go into more detail.

Using Nested Lookalikes and Smart Exclusions

Let’s start with an example, where we exclude the next-highest percentage audience from our targeted lookalike audience. So, if you’re targeting lookalike 3% and lookalike 5%, then exclude the 3% audience from the campaign that’s targeting the 5% one.

Nested lookalikes:

Smart exclusions:

With smart exclusions, we exclude the targeted audiences that we’re already using in other live campaigns. For example, if you’re running campaigns with 1% lookalike and 3% lookalike and want to launch a broader targeting campaign, then exclude the 3% lookalike.

Avoiding Campaign Redundancies and Fine-Tuning

When you’re planning your targeting strategy, make sure you’re segmenting your lookalike thresholds according to the value of the user, and excluding the targeted audiences from campaigns to avoid overlap. This’ll allow you to use lookalike audiences from different sources, increasing the overall reach and scalability of your campaigns.

For example, if you’re running a retargeting campaign based on a Website Custom Audience of all your site visitors, exclude this campaign from all of your acquisition initiatives, along with the associated lookalike audiences.

Here’s another scenario. Suppose you’re a travel website and the user funnel includes two conversions—registration and booking. You would segment the audiences based on your goals—perhaps based on the custom audience of the previous month's bookers, conversion pixel data, and Website Custom Audience of people who registered but didn’t book. Your segmentation would look like this:

Custom audience segmentation:

You can use all of these audiences for your acquisition campaigns, along with interest-based and other targeting options.

Here’s the final campaign planning structure for this example. This takes into account that retargeting campaigns are running based on your Website Custom Audiences.

Fine-tuned campaign planning structure:

Putting It All Together

Creating effective lookalike audiences takes a bit of cunning and patience, but it’s not rocket science. With continued practice, refinement, and measurement, you can scale your campaigns to ensure you’re targeting audiences with the most relevant ads at the most relevant time, in a way that works the best for your business. If you haven’t yet implemented this feature, we strongly recommend you get started today!

Although it’s a great feeling when social ad campaigns are on auto-pilot, functioning automatically, and blasting out to all the audiences we’ve carefully selected, it could happen—we start seeing stunted reach, fewer clicks, and sluggish conversion rates. At these moments, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and investigate the most common culprits for dips in social performance, and make adjustments to address the problems.

Here are a few simple things to examine to ensure your social ad campaigns are performing at their best.

Frequency

What is it and why does it matter?

Frequency is the average number of times people see your ad. A higher frequency can leave a greater impact on the user, since they’ll be more likely to remember your brand and take action. As a starting point, we recommend planning campaigns for a frequency of 5-8, but with every campaign and creative being different, this can fluctuate depending on a few different variables:

• Campaign length
• Daily active users
• Optimization event
• Page connections
• Previous brand exposure
• The longevity of the decision-making process

What does it mean?

A greater frequency—often combined with a decrease in click-through rate (CTR)—simply means that your ads are reaching the same audience continuously. In turn, a decreased CTR indicates that users are no longer paying attention to your ads or the audience pool is left with users who aren’t interested in your brand or product offering. Either way, the audience isn’t clicking your ads anymore.

How do you improve it?

If ad frequency has reached higher than your usual average, the best solution is to explore new audiences that represent potential new revenue. Try lifetime value audiences, campaign lookalike audiences (available through Marin via API), or Marin’s search intent retargeting and prospecting audiences.

In addition, new creatives can always provide a performance uplift, as they can appeal to audiences that initially didn’t respond to your ads. Consider changing:

• Theme of the creative
• Creative format (e.g., video or carousel)
• Call to action
• Color palette
• Offers and text

CTR

What is it and why does it matter?

CTR indicates the percentage of clicks that result from the total number of impressions. The higher the CTR, the more people click your ad, and the higher the website traffic that could result in conversions.

What does it mean?

There are four potential reasons for a decrease in CTR.

1. For audiences that have performed in the past or are very relevant—e.g., 1% lookalike or retargeting audiences—the creative might be the offender. Alternatively, you’d need to check the frequencies of the previously best-performing audiences to avoid audience saturation.
2. If you’re experimenting with broad audiences such as keyword targeting, it could be that this particular audience is just less engaged with your brand and your investment could have a better return somewhere else.
3. If your high CTR plummets, it could be that your ads are suffering from creative fatigue, meaning your audience has seen your creative for a while already and is simply tired of it. Make sure you’re following creative best practices.
4. Lastly, if you’re targeting large audiences, the campaign may have not had enough time or budget spend for Facebook to identify the users who are most likely to convert.

How do you improve it?

Having identified the reason behind the decrease in CTR from the suggestions above, you could try a new approach or a combination of tactics:

1. Test new creatives using one of the suggestions in the Frequency section.
2. Make your audience more specific by overlaying your keyword targeting with a lookalike audience or reducing the percentage size.
3. Don’t pause your campaigns too early, as Facebook’s algorithm requires at least 50 conversions per ad set to get through the learning phase. As the name suggests, during the learning phase the algorithm is learning about your audience and their behaviors and may not produce optimal results. However, having gone through the initial learning phase, Facebook has enough data to deliver your ads to the right audience and therefore produce the results you’re after.

CVR

What is it and why does it matter?

Conversion rate (CVR) indicates the conversions (purchases, sign-ups, etc.) resulting from link clicks. It’s one of the most important metrics, as it indicates the quality of the click audience and the relevance of your ad.

What does it mean?

A sudden, significant drop in CVR can indicate a tracking issue such as:

• Broken tracking links
• Missing pixels on your website
• Missing pixels in ad setup

Alternatively, it can be a sign of a technical error on your website such as broken webpages or errors with processing purchase requests.

Other reasons behind a low CVR can be a misleading call to action or irrelevant landing page. It can also indicate the state of the market and competition, which is why we always recommend keeping an eye on competitors’ activity and Facebook offers.

How do you improve it?

If you’ve seen a sudden unexpected drop in conversion rate we recommend reviewing your website, since often it’s related to this.

Double-check your tracking links and ensure that active pixels are on the website and attached to your ads. Install Facebook’s Pixel Helper plugin, and verify whether the pixel fires on each relevant page such as add to cart, register, and purchase.

Additionally, try optimizing the user experience by shortening the conversion journey and providing appealing offers.

In the previous article in our Marketing on Facebook series, we looked at how to build a robust A/B scope of test framework to help uncover optimal relevance and ROAS. In our third and final post, we analyze the results of our test and formulate an action plan. (Be sure to refer back to the previous article for a refresher.)

Summary of Insights

Remember, we’re working with a retail advertiser’s scope of test. The retail advertiser is using Conversion and Product Catalog sales objectives. They’ve set a goal to optimize their campaigns, with the broader challenge to drive ROAS improvements.

Let’s don the hat of a Marin Customer Engagement Manager. Reviewing performance insights, we can formulate our summary:

• Men and women display consistently different trends in purchase behaviors—men have higher conversion rates, but cost more per conversion and produce lower revenue; women produce higher revenue, but have lower conversion rates.
• Instagram posted consistently higher ROAS versus other placements.

Summary of Opportunities for Optimization

In response, we note several opportunities for optimization:

• Testing men and women targeted together versus. segmented
• Testing placement optimized ad sets including Instagram versus segmenting Instagram
• Testing optimizing to standard pixel events versus. Custom Conversion
• Testing more refined lookback windows for seed audiences
• Testing more refined lookback windows for dynamic ads

Summary of Scope of Test

Because age, gender, and in many cases the location often have a significant impact on results, the gender A/B test weighted higher in importance for Phase 1, versus testing placement optimization. Additionally, this was a priority for the advertiser at the time because they were also thinking about a more gender-tailored approach to creative design.

We’ve noted that in setting up ad studies, a clear definition of success is very important for successful learnings, so be sure to define KPIs. We elected ‘overall campaign performance’ as the measured goal for our scope of test, and also noted improvements for our KPIs of Relevance Score and ROAS.

Let’s look at some of the highlights that the example scope of test produced.

Phase 1: Testing Gender Optimized Ad Set Versus Unique Ad Sets for Men and Women

Background: A/B test campaign targeting men and women together in an ad set, versus a campaign targeting men and women in unique ad sets. Winner is plugged into Phase 2.

Theory: Optimized ad sets—whether combining placement or genders—allow the Facebook auction algorithm to find the most opportunities from the defined audience pool. When we target women uniquely, do we see higher ROAS?

Test Results

Including men and women in the same ad set can work better in some cases. This is because the auction algorithm has more options in effectively placing impression opportunities for results (placing an ad impression in front of the person most likely to take action X), for the most efficient price.

In other cases, we need segmentation to better refine the audience versus the goal—to make it more relevant.

Learnings: The campaign segmenting men and women improved Relevance Scores by two points, and improved ROAS by 18%. Creating segmentation in the audience—limiting and refining its overall scope—helped generate a more relevant targeting pool. Because more relevant ads are more cost efficient, we saw improved ROAS in correlation with higher Relevance Scores.

Highlights: Looking at the ad set targeting men only, we saw that the Relevance Score and ROAS were about equal to that of the campaign ad set that combined gender targeting. However, the ad set targeting women only posted significantly higher Relevance Scores and ROAS. While men remained an overall difficult and more expensive conversion, the more focused and relevant ad set targeting women was able to efficiently serve impressions, and generate conversions and revenue.

Conclusion: Overall, the campaign segmenting gender targeting produced better results.

Targeting in this way achieved not only a more relevant—but also a more positive—user experience. The auction produced more value for our advertising outcomes, reaching people who mattered most to specific goals. As a result, we gained improved ROI.

Additional Insights

It’s possible for a budget to be spent faster yet win less auction impressions. Why? Because of low relevance. For comparison, the two campaigns with equal overall audiences produced the following insights in Round 1:

CPM (Campaign A, Segmented Genders): $26.16

CPM (Campaign B, Combined Genders): $29.66

For the same budget of $1,500, Campaign B produced 6,776 fewer impressions, and despite a higher conversion rate (52.94% vs. 49.89%), produced 18% less revenue.

In all, the ‘less relevant campaign’ produced less impressions, less clicks, higher overall CPAs, and lower revenue.

With similar results in Round 2, we were able to prove that fostering more relevance in our targeting, ads in the auction produced more results at higher overall campaign ROAS in response.

Marin Tip: Relevance Score can be a powerful tool in your campaign management. Look for it in the Marin Social dashboard at the campaign, ad set, and ad level:

With the above results, you can also test unique creatives to men and women in the future, to see if you can further optimize with a more tailored message or image/video.

Phase 2: Test Placement Optimization Versus Segmenting Instagram

A/B test campaign utilizing Placement Optimization (including Phase 1 winner: men and women segmented), versus a campaign utilizing Placement Optimization except for Instagram, which is a unique ad set. With noted insights that Instagram produces higher ROAS, can a controlled budget via a dedicated ad set improve overall campaign ROAS?

Winner is plugged into Phase 3.

Test Results

Learnings: Segmenting Instagram into a unique placement and providing for controlled budget produced a 4% improvement in ROAS overall. We noted a slight uptick in Relevance Score, (under 1 point).

Highlights: While Instagram continued to post performance gains in a dedicated at set, we saw smaller overall gains than we hoped for. We noticed that the ad set utilizing all other placement options without Instagram performed markedly worse than when we included Instagram.

In the ‘overall’ performance gains overview, Instagram carried the campaign’s success. We planned further testing to produce a placement-optimized ad set.

While not as impactful as we’d hoped, Phase 2 created an opportunity to build a follow-up scope of test to understand the best combination of placements. Just because our results don’t post a clear winner doesn’t necessarily mean a failed ad study. We should view such results as additional opportunities to test and refine our strategy.

Phase 3 and Beyond

Additional testing found that building Lookalike Audiences from Custom Audiences that used more narrow lookback windows (10days was best) helped improve Relevance Scores. In addition, on average, it produced 11% gains in ROAS, versus campaigns that used Lookalikes based on a 180-day lookback window seed Custom Audience.

We uncovered similar patterns for dynamic retargeting ads—using more tiers, plus more narrow windows in those tiers, proved most optimal from a ROAS perspective. There was no significant impact to Relevance Scores.

Dynamic retargeting tiers we found most successful were:

• Added to Cart but not Purchased in 3 days
• Added to Cart but not Purchased in 10 days, not Added to Cart in 3 days
• Viewed Content but not Added to Cart in 7 days
• Viewed Content but not Added to Cart in 14 days, not Viewed Content in 7 days
• Viewed Content but not Added to Cart in 30 days, not Viewed Content in 14 days

We also determined that using a Custom Conversion produced worse overall results, versus using a pixel event to track conversions. When using the pixel event, for example, our Relevance Scores were on average 1.2 points higher than when we used a Custom Conversion. Also, we also improved our ROAS when we used the pixel event.

Final Thoughts

Relevancy and quality can help advertisers achieve efficiency gains in assigned budgets on Facebook. However, they’re often overlooked in favor of bid and budget adjustments.

While bid changes and budget adjustments hold value in optimizing campaigns, Relevance Score—and overall the relevance concept in the auction as described within the total bid—is one of the key drivers of performance efficiency.

Time after time we’ve noticed that campaigns with low Relevance Scores perform worse when compared with campaigns posting a higher Relevance Score. In these cases, increasing the bid value or switching to Auto Bid doesn’t typically improve acquisition costs or revenue.

In a lot of cases, campaigns with low Relevance Scores also under-deliver to allocated budgets.

Finally, to achieve efficiency gains, you need a carefully outlined approach that incorporates an understanding of the baseline, plus measured steps to test improvements to this baseline.

Refining Your Campaign Strategy

If you’d like to partner on projects similar to the one we’ve described here, contact your Customer Engagement Manager and they’ll gladly schedule a time to review your campaign strategy. They can also help model and support your progress through a scope of test. Or, if you’re new to Marin, feel free to get in touch.

Like all algorithms, Facebook’s collects a certain amount of data and analyzes it before stabilizing performance and delivering the best results. So, while your ad sets are in this “learning phase,” you may see fluctuations in performance, which might make it tempting to stop your ads before they’ve had a chance to work most effectively.

In this article, we cover the basics of the Facebook algorithm and things that can impact the learning phase.

More About the Learning Phase

Facebook wants to ensure a flawless user experience and that you’re reaching the people that matter the most to your business. To this end, they’ve introduced the learning phase.

During this time, Facebook’s algorithm shows ads to different types of people in your audience, and tries to feed the delivery system with more conversion data for the most stable and best results after the phase ends. The algorithm decides who gets served ads.

Facebook has different requirements depending on the optimization timeframe:

• Day: Facebook has a minimum requirement for an ad set of five optimized conversions. You should aim to get at least 10.
• Week: For a week, the number of conversions has to reach 50 for optimal optimization.

What Happens Once the Learning Phase Ends

After an ad set reaches 50 conversions, the learning phase ends. This means the Facebook algorithm has collected the necessary amount of data and you should start seeing stable performance.

If you’re using a different attribution model than the Facebook default (one-day post-view/28 days post-click) the learning phase can be longer. For example, for one-day post-click it’ll take longer to get 50 conversions.

In addition to the recommended number of conversions, be sure to not pause ads or make any drastic changes to the ad set, especially by editing creatives, updating targeting specs or the optimization timeframe, amending bids and budgets, and firing the pixel conditionally. Also, note that the oCPM algorithm needs at least 24 hours, with no changes at all, to effectively learn.

After the learning phase, you can start optimizing your ad sets to get the best performance. However, make sure that your budget/bid changes aren’t higher than 20%, as this will most likely restart the learning phase.

It’s important to gather enough of data for the algorithm to collect learnings and stabilize performance. So, be sure to allow the algorithm to reach the time thresholds before trying to optimize your campaigns.

If your Facebook ads aren’t quite reaching all the people you’re looking to influence, there are several things you can analyze to solve the problem. Here are a few tactics to ensure your ads are delivering the way you want them to.

Is your bid too low?

In order to run competitive campaigns in an increasingly competitive Facebook auction market, make sure you’re entering your ads in the auction with a realistic bid that reflects your CPA target. However, if the initial bid doesn’t get you delivery at some point, don’t be afraid to test higher values to get back on track. Facebook’s market is ever-changing, so be sure your bids keep pace.

Is audience overlap too high?

If ad sets in your ad account have a high overlap, Facebook will try its best to keep you from bidding against yourself in the auction. However, in order to do so one of the ad sets will miss out on impressions and subsequently suffer from under-delivery.

To combat this, try excluding the audiences from each other. If this result sin small audience sizes, try testing broader audiences (such as increased lookalike threshold) and apply the exclusions then.

Your promoted object may not have enough data

Generally, if you’re optimizing towards one of your pixel events, it’s recommended to be as specific with your promoted object as possible. By setting your promoted object, you’re telling Facebook what you want your final conversion to be so that Facebook can help you achieve it.

Some advertisers may struggle with generating enough conversions to feed Facebook’s algorithm to have the required delivery. Facebook recommends having 50 conversions per ad set per week so that the algorithm has enough data to optimize delivery.

If you’ve concluded that your promoted object doesn’t reach this target, try adjusting the promoted object to an event before the final conversion. The volumes there are likely to be considerably higher and therefore can improve delivery.

Are you using the right bidding type?

Facebook offers various bidding types to suit your objective, audience type, and audience size. While oCPM bidding can be very powerful, it’s not always the right bidding value. As a rule of thumb, we suggest using oCPM only with larger audiences whom you know relatively little about (i.e., prospecting audiences). Keep the audience size over 100k.

Consider seasonality

Sometimes seasons, holidays, and major retail days (such as Black Friday, Christmas, and Back to School) can increase the demand of ad space for particular verticals. If you’ve historically noticed increased competition during those periods, consider increasing your bidding to stay in the game.

Is your budget realistic?

Make sure your budget expectations are realistic for the audience size you’re targeting. For instance, if you’re retargeting a high-value custom audience of 500 users, you might not be able to spend the whole allocated budget. To set realistic audience targets for your team and your client, follow this simple calculation.

Audience size x 5 (frequency)
____________________________ = Anticipated budget
CPM that you’ve historically seen
for such small audiences

With this calculation, you’ll get the total number of impressions you’re able to deliver with a recommended maximum frequency of 5. By dividing it with your historical CPM for a similar audience, you’ll get the expected budget you’ll be able to spend.

Check the Relevance Score

Lastly, Facebook is always looking out for its audience as it’s aiming to provide a pleasant user experience. If your ads have received a lot of negative feedback (hint: the tiny x button in the top right corner of the ad) Facebook will scale down the delivery of the ad as it’s seeing that it’s not resonating well with the audience. So, always make sure to target the relevant audience with the best possible creative most likely to resonate with them.

Facebook is constantly introducing new features to help advertisers scale activity. Testing new stuff is exciting, and can often distract us from our main tasks. That said, a best practice is to allocate 70% of your budget to core campaigns and 30% to testing new features.

What steps should you take to ensure your core campaigns perform efficiently, and that your campaign structure’s up to date? Don’t be afraid to shake things up and re-structure your campaigns to identify more opportunities and improve results.

Before You Jump In

Before you re-structure anything, it’s crucial to analyze your current core activity—in other words, a gap analysis. This happens in three stages:

• Assess your current campaign structure and note observations.
• Identify opportunities and action items.
• Design and implement the campaign restructure.

Current Campaign Structure and Observations

Depending on the size of your account, you can either analyze all of your campaigns or concentrate on the top performers. In either case, follow the steps below to complete an initial assessment of your campaign structure. The campaign elements we’re using are just an example—tailor the specifics for your business.

1. Mirror the campaign structure to an Excel table. This will give you a full view of your setup. Include:

• Campaign name
• Ad set – Audience Inclusion
• Ad set – Audience Exclusion
• Ad set – Age
• Ad set – Gender
• Ad set – Placement
• Any other ad set splits, e.g., country, language, connections, etc.
• Number of ads inside the ad set
• Budget per ad set

2. Analyze the amount of ad sets and the audience splits. You can use Facebook’s overlap feature to identify highly overlapping audiences.
3. Analyze Exclusions to make sure you’re using smart exclusions, and at the same time not excluding too granularly for ad sets to have limited size (and thus bad delivery). Read more about this in our article on lookalike audiences.
4. Check that your age and gender splits are consistent and broad. Facebook algorithms are more efficient with broader demographic targeting.
5. Make sure you’re using consistent placements and making the most of Facebook algorithms.
6. Ensure you’re not running too many ads, and that the number of creatives is consistent.
7. Make sure you have enough budget allocated to the ad. This is important. There should be enough budget to deliver at least one main KPI per day.

In our example there are a couple of observations:

Our Main KPI is Purchase and goal CPA is €35.

• Yellow: The campaign has 25 ad sets with lookalike audiences that have a high overlap percentage. This means the splits are too granular and are less efficient.
• Tan: In most cases, you should use smart exclusions. However, since we’re targeting highly overlapped audiences, these exclusions aren’t sufficient to reduce overlap and excluding more audiences will result in very small audience sizes.
• Blue: Some ad sets have reduced age ranges for no particular reason. Also, since our product is suitable for both genders, there’s no reason to split them.
• Light green: Placement optimization is common and can be rolled out to all ad sets. Read more about placement optimization best practices.
• Gray: Currently, there are too many ads within each ad set and it looks like the number isn’t consistent. Facebook will push the best performing ad, so not all ads in the set will have a chance to perform. It’s better to reduce the amount of ads to two to four to avoid wasting budget.
• Dark green: Since we’re running a lot of ads, our budgets are very limited—some ad sets have enough budget enough for one conversion. This is fine, but our budget should be higher to scale activity.

Opportunities and Action Plan

As you’re noting observations, you’ll likely identify a few opportunities to improve your account structure. Let’s put our knowledge into action.

1. Reduce the number of limitations by reducing the amount of targeted segments. Run main lookalike audiences with smart exclusions. Once the initial segments are exhausted, we’ll add other thresholds. This will allow for audience and campaign rotation.
2. Expand reach by targeting broad consistent demographics and avoid splits. Same for placements, as this will allow Facebook’s algorithm to optimize your ads more efficiently.
3. Reducing the number of ads will prevent user fatigue, and once these ads are exhausted, add other elements to keep things fresh. You’ll spend your budget more efficiently here, too, and you’ll be able to identify the best performing creative you can use as a template for the future campaigns.

Proposed Campaign Restructuring

The final and easiest step is based on our action points. Here, we create our new campaign structure.

Management and optimization should be easy, whether manual or automated. Allow more budget for your ads to deliver and push the best performing ones.

When your campaign starts to experience fatigue, pause underperforming ads and let your top performers continue delivering results. Create a campaign with new segments to ensure you have the right volume.

Your own campaign structure and goals may differ from our example. Look at your strategy from a full-funnel perspective, and implement the most efficient campaign structure for your particular needs. If you’re a Marin customer and need help, contact your account representative. They’ll be able to assist with a full gap analysis and provide the best recommendations for your campaign restructure.

Audience targeting gives marketers a powerful tool to tailor their message and build highly relevant ad campaigns for different customer segments. Layering “Audiences” on top of keywords drives better results than using keywords alone.

Consider a few results:

• eharmony averaged 220% ROI after adopting an advertising strategy based on personalization and audience segments.
• Ancestry’s smart audience utilization continues to increase its ROI and drive high-performance remarketing campaigns.
• MoneySuperMarket discovered that delivering the right message at the right time was key to keeping customers happy and retaining their business.

Breaking Down Barriers to Success

Most marketers underutilize audience products today. In our conversations, we hear a number of recurring themes when we explore why this is happening.

Many advertisers say that “We don’t have a retargeting pixel installed” or “I don’t know where to start or how to test audiences.” The good news: After you set a baseline with Google Analytics, audience targeting is easy to implement and test to find the best configuration for your organization.

Start Your Audience Targeting Efforts Today

To get started with audience targeting and ensure the largest yields from your advertising budgets, download our free guide, Finding Your Ideal Audience: Advertisers Get Smart About Customer Acquisition. With its practical advice and hands-on tactics, you’ll be able to begin using audience targeting right away.

Luckily for social advertisers, Facebook algorithms continually optimize to create value and provide a positive, relevant user experience. Still, there are a few things you can periodically do to boost performance.

One important exercise is examining why your ads may be under-delivering. There are two main areas to monitor for under-delivering ads: targeting and bidding.

Targeting

Cause: Audience is too narrow and paired with low budget

Solution: The easiest solution to overcome this issue is to broaden your audience. Facebook offers many audience types—so, instead of being granular with your splits, make sure your audience is broad enough for Facebook to maximize opportunities of reaching relevant users.

Cause: Overlapping ad set audiences

Solution: We all try to get the most out of our high-value users. However, it’s important to use smart exclusions to make sure you’re not targeting the same people to ensure the best delivery.

Cause: Audience too broad paired with low eCTR (the probability of a click) and eCVR (the probability of a conversion)

Solution: Segment your audiences to be more precise, making sure the segmentation isn’t too granular. If the segment is too narrow, consider changing the bid type.

What’s in the eCTR and eCVR? Everything. Facebook looks at your ad, ad set, campaign, and account history; recent activity on the ad set; user characteristics such as gender, age, and conversion history; page/app history; and other factors.

Focus on your value and let Facebook do the rest. Test value-based lookalikes, including the tiered lookalike approach, remember smart exclusions, and always test different targeting options.

Let the system optimize and avoid stopping or starting your ads too often.

Bidding

Cause: Bid is too low

Solution: Increase the bid to the maximum to ensure ad delivery.

Cause: Low number of 1-day post-click conversions

Solution: There are a few possible solutions here:

• Consider changing bid type to clicks or reach.
• Optimize to a conversion higher in the funnel.
• Change the bid to a 7-day post click conversion optimization.

Note that bidding higher won’t affect your cost. Therefore, it’s important to choose the right bidding option depending on your objective.

Average and Maximum Cost Bidding

Average or maximum cost bidding can also lead to better results. Use maximum cost bidding to optimize for cost that’s under a given amount. Use average cost bidding to increase delivery and volume within an average threshold.

Remember that it’s important to enable an ad set to deliver at least a few conversions per day, so that Facebook can gather more data and optimize more efficiently.

The Quest for Better Ad Delivery

Remember that whenever you’re experiencing ad delivery issues, be sure to review your targeting and bidding options. The fewer constraints, the better Facebook can optimize your ads. Best of luck!

This is a guest post from Laura Stiles, Manager of Digital Advertising at Wheelhouse DMG.

Did You Know

According to the National Retail Federation, by October, 55% of consumers will have already begun researching their holiday purchases. So, if you’ve been scouring the internet looking for new strategies to adopt this holiday season, look no further—now is not the time to change your SEM strategy.

The most successful clients during holiday are the ones who do the same thing they’ve been doing all year, only bigger. Spend more money, get more clicks, see more orders and higher revenue, but do it the same way you’ve been doing all year.

If you’re not sure you can plan and execute a mobile-only PPC strategy this season, then don’t! If you don’t think you have time to flesh out a new shopping campaign structure before Cyber Week, don’t! Save testing for Q1, when the stakes aren’t so high (more on that in the coming months). Use your tried-and-true methods on a larger scale, and I’m willing to bet money you’ll see great results.

Holiday Prep List

All this is not to say you shouldn’t be investing time now to prep for the holidays. Even though I’m suggesting you shouldn’t change your strategy, here are a few steps to ensure this holiday will be your most effective yet.

Check Your Keyword List Twice

• Ask yourself, is there any new merchandise coming in for the holidays or gifting this season? If so, do we have keyword coverage for these brands or products?
• Secondly, what key products were popular this time last year? Do you have expansive coverage around them?
• Finally, once your keyword coverage is in place, are the keywords above first-page minimums so they’re eligible to show ads?
• Pro-tip: Avoid generic gift keywords (gifts for mom, Christmas present, etc.) unless you have significant budget to spend with low ROAS goals. These terms get very expensive (high CPCs) around the holidays and don’t have specific intent (low conversion rate).

Shopping Campaign ‘Til You Drop

• As you bid up on your product groups this holiday season, do you know what kinds of search queries you’re receiving? Scan Search Query Logs, and add negatives for any irrelevant traffic that may spike when you increase bids on your popular product targets.
• Make sure you’re separating your trademark traffic utilizing engine priority settings. Need a refresher on how this works? Check out our Shopping structure post.
• Pro-tip: Optimize your feed with relevant titles and descriptions. Is your “Gingerbread Birdhouse” a great gift for bird watchers? Add “Bird Watcher Gift” to your product title to help the engines match a user’s intent to your perfect product.

Make Your Message Jolly and Bright

• There are lots of ways to make your copy stand out. Experiment with countdown copy and IF statements that target user device or audience segments to make your message super-targeted.
• If you’re using the new AdWords UI, then you have access to Promotion Extensions. This feature allows you to add Black Friday and Cyber Monday specific extensions to your ads.
  

• Pro-tip: If you have physical locations, use ad copy or extensions to promote extended hours to help drive users in-store this season.

Invest Early

• Shoppers start researching early for purchases they plan to make on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Make sure you’re allocating budget to days based on click date revenue per click, as opposed to purchase date.
• Don’t rely on your existing time of day or day of week rules through Cyber Week. Keep in mind shoppers may be searching at odd times (like 3am on Black Friday while they’re in line at Best Buy) and your current bid pullbacks may cause you to miss good opportunities.
• Pro-tip: Use the custom holiday audiences you hopefully created from converters this time last year to retarget as they shop this holiday season.

As you prepare, ensure the best practices you’ve been refining all year are in place, and don’t change your overall approach. Happy (almost) holidays!

Brand awareness campaigns on Facebook are great—they allow you to improve the visibility of your brand and products, and enlarge your fan base.

But, when it comes to driving users to perform specific actions on your website or app, conversion campaigns are your best allies!

Unlike branding campaigns, conversion campaigns usually need not only a more detailed plan and sophisticated structure—they also require a more specific and timely optimization, along with an impeccable bidding strategy.

Every situation and project has its own peculiar characteristics, and needs to be considered carefully in developing the right strategy. But, you can follow some basic steps that serve as a mini-guide on how to master conversion campaigns on Facebook.

Tracking

Before you launch a conversion campaign, always make sure you’re able to properly track your conversions. You should only have one Main KPI—which we’ll discuss in the next section—but you should also have perfect visibility of the whole conversion funnel, in order to be able to answers questions like:

• How many users left the website right after viewing a product without converting?
• How many “add to cart” events did your campaign generate?
• What’s your bounce rate on each step?

You can answer these questions with intermediate, specific events that you track along with your main KPI.

Main KPI

Choosing the right Main KPI enables you to accurately evaluate your campaigns, and optimize them towards your central objective.

Pick the Pixel or In-App event wisely. Main KPIs that generate poor volume—like the purchase of a very expensive product—or metrics that will most certainly be performed outside of the attribution time frame, may complicate campaign optimization. If you don’t achieve enough conversion volume, you won’t be able to analyze your campaign results properly and take the right course of action to optimize them.

CPA Goal

Make sure your desired cost per conversion is achievable, and that it ensures a transparent analysis of your campaign.

If you’re new to the publisher or launching in a new market—or simply unsure of the best cost per conversion you can get with your campaign—start by optimizing on CPC or other delivery metrics.

It’s easy to estimate the average CPC and CPM, so use this as a good starting point for your new digital advertising activity.

Bidding

Conversion-focused optimization is the most precise way of bidding in conversion campaigns. But, you may want to start with a CPC or CPM optimised bidding model, especially with small audiences.

Once you get your first conversions and a decent volume (and your audience is ample enough), you can switch to oCPM and let Facebook’s algorithm optimize your bidding towards your Main KPI.

For More Information

If you’d like more information on setting up the best conversion ad campaigns for your business, just get in touch.

Advertising performance for a world-famous design and fashion house trended well below its target return on ad spend (ROAS). Strong seasonality and a rapidly shifting marketplace caused sliding sales. These challenges were as tricky to negotiate as the catwalks at Fashion Week.

In with the Marin Crowd

Marin Software collaborated with this fashion house to design a new shopping plan and implement it with the “hautest” marketing technology.

The alliance was an immense success, resulting in a 400% increase in ROAS.

How did we do it? To find out, read the case study.

Facebook recently worked with Kantar Worldpanel to test the hypothesis: is someone exposed to an ad on both TV and Facebook more likely to buy? Specifically, would there be at least a 22% lift in sales from this “double exposure” on both channels?

The short answer: yes. The amazing answer: the lift was actually 29%—1.3 times higher than expected.

What can digital advertisers do to capitalize on these numbers?

Get in the Game with TV Sync Technology

If you already have a good baseline social advertising strategy, use TV Sync technology to take things to the next level. TV Sync allows you to automatically activate your social ads based on customizable offline events like television flight schedules, live programming, weather changes, or sporting events—all in real time. It’s a powerful way to amplify your reach and drive engagement across screens.

And, as the Kantar Worldpanel study indicates, it’s a great way to increase revenue across a host of CPG industries.

TV Sync allows you to:

• Trigger your social ads when your competitor’s commercial airs
• Launch social ads automatically based on weather status or key sporting events such as touchdowns and timing
• Extend your advertising beyond TV, onto the second screen and into the virtual shopping space

Consider a few other examples of how you can use Marin’s TV Sync to amplify your advertising efforts.

Extend Your Advertising Message Across Screens

Running TV commercials? Use TV Sync to trigger your social ads immediately as your commercials air, reinforcing the message and increasing your impact with a multi-screen presence.

Counter Your Competitor’s TV Commercials

As soon as your competitor’s commercials appear on TV, counter them by launching social ads in real-time. This is a great way to stay top of mind and boost mindshare.

Improve Targeting and Relevance with Weather and Sports

Trigger your social ads according to weather status or key sporting events for a timely, optimized, and personalized campaign that strikes a chord with your audience. For example, during snow-filled winters, travel advertisers can target users with ads to tropical locations.

Drive Engagement During Live or Scheduled TV Programs

TV Sync can help you advertise your auto brand during an episode of Top Gear, or launch social ads for your beauty brand during the red carpet at the Oscars. Aligning your ads with specific programming in this way creates a highly targeted and relevant ad experience.

Make TV + Social a Default Part of Your Advertising Strategy

As more and more brands see positive results from this dual advertising approach—and as premium TV and Facebook continue to domineer viewers’ leisure time—make the double exposure a given. Measure and optimize, and see if you can top Facebook’s and Kantar’s 29% sales lift figure.

TV Sync is available for Marin Social customers, and clients like Danone Actimel have already seen great results—nearly 40% increase in CTR, helping drive down video view costs by over 60%. Be sure to check out the full case study.

If you’re interested in learning how Marin can help you expand your ad exposure and reach, contact us today.

Search advertisers are having an increasingly common conversation around the importance of product feed optimizations in the context of overall Shopping performance. Truly, you can’t maximize results of your campaigns by only managing campaign-side efforts or only tweaking the product feed.

To get the most out of your Shopping endeavors, it’s important to know what’s happening on both sides of the fence. This post explores a few scenarios to demonstrate why.

1. Inventory

As long as they’re “in stock,” your products will continue to show on Shopping ads. This poses an issue when “in stock” means “only four left” or extremely limited sizes or colors. At some point, the product is no longer competitive. Be proactive by optimizing based on back-end inventory (excluding products in low supply) as opposed to waiting for performance to drop.

2. Image

A product image can have as much impact on how a product sells online as its respective bid does.

If you’re only looking at CTR on the campaign side and notice a shift, perhaps it’s due to an image change on the feed side. It takes a unified approach to understand product attribute testing (like an image change) and the resulting impact on performance. Note that having multiple variables will blur results and make a test inconclusive—a proper test has a single variable.

3. Attribute Change

In a worst-case scenario, a change in the feed can cause products to go offline. For example, think of an advertiser who has five product groups, all mapped out to Brand = definitions. These run for a few weeks and then, unbeknownst to the campaign manager, the Brand values for the products are all changed to something new.

This means the existing Brand = product groups would stop showing ads because there are no longer products in the feed that match that criteria. The same could apply to SKUs or any other criteria that depend on a product match in the feed itself.

Conclusion

Understanding that a feed attribute change can have a realized impact in a Shopping campaign is very important. Keeping this in mind allows you to test things like image variations (what’s the impact on clickthrough rate of a side image vs profile?) or titles (does adding brand name improve conversion rate?). Make sure that all the campaign-side optimizations (bids) are consistent, and you’ll get data-backed insights on what works and what doesn’t.

For digital advertisers, 2016 was a fabulous year. Global Internet usage on mobile surpassed desktop, plus significant strides were made in mobile-connected technologies.

Still, marketers continue to identify winners—and losers—that can affect performance and act as barriers or opportunities for growth.

In our State of Digital Advertising 2017 report, conducted in December 2016, we surveyed over 500 professionals in digital advertising—41% who are with agencies and 59% working for brands/client-side.

In addition to data charts and recommendations, the report discusses several industry insights:

• Mobile ad spend: Marketing budgets are following the eyeball shift from traditional channels to mobile. We examine this trend and discuss the ROI potential of different mobile strategies.
• Overlooked revenue: We explore the implications of the industry’s lack of expertise in the face of new features and products, and the opportunity this presents to those willing to learn and leverage new tools and channels.
• Top priorities and aspirational goals: Marketers have taken notice of consumer willingness to try the newest video, voice, and augmented reality technologies coming to market. They also identified content marketing as a top priority.

To learn more, download the full report.

Simplify Campaign Creation with Multi-Objective
Media Plans

This month, we’ve rolled out several new UI enhancements to help our users streamline workflows—most notably, our next generation of media plans. Marin Social now supports the ability to create media plans with multiple objectives, which provides users the ability to create campaigns and view performance across objectives within a single plan. This is a significant workflow enhancement that greatly reduces data clutter and the amount of time it takes to launch campaigns.

Roll up Performance Across Multiple Objectives and Calculate Costs Along the Funnel

Multi-Objective Media Plans are especially effective for enterprise advertisers or agencies that want to organize performance across complex initiatives. Now, you can organize your campaigns within a single media plan by things like region, teams, brands, or new vs. existing customer strategies to understand performance across the buyer journey.

For example, say you were launching a new, complicated product with the goal of driving leads. You could create a Multi-Objective Media Plan with video ad campaigns for more top-of-funnel awareness, and Lead Gen Ad campaigns for bottom-of-funnel conversion. This would allow you to view performance metrics across both objectives in the same view and better understand the costs associated to conversion with each touch point.

To see how this new feature can help grow your business, check out our demo video.

For Marin customers only—resources from our Knowledge Base:

• Context Sensitive Mass Editor
• Campaign Duplication Enhancements
• Global Region Targeting Worldwide

This is the first in a series of posts on the nuts and bolts of Facebook Dynamic Ads. Today, we teach you techniques you can use to entice customers to make additional purchases from your product catalog.

If you’re a direct response advertiser on Facebook, by now you’ve probably heard of—or you’re already running—Dynamic Ads campaigns. We’ve put together these expert tips and real-world examples to ensure you’re maximizing the effectiveness of your campaigns.

A Quick Refresher

Dynamic Ads automatically generate creative from a product feed, and you can target to people based on their actual intent. A lot of advertisers would call this practice Website Custom Audience remarketing.

However, with Dynamic Ads, you can automatically trigger upsell and cross-sell campaigns—to people who’ve converted on your website or app—with personalized creative from your feed. This is a great way to increase the lifetime value of your customer base with relevant product creative based on their purchase and browse behavior.

Now, onto the tips….

Dynamic Ads Upsell Techniques

Gear your upsell campaigns to offering a higher margin product or service based on someone’s browse or purchase behavior. For example:

• Visitors viewed and purchased fitness shoes -> upsell smart fitness watches
• Visitors viewed fitness shoes, but didn’t buy -> upsell with higher-margin shoes
• Visitors viewed hotels in San Francisco -> upsell hotels with great reviews and amenities

Dynamic Ads Cross-Sell Techniques

For your cross-sell campaigns, offer a complementary product or service based on someone’s browse or purchase behavior. For example:

• Visitors viewed and purchased fitness shoes -> cross-sell complementary socks
• Visitors purchased an airline ticket to vacation in Hawaii -> cross-sell hotels within that destination
• Visitors bought a hotel room for a weekend stay in New York -> cross-sell a discount on drinks in the lobby bar

Follow these suggestions, and you should see more engagement and more clicks from your Dynamic Ads. If you’d like to hear how Marin can help you implement a robust, click-generating Dynamic Ads strategy, just get in touch. Also be sure to check out our Dynamic Ads webinar with Facebook.

Easter spending is on the rise. Is your 2017 Google Shopping campaign ready?

If you’re a Marin customer, here are some advanced tips to help you get the most bang for your buck with your Shopping budgets.

1. Dimension Synergy Across Shopping and Search

Ever wonder how your Shopping campaigns are performing compared to search? With a solid understanding of how your account is structured, you can readily implement this reporting with Marin Dimensions.

Create a dimension for All Networks, and then tag corresponding ad groups with respective products. For example…

Campaign: Shoes (Search) > Ad Group: Running Shoes and
Campaign: Footwear (Shopping) > Ad Group: Shoes > Product Group: Product Type = Running Shoes

…would get the same tag Running Shoes. This allows you to see how Running Shoes are performing in aggregate, and also to pivot the two against each other (campaign vs. campaign).

Consider ways you can apply these to identify opportunities. Is a product category performing exceptionally well on Shopping but not search, or vice versa? Identify and rectify this by adding objects or tweaking bids. The flexibility of Marin Dimensions makes this an easy project.

2. Remarketing with Shopping

You can use Google remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) in combination with Shopping. Plus, it’s supported to the same extent as RLSA for search.

Create lists in Google, and then use campaign management functionalities in Marin to link them to campaigns or groups to manage the audience boost.

There are some neat ways to remarket with Shopping. For instance, if you have a list for Returning or Existing Customers, you could define your product groups so that you’re only showing these customers a preset list of products. Similarly, if you have a list for Shoe Buyers, you could set up product groups for socks or shoelaces for customers to re-engage with.

3. Clone to Facebook Dynamic Ads

If you’re comfortable using Google Shopping campaigns and want to increase your reach, check out Facebook’s Dynamic Ads (DAs). Facebook is growing rapidly, with 61% of advertisers planning to increase their Facebook spend over the next 12 months. Marin has a tool to clone existing Google Shopping campaigns to Facebook DAs, and we can help you set the program up for success.

If you’re interested in further details on any of the above, we’re happy to discuss. Just get in touch. Here’s to a nice spring and happy Easter.

During the research phase of the user journey, your brand can easily turn off a consumer due to a slow loading page or a pixelated product image that’s not designed for mobile. Trust is an important aspect of any purchase, whether online or offline, and without it, you run the risk of a negative user experience, or worse—a lost sale.

Here are three tips to heighten the effectiveness of your mobile ads.

1. Build Initial Trust and Maintain It

When consumers are on their mobile devices, they’re still tentatively in the m-commerce sphere. At this research stage, trust building and nurturing the consumer relationship are often at the highest point. Create relevant, useful, interactive content to build and maintain your reputation. Also make sure the information you’re delivering is timely and accurate.

2. Make It Easy and Attractive

When you create your ads, place yourself in the shoes—and palm—of the customer, and check your site experience from this perspective to ensure a smooth ride for them. If you’re a social advertiser who’s looking to tackle slow-loading pages, consider Facebook Instant Articles, a simple way to deliver fast, interactive content.

3. Think Beyond the Ad

Make sure your landing page is also designed for ease of use. Use short copy, plus stats and bullets for scalability and to drive more engagement. And, while you have their attention, ensure your payment gateway is completely mobile-compatible, offer a smooth payment path, and don’t let them abandon the cart. If they do, don’t let them get away!

For more great tips geared toward mobile ads on social platforms, download 5 Steps to Better Mobile Advertising: Tips for Social Marketers.

As online retail continues to grow, small brick-and-mortar stores are increasingly developing attractive e-commerce websites and investing in digital advertising. However, for the majority of these businesses, their lion’s share of revenue stream is still offline, in-store sales.

In a former life, I owned a physical retail store. My business partner and I would debate on a weekly basis about how much our social ad spend was actually leading to in-store sales! We’d dream about tracking our online ad spend to in-store revenue.

Well, it’s finally arrived. Facebook now allows us to upload sales data files. Facebook, in turn, matches that data to users who were shown your ad. Presto—we can associate offline conversions to social spend!

Getting Started

First, from your page, navigate to the Facebook Business Manager and go to Offline Events.

Next, create an offline event set.

• In the upper left of the page, click Create Offline Event Set.
• Enter a Name and Description.
• Accept the Terms & Conditions.
• Click Create.

Now, choose which ad accounts should be assigned to this particular offline event set.

Note: Be sure to keep auto-tracking On to automatically track offline conversions for all campaigns in your ad account.

Et voila….

Uploading Offline Events

Now that we’ve created our event set, we need to upload our data so that Facebook can try and match it with a user.

Building Your Data File

The data file upload is quite similar to a Dynamic Product Feed. However, in this case, it’s a record of all offline transactions. Here’s a data file template to make your life easier.

Every entry must have an Event Time that’s either a date or a Unix timestamp.

Tip: If you don't have an exact timestamp, use the next day's date so that you don't miss conversion attributions.

Every entry must also include an Event Name from one of the following case-sensitive strings:

• Purchase
• Lead
• Other
• ViewContent
• Search
• AddToCart
• AddToWishList
• InitiateCheckout
• AddPaymentInfo
• CompleteRegistration

You’ll also need to enter the purchase value and currency. While you can choose to set Value to zero, this turns off the ability to measure cost performance metrics and cost-based optimization features.

Once you’ve organized your data file, you can upload it as CSV or TXT.

Tip: Offline tracking only works if you gather information from your offline sales—name, phone number, email, date of birth, etc. The most unobtrusive way to gather consumer data is by offering to email them their receipt. Even better, offer a loyalty program that can collect more data. However, this data must match their Facebook account in order to be matched to a user.

Mapping Data to Users

Similar to uploading a product feed for Dynamic Ads, Facebook cross-checks the data file and shows us any errors we should address.

Once uploaded, Facebook gives us the glorious green indicator telling us everything’s been successfully uploaded. You’ll now see your offline event set in your list.

Tracking and Reporting Offline Events

Now that we’ve uploaded our offline event data and ensured that auto-tracking’s on, we can analyze our campaign’s offline performance.

Tip: If you navigate to the ad Level, click Edit, and find the tracking section of the workflow, you’ll be able to ensure your event set is tracking your ad.

To see offline events in reporting, navigate to the Ads Manager campaign dashboard and customize the columns.

In the Conversions section, note the addition of the Offline tab.

Select the offline events that are relevant to your business and data file. Your dashboard will show the selected offline events, indicating how many conversions occurred, just like an online conversion with the Facebook Pixel!

A Few Best Practices

As with any new feature, it takes some time to truly use it to its fullest potential. Here are some of our recommendations to help you get started with offline events.

1. It’s important to keep your sales caps on at all times, so that you can try and make use of the data for further opportunities. We recommend segmenting your offline events, for example, by product type or price range. Segmenting data in this way allows for future cross-sell and upsell campaigns.
2. To increase the match rate of your offline event set, try to include as much information as possible, i.e., email, first name, last name, telephone number, etc. The more data, the higher the match rate!
3. Facebook recommends uploading transactions within 62 days of the conversion. You can uploaded transactions up to 90 days after the attribution event.
4. Organize your data gathering. Try to glean as much information as possible, and use the required naming conventions to save you time when uploading.

Advanced Best Practices for Offline Conversions

• Retargeting
• Lookalikes
• Exclusions
• Retail
• B2B

Offline Retargeting

Through mapping offline events, Facebook allow us to use this data to create custom audiences. In other words, just like online retargeting, now you can retarget people based on what they do offline. You can create retargeting segments and up-sell/cross-sell people based on their offline purchase behavior. Invite those recent purchases back and cross-sell a complimentary product, or retarget loyal customers with a discount offer to keep them happy!

Lookalike Prospecting

As with any custom audience, you can also develop lookalike audiences from them. This offers a wonderful opportunity to create high-intent lookalike audiences to target those similar to your purchasing audience. Since advertisers constantly need to recruit new customers, high-intent source audiences provide great lookalike options.

Excluding Audiences

Excluding converters is just as helpful as targeting them. Remember to exclude those who’ve converted offline if you’re running campaigns that have little or no correlation to these people.

Retail

Mapping offline events provides real insight into your customers. Try to create multiple offline events based on revenue amount or, for example, product category purchased. Speak to your customers with all the information you have—personalize your advertising to the price-conscious consumer, and be product-specific to others.

B2B Companies

Offline Conversions isn’t limited to retail. If you’re a B2B company and want to track performance metrics like opportunities and revenue generated from your campaigns, then Offline Conversions is for you.

Do you often wonder how many of your inbound leads that came from Facebook advertising converted to opportunities and revenue? With Offline Conversions, B2B marketers can close the marketing and sales loop with performance data such as phone calls, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and revenue from leads that resulted from people seeing or clicking your ads.

Final Words…

So, that’s it. You can now track your offline sales to your social ad spend. However, although this is an exciting move toward bridging the gap between offline and online reporting, we’re restricted in our ability to match users. What retailers should do now—start finding unobtrusive ways to glean Facebook-matching information from consumers during the purchase, in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the customer experience.

Where to Find More Info: Facebook Documentation

Track Conversions for Offline Events | Facebook Help Center

Offline Conversions API | Facebook for Developers

In-Store, Meet Mobile: New Ways to Increase and Measure Store Visits and Sales

Retailers Using Custom Audiences Can Now Measure Offline Sales | Facebook Business

We all know the two most popular websites in the world right now—Google and Facebook. On any given day, people are performing close to 3 billion Google searches, and over a quarter of the world’s population use Facebook. Bing is also growing fast and is now a major SEM contender.



[caption id="attachment_9017" align="alignnone" width="500"]

Image source: Parse.ly, 2016[/caption]



Advertisers have much to gain from an integrated search and social advertising approach. But exactly how much?

To answer this question, we conducted a study of more than 200 enterprise advertisers managing Google, Bing, and Facebook campaigns. With billions of dollars in annualized ad spend managed on the Marin platform, we work with many of the world’s largest and most sophisticated advertisers.

Here’s what we found:

• Customers who click search and social ads are more likely to buy. Users who click both an advertiser’s search and social ads had an approximately two times greater conversion rate than users who click the search ad only. Users who click both the search and social ads have a click-through rate approximately four and a half times higher than users who only click social ads.
• Customers who click search and social ads spend more. Users who click both a search and social ad contribute approximately two times more revenue per click than users who click search ads only. Users who click both a search and social ad contribute six times more revenue per click than users who click a social ad only.
• Search campaigns perform better when managed alongside social campaigns. Search campaigns managed alongside social advertising campaigns have two times more revenue per click than search campaigns managed in isolation. An integrated search and social management strategy also benefits an advertiser’s revenue per conversion—advertisers have almost 10% higher revenue per conversion from their search campaigns when managed together with social advertising campaigns.

For full research results and actionable tips for cross-channel success, download The Multiplier Effect of Integrating Search and Social Advertising.

You’re beaming, proud, and ready to rake in a massive amount of leads. Why? Because—you’ve got two brilliantly designed sets of ad creative and you’re ready to set ‘em loose to the hungry, scrolling consumer masses.

How do you know if your campaign will be a boom or bust? Can you even test such a thing in an easy and straightforward way?

Time for some split testing....

Some What?

For those who haven’t yet implemented split testing to increase conversions, an explanation is in order. Simply put, split testing (also known as A/B testing) allows you to test different advertising strategies on commonly divided audiences to see what works and what doesn’t.

Want to see which bidding option, creative, or ad placements perform best? Split testing is the answer.

How Does It Work?

The Facebook split testing API does several great things:

• Automates audience segmentation
• Ensures there’s no overlap between segments
• Allows you to test variables like bidding type, ad placement, different ad creative, and more
• Takes away the hassle of manually building unique audiences and running your test campaigns independently

Where to Start and How to Run with It

First, let’s start with a simple example. Let’s go back to those two stellar ad creatives. At this point, of course, you don't know which one’s going to perform better. The first thing you should do is set up your two ad sets, with each one of your creatives in each ad set (in other words, one ad in each set for a total of two ads). Keep the copy the same for each ad.

For the purposes of this example, then, our plan is straightforward:

• Create our two ad sets
• Target the same audience
• Split test to see which one performs best

To run the split test, you’ll need to set it up in Facebook. (If you’re a Marin customer, contact your account manager for help with this.) The test can be 50/50 or 33/33/33, etc., depending on the testing variables, but note that 50/50 is the most commonly used model. So, if an audience has 10 million people, the ad sets will have 5 million people in each audience.

From here, we select the image as the variable to test. Our main KPI is conversions (downloads), and we’re allocating $5,000 per ad set. As we mentioned above, our audience is 5 million per ad set. We’ll run the campaign for two weeks to ensure we have a broad reach, high budget, and long duration.

Since we want to see positive results before we extend our campaign to other markets, we’ll start only in the UK first.

Ready, set, test, measure.

How to Scope a Test That’s Right for You

When scoping your own split test, make sure that the test will have value for you, and that you’ll see clear results that you can use to refine and improve your campaigns.

The first questions you should answer include:

• Which ad account are you planning to use?
• What are the campaign timelines, including start and end dates?
• What’s the budget, broken down by test group?
• What variables would you like to test?
• What’s the campaign objective and the main KPI?

Analyzing Results

Back to that riddle—is it a boom or a bust? To determine which test worked best, choose the variable that has the highest efficiency level based on your objective.

In our example, our objective is conversions and the main KPI is downloads. So, we can consider the ad set that has the lower CPA as the best performing.

And there you have it. Easy, right?

Best Practices and Recommendations for Maximum Success

If you’d like to dig deeper (and we recommend that you do), here are a few best practices.

Define an acceptable confidence level

Before you create a test, determine an acceptable confidence level. Test with larger reach, longer schedules, or higher budgets.

Choose one variable to test

This allows you to define the exact difference in ad creative that drove better performance.

Define main KPIs before the test

This will allow you to determine the best performing variable.

Ensure both test sizes are comparable

When testing for volume metrics such as number of conversions, scale to ensure both test sizes are comparable.

Start testing on one specific market or campaign

This will allow you to monitor and analyze the test results more efficiently, which will in turn allow you to draw better conclusions. If you find this useful, you can conduct further tests on different variables and expand to other markets.

Test based on one large audience

The audience should be big enough to be split and to allow you to gain sufficient insights.

Allocate the same budget to the test groups

If you’re running your splits at the campaign level, make sure both campaigns have the same lifetime budget. If you’re testing on the ad set level, both ad sets should have the same lifetime budget.

No changes to the test groups

Any changes could compromise the split testing and prevent you from seeing clear results.

This is the final post in a series on transparency. In today’s article, we look at data transparency, why it’s important, and the elements of a transparent data model.

We’ve reached the last article in our series on transparency in programmatic display advertising. For those of you just tuning in, let’s quickly recap:

• In How to Evaluate Programmatic Buying Transparency—Types and Tips, we covered the three types of programmatic transparency—intermediary, environmental, and data.
• Tips to Determine the True Cost of Your Programmatic Supply Chain took a deeper dive into intermediaries, and ways to calculate what you’re spending with each one.
• In The Good, the Bad, and the Unviewable—The State of Ad Viewability, we examined why it’s important to uncover ad fraud, brand safety, and ad viewability.

To wrap things up, this article looks at the importance of having access to all of your data—not just the numbers a publisher wants you to see. Let freedom—and transparency—ring.

The Trouble with Too Little Data

When it comes to data visibility needs and desires, advertisers and agencies run the gamut—some are happy to pay on a CPC basis without knowing what CPM the vendor paid. Others are okay tracking to just a few KPIs. Still others want it all. What’s the best way to go?

The key to transparency is precision—whether you’re running a direct response or a brand campaign, having the right data measures the impact of either type of campaign, and allows you access to what you need to measure ROI.

So what do advertisers most often expect from their ad tech vendors and publishers? Our take is that list is long, but we’ll focus on the essential data you need to transform “unaware” to “X-ray vision.”

To gain greater intelligence about the effectiveness of your display campaigns and to better understand the customer journey and attribution, at minimum, you need access to:

• Effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM): the effectiveness of a CPM campaign that takes earnings into account and gives you a comparable metric across buys
• Assisted conversions and view-through metrics: measures the extent to which display ads influence subsequent site visits and sales—without a click—and avoids allocating value to ads that didn’t influence a visit or sale
• Site-level reporting and performance by domain: whitelisting and blacklisting promotes better targeting and provides a way to measure site-level effectiveness
• Bids: know what your partner’s bidding for each impression (win vs. bid rate), and the logic, math, and algorithms behind a bidding process
• The lookback window used to calculate conversion credit: lets you understand the relationship of a consumer’s engagement during upper-funnel tactics to drive awareness and consideration (e.g., 30-day+ window) or lower-funnel tactics (e.g., a two-day window) to give proper attribution to the campaign that lead to the conversion

This level of transparency allows you to understand true ROI. It also lets you keep an eye on how your bids are managed, unlike black box vendors who don’t reveal a history of bid calculations or otherwise provide any idea of what—and how—you’re actually doing. With the black box model, it’s much harder/impossible for you to look into the data and understand what’s driving conversions or an algorithm. Conversely, being able to do this provides you with a high level of visibility into the effectiveness of your campaign.

Why All the Secrecy?

Despite industry calls for greater data transparencyon many levels, mum’s still the word from most vendors and publishers. Some players have their reasons—the main one being to maintain a competitive edge. Understandable. However, as more and more brands pound at the locked doors of black box vendors, it’ll become less to those vendors’ advantage to keep the secret sauce secret.

If a vendor is transparent about not being transparent, is that “transparent”? We say “no.” As vendors realize this, perhaps there’ll be some level of agreement that to survive in an increasingly tug-of-war environment, neutrality and openness are key.

That is, companies must heed the call to “show me the data.”

Transparency for Optimal Performance

In sum—the best way you can improve campaign performance is to know exactly how bidding, reporting, and attribution are all working independently and in concert. Once you have this level of data and insight, you’ll know exactly how your budgets are working for you (or not), and you can take active steps to enhance effectiveness. At that point, you’ll have a crystal-clear view of your marketing efforts—and your ROI—to give you the confidence, control, and independence you need to execute measurable marketing initiatives.

Holiday shopping’s in full swing. If you’re running retargeting campaigns, make sure they’re as prepared for the season as you are. Online sales are forecast to increase between seven and 10 percent over last year to as much as $117 billion.

We made your list, so check it twice, and take these steps to boost campaign performance during the holiday season.

Increase your budgets to win more impressions

You’re likely going to see a boost in site traffic (especially if you sell anything that can be given as a gift), which means you’ll see a boost in impressions served and in advertising funds spent. Make sure your campaigns have a proper budget set to guarantee you have enough ad money available for the day, so that you don’t miss out on these potential new customers.

We recommend a 25 to 50% budget increase for the holidays, but you know your site traffic best. Whatever percentage of traffic increase you’re expecting, boost your budget about that same percentage.

Raise your campaign bids

Almost all advertisers will increase their spend for the holidays, so you’re going to have serious competition.

With so many advertisers fighting for ad space, it’s not uncommon to see your CPM costs rise during this time of year. To prepare for this surge, make sure you increase your CPM bids across your campaigns. Bidding higher will make your campaigns more competitive and will give you a better chance of serving more ads by winning more impressions. We suggest increasing your CPM bid by 50-100% of the current average CPM cost for the campaign.

Use holiday-themed ads and landing pages

Holiday-themed advertising only gets people’s attention during one time of the year, and you should join the conversation your customers are having. Using ads that mention specific events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or any of the major holidays can grab a visitor’s attention.

Send a happy holiday message, mention that there are only X number of shopping days left, and give them a reason to click your ads. Use the holidays as a chance to create urgency and you could see a boost in clicks and conversions.

Two Quick Steps You Can Take Right Now

• Create landing pages and content on your site for these holiday events, then create audiences that capture visitors of these pages.
• Run campaigns to serve your holiday ads to your holiday page visitors. If they’re coming to your site looking for seasonal deals, they’re more likely to respond to holiday-themed ads.

We hope these suggestions are helpful and lead to a profitable holiday season for you and your business. As always, please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

From our team to yours—happy holidays!

We’re headed into another peak retail season, which runs from now through Christmas Day. Considering not-so-recent trends in Shopping and mobile, many marketers are hedging their bets on this being the biggest online retail season yet. Preparation is key, and understanding what went well and what didn’t last year—and when it did and didn’t—will help guide decision-making in the coming weeks.

When the volume is so high, each day could make or break the quarter. Here are three things you should be doing on a day-to-day basis to increase the likelihood of favorable outcomes.

1. Monitor Top SKUs

Your buyers should have a list of products they expect will be major sellers this season. These could be products where inventory is so deep no one can compete, or buyers purchased at a bulk rate and can offer the best pricing.

Work with your buyers to understand what these products are, and optimize them on a per-item basis with SKU-level product groups in a High Priority campaign. Monitor these daily and keep an eye on inventory—when they start to sell out, pull back so that you don’t end up aggressively pushing nearly sold-out products.

2. Segmentation

In addition to the proactive management of products you’re bullish about, the high volume is going to yield insights of its own. Monitor your broader product groups—defined by Category, Brand, Custom Labels, etc.—for segmentation opportunities.

You’ll start the season with a single bid for a Brand product group. But, as volume dictates, some products or sets of products within the group will warrant segmenting and assigning a new bid based on how they’ve performed to date. This is a crucial step to optimizing and hitting performance goals on an ongoing basis.

3. Bidding

As you structured your campaigns, you established the levers and switches you’re going to use to effectively manage your product mix and hit performance goals.

The most important pieces of all this will be to understand how you want to bid these levers and how to stay on top of everything. Be considerate of sales, key dates, top products, and inventory / stock levels. A combination of proactive strategies (e.g., Brand X is 20% off next week) and reactive strategies (e.g., Brand Y is selling amazingly well over the past week) will be necessary to generate the best results.

Be aggressive where you expect the best returns and don’t hesitate to pull back on things that aren’t producing. Good luck!

In PPC, there are two main approaches when it comes to bidding workflow—manual and automated. Over the years, there’s been debate among search marketers on the pros and cons of each approach. Search marketers have differing opinions on which yields the best outcomes.

The Great Manual Versus Automated Debate

One of the main arguments in favor of manual bidding focuses on the control that it affords the search marketer, in contrast to the hands-off nature of automated bidding inherent with publisher bidding—like AdWords “Smart” bidding and most (but not all) 3rd party proprietary bidding algorithms.

In nearly all automated bidding approaches, the search marketer sets a goal and the bidding algorithm reviews historical performance, and then calculates a bid with limited transparency from start to finish.

The apprehension some search marketers feel towards automated bidding derives from the opaque nature inherent in most approaches. This fear is realized when a campaign is underperforming, and the search marketer becomes at a loss for what’s amiss, or how to improve it.

Putting that fear aside, let’s reflect on the many benefits of automated bidding, which is the reason for its proliferation.

Here are just a few.

Efficiency

Automated bid management is a huge time saver. Think about it—how long would it take you to manually change a million keyword bids? How confident would you be that each bid is optimized to maximize your return?

If you’re being honest with yourself, the answers to those questions should naturally steer you towards automation as the optimal solution. Automation augments the search marketer by executing repetitive tasks, serving as an ‘enabler’ for the search marketer to focus on growth opportunities or account strategy while keeping tabs on daily performance.

Accuracy

Automated bid management platforms produce accurate bids through regression modeling that looks backwards to predict future outcomes. With millions of dollars at stake, these algorithms are typically built with risk aversion at their core to produce low error rates. By their very nature, they make changes at scale that’s quite literally impossible for any individual, or even team, to compete with.

The reality is, sophisticated marketers with material budget use an algorithm to bid on their media today. If you aren’t, you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage.

Flexibility

Automated bid management platforms allow advertisers to define the goals and milestones for the algorithm to work towards. The marketer remains the operator and the brains of the operation, with the bidding algorithm working as his proxy.

Machine Learning

Learning from massive datasets to create better future outcomes is at the heart of bidding algorithms. Today, this type of mathematical analysis is popularly called “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence.” Most ad tech companies have years of experience with these techniques, but largely fly under the radar in popular press, with newfangled applications like self-driving cars getting the headline coverage.

So, how do you get the best of both worlds? Simple—employ automated bidding with full transparency. That’s not an oxymoron. That’s a real thing offered by a few leading independent marketing partners (not to toot our own horn, but Marin Software is one such example).

What’s in a Fully Transparent Bidding Solution?

Fully transparent bidding solutions (i.e., the bidding system shows you the step-by-step logic of the bidding algorithm) allow users to see all the details behind their bid calculations for each keyword. This includes the bidding model(s) employed, the details of the dataset used, performance bumpers activated, and any other pertinent details behind the decision-making. If automated bidding is fully transparent, many of the arguments opposed to automated bidding lose their heft.

Information Available in a “Fully Transparent” Bidding Solution

The level of information available for each keyword in a “fully transparent” bidding solution varies. That said, at Marin Software, we show the logic of our algorithms “line by line,” which allows users to see a full breakdown of bidding decisions, including:

• Date ranges and data sets used
• Metrics used
• Predicted metrics
• Auction and volume models
• Data blending
• Bid headroom
• Learning models
• How the optimized bids are calculated
• External rules applied
• Excluded dates and thresholds
• Existing bid
• Final calculated bid
• Constraints on the algorithm

Contrast this to the information displayed in a “black box” bidding solution:

• Existing bid
• Final calculated bid (sometimes this is obscured, too)
• User-defined bid rules

Clarity and Confidence in Transparent Automated Bidding

Fully transparent bidding solutions allow PPC managers to review the logic used to reach a bidding conclusion. In addition, the search manager has the option to overlay bidding rules to ensure the algorithm behavior is consistent with their risk tolerance and strategy to hit certain goals and milestones.

The best fully transparent bidding solutions also allow you to preview bidding calculations before they’re pushed to publishers, and manually override bids on specific keywords if needed. This gives PPC managers the full control of manual bidding with all the time saving, efficiency, and data processing power of automated algorithms.

If automated bidding isn’t currently part of your strategy, we hope this post helps break down the nuances of different approaches. Although it also explains the pros and cons, it advances the argument that if you aren’t using a transparent bidding algorithm in today’s environment, you’re hamstringing yourself, because it’s near-certain that your competitors are employing an automated method of bidding to try and out-compete you. If you’d like to learn more about Marin Software’s approach to bidding, click here.