Case Study

Looking for growth? Interested in a channel where you can generate leads, drive website traffic, and build brand awareness?

How about LinkedIn?

You can now manage LinkedIn Marketing Solutions campaigns from Marin Software’s flagship MarinOne platform. The MarinOne integration with LinkedIn’s Campaign Management and Reporting & ROI APIs gives advertisers better insights and improves the performance of their LinkedIn campaigns.

With nearly 800 million professionals and 4 out of 5 members driving business decisions based on information they find on the platform, LinkedIn is an important lead generation destination for B2B marketers and others with longer consideration cycles.

Our self-serve MarinOne platform unifies industry leading optimization tools with flexible reporting and bidding to help advertisers maximize the impact and reach of their LinkedIn marketing investment.

Blast Analytics, an innovative agency helping advertisers with LinkedIn ads has been using MarinOne to optimize their campaigns.

“Marin Software continues to innovate and improve its technology to drive better performance for our clients,” said Brian Lange, Senior Marketing Manager at Blast Analytics. “The MarinOne solution has saved us time reporting on our LinkedIn campaigns and also provided a significant performance uplift leveraging its bidding technology." (Click here for the full case study.)

MarinOne serves a hub that links marketing activity with true business impact from an advertiser’s CRM, allowing optimization to revenue, not just form fills.

“By connecting downstream customer data to our advanced automated bidding, MarinOne can significantly improve the performance of your campaigns,” said Chris Lien, Marin’s Chairman and CEO. “LinkedIn is an untapped opportunity for many advertisers and we are excited to help advertisers drive growth on this fast-growing channel.”

Advertisers can manage their LinkedIn campaigns alongside paid search, paid social and display campaigns to help generate additional demand. Marketers can align their efforts across channels to ensure they are working seamlessly across the customer journey.

Click here to learn more about support for the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions integration with MarinOne.

“With Carousel Ads and Facebook Audience Network, we’re telling a captivating brand story, and more people who are likely to browse our products are clicking our ads.”
– Cheryl Degrasse / Sr. Director of Digital Media / American Eagle Outfitters

With a high volume of spend across two brands, four Facebook accounts, and two U.S. social teams operating on opposite coasts, retail brand American Eagle Outfitters (AEO) wanted to express the narrative of their brand values in a visually engaging way, to more emotionally appeal to their core audience primarily using mobile devices for shopping.

Since AEO manages two different brands with distinct audiences and creative, they needed an enterprise-class tool to achieve their advertising goals – and handle complexity – at scale.

American Eagle and Marin Social

Using Marin Social, AEO ran a mobile campaign with Facebook Carousel Ads and Facebook Audience Network (FAN).

Compared with Link Ads, the best results came from running Carousel Ads, achieving a 69% reduction in Cost per Conversion (Facebook Conversion Pixel). Including FAN, Facebook’s mobile-only network composed of publishers outside of Facebook, AEO benefited from a 73% reduction in Cost per Link Click compared with News Feed Desktop.

Thanks to Marin’s mass creator and bulk editor, AEO can now create tons of ads and ad combinations very quickly. With the Media Plan organizer, AEO can view metrics of all campaigns at a high level, avoiding the need to manually aggregate the data. Using one tool across Facebook, Instagram, and FAN significantly reduces the amount of time spent implementing and managing campaigns.

Learn more and see full results in our American Eagle case study.

“It makes my job a lot easier, and now I don’t have to spend all day combing through spreadsheet after spreadsheet, trying to figure out where a booking value came from because it’s nowhere in
my system.”
– Kevin High / Digital Marketing Manager, IBC Hotels

IBC Hotels had a retargeting problem. Not only were they unable to easily attribute conversions – they were having a hard time even implementing their existing solution’s dynamic tracking code, and considered their vendor’s service team “unknowledgeable and nonexistent.”

IBC Hotels prides itself in introducing travelers to unique, locally owned hotels all over the world. Since IBC makes commission on each acquired booking, it’s crucial for them to accurately attribute the source of their conversions and revenue.

If they were going to lower cost and increase ROI, they needed a platform that would make their jobs easier, not more burdensome and clunky.

Enter Marin Display

IBC implemented Marin Display – with its Site Tracking Tag – to build audiences for retargeting across channels and devices. IBC found Marin Display’s tracking solution worked flawlessly and was easier to implement than their previous retargeting solution.

The Site Tracking Tag allowed IBC to automatically collect important information such as order ID and revenue, and to easily attribute conversions. IBC could then effortlessly access this data and
export it.

From here, they were able to optimize their retargeting funnel, attribute conversions accurately back to their own internal reporting, and ultimately lower CPM and improve ROI.

Learn more and see full results in our IBC Hotels case study.

As the world’s top online destination for men’s luxury fashion, MR PORTER wanted to deliver a step change in their prospecting campaigns. Their goal was campaigns which would work harder to disrupt men’s purchasing habits and increase market share. MR PORTER leveraged Marin Display’s Partner Connect, an exclusive private audience network where marketers can find new customer prospects by connecting with other companies and publishers. Connecting with partners’ audiences resulted in highly relevant and targeted advertising to those second-party audiences on Facebook and across the Web.

Partner Connect allows MR PORTER to collaborate with premium publishers and designer brands to expand their reach to purely new customers. MR PORTER also use second-party signals to increase the creative relevance based on product category intent from the partner site.

Marin Software sat down with Matt Pollington, Senior Performance Strategist at MR PORTER, to talk about how Partner Connect helped them attract the right audiences and generate high-quality web traffic.

Traveling to Timbuktu? Venturing off to Venezuela? Chances are good you’ll have a Lonely Planet guidebook in tow – maybe even a copy you purchased online.

Lonely Planet is the world’s most successful travel publisher, printing over 120 million books in nine different languages. We are proud to be partners in their success, and thank the team for allowing us to share their story in a brand-new case study.

There are many takeaways from the case study, but here’s one of the biggest – with automation comes time-savings, and with time-savings comes the opportunity to optimize and adopt a cross-channel strategy. This is crucial, especially at a time when 67% of marketers say their priority is for all marketing activities to be integrated across channels (eMarketer study).

Lonely Planet started out with a small team focused on day-to-day management, reducing costs, and maintaining volume. After onboarding with Marin, they now spend the bulk of their time focusing on strategic management, making quick optimization decisions, and expanding campaigns to include Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and retargeting programs across geographies. The added bonus? Marin pays for its monthly cost every 2.7 days, and profit is up 50%. You can learn more about their campaign management strategy, data and analytics integrations, and financial improvements here.

Third-party platforms like Marin clearly make an impact for marketers looking to bolster their cross-channel strategy. Plus, it may give you a little extra time to plan that trip to Bali…

In today’s data driven world, businesses rely on multiple pieces of technology to deliver, optimize and manage their online advertising and website analytics. Virgin Atlantic is a great example. They have an open stack approach to technology, deploying best-in-class tag management, site analytics and media optimization technologies.

While this way of doing things is terrific for selecting the best technologies, it can also present some challenges. Each technology relies on unique tracking paramenters being appended to keyword URLs. Manually bidding URLs containing multiple tracking parameters is highly complex, time consuming and open to human error.

Virgin Atlantic works with agency Manning Gotlieb OMD (MG OMD), and together they turned to our platform for a solution.

Marin integrated seamlessly with existing Tagman and CoreMetrics tracking, which meant there was no need for Virgin Atlantic to re-engineer their advertising technology architecture. MG OMD’s search team quickly and simply deployed Marin’s tracking pixel within the TagMan container tag. Using this method, there is no need to wait for a development window, and data discrepancies are minimized because historical data is preserved and bids can be calculated from day 1 with no "learning period."

As more companies invest in open stack architecture, we're ready to support them with the partnerships and technology for a best-in-class solution. Thanks to Virgin Atlantic and MG OMD for allowing us to share their story! You can learn more details here.

If you're already doing some level of Facebook advertising, you've probably found it to be a good way to generate leads, and drive brand awareness and ROI. But like any other advertising channel, there are often some challenges along the way. Let's take a look at Precision Dialogue's story, and the best practices we can glean from their experience.

Precision Dialogue is a leading customer engagement firm focused on leveraging customer insights to drive relevant communications and improve marketing ROI. Based in Cleveland, they manage the search, social, media, and display advertising programs for approximately 12 advertisers spanning 8 different countries. They turned to Marin when they were tasked with redesigning and growing the Facebook marketing program for an industry leading retailer of kitchen supplies.

When diving into this project, Precision Dialogue identified a few challenges. First, there was increased competition to advertise on the platform. Second, they had to keep up with the many and frequent changes to Facebook's UI. And third, they needed to find the retailer's ideal target audience.

Precision Dialogue tackled these challenges head-on, crafting a smart strategy and letting the Marin platform do the heavy lifting. Here's how they made it work:

• Campaign Wizard - The team used the Campaign Wizard to easily create hundreds of different ad combinations organized by target audience.
• Intraday Creative Rotation - Precision Dialogue used this feature to automate creative testing and pinpoint the top-performing audiences, images, and call-to-actions based on lifetime value. They set things up so it would automatically change out ads when CTR dropped below a desired level. This saved the agency about 10 hours per week, and was ideal for keeping ads fresh and CTR high throughout the day.
• Analytics to Action - After running the campaigns for 3-6 weeks, the agency used the analytics to action workflow and multi-edit capabilities to identify and take action against under-performing ads across their entire program in just a few clicks.

Happily, Precision Dialogue was able to exceed the Facebook advertising campaign objectives, cementing a strong partnership with the retailer. Specific improvements included 33% lower cost per conversion, 36% higher cost per click, 4% higher conversion rate, and 30% higher CTR.

We are happy to say that Universal McCann and American Airlines have been partnered with Marin Software for over 3 years. Their experience is a good introduction for those who may be considering Marin as a bid management platform to take their business to the next level.

Universal McCann selected Marin Software because they needed a technology to help them in three core areas:

1. Optimise bids to a cost-per-acquisition goal
2. Automate reporting
3. Optimise ad copy

As part of a smooth onboarding process, Marin’s tracking pixel was deployed. In addition to capturing sales and revenue data, it tracks other key information such as flight origin, destination, and ticket type. Having this additional data at the keyword level is vital for Universal McCann, making it easier to prioritize budget and ensuring high share of voice. This is particularly crucial for high-profit routes in the highly saturated travel vertical where airlines compete with aggregators, meta search engines, and online travel agents.

Marin’s powerful automated bidding is put to great use by Universal McCann, with revenue targets geared toward achieving year-over-year growth in revenue against ever increasing CPCs. Over their 3 years with Marin, Universal McCann has seen continuous improvements in performance and benefitted from innovative new bidding features.

The team at Universal McCann has also realized great time savings on administrative tasks such as reporting, which now takes just half a day per month. With Marin, they are able to make regular udpates to the prices in ad copy – a must, due to the volatile nature of the air travel industry. These changes are easily made with just a few clicks in the Marin user interface, a huge time savings from the previous process of exporting and uploading bulk sheets. All these saved hours are re-invested in strategy, and performance continues to improve year after year.

A big thanks to Universal McCann and American Airlines for being such terrific customers. We’re excited to see your continued growth and success!

Paid search is one of the most essential and effective online search marketing strategies. However, as transaction volume increases and competition for keywords grows, paid search can also be increasingly complex and challenging to manage. How do you manage your daily workflow? Are you wasting time in Excel? Can you identify opportunities for performance improvement? Are you getting the insights you need?

If you ever grapple with these concerns, you are in good company!

Let's consider Del City, a leading supplier of professional grade electrical and transportation supplies since 1947. Del City relies on an integrated paid search program that is optimized based on a one-year customer value model. They support over 10,000 SKUs within their product catalog, requiring a broad range of campaigns and extensive keyword lists.

Del City turned to Marin Professional, our mid-market platform, for automated and position-based bidding. As a result, they were able to save time and increase revenue by 30%. Del City is now able to focus on and invest in higher priority, strategic initiatives for expanding their paid search program.

It is our pleasure to announce a new case study with ArrowMedia!

ArrowMedia is a digital advertising agency specializing in pay-per-click advertising and web analytics. Employing over 60 seasoned professionals out of Moscow and Krasnoyarsk, ArrowMedia also provides consulting, auditing, SEO, and automation services to advertisers across Russia.

As the digital advertising landscape in Russia matures, advertisers and agencies are increasingly managing programs on a return on investment (ROI) basis. Unfortunately, publisher solutions like AdWords and Yandex.Direct are unable to provide adequate visibility into revenue outcomes. ArrowMedia also found that it was impossible to track campaign processes and manage geo-targeted accounts with over 1,000 keywords. With growing accounts and increasing complexity, ArrowMedia needed a solution that would provide better visibility, time-savings, and that would scale efficiently.

ArrowMedia turned to Marin Professional. Using self-service revenue integrations, they now have a complete view of revenue outcomes. This allows the team to optimize bids and creatives based on their own key performance indicators. ArrowMedia also uses Marin Professional’s bulk sheet and multi-edit capabilities to efficiently track and make changes across multiple geo-targeted campaigns. Finally, the platform’s advanced filtering capabilities and web query reports allow the team to easily segment and analyze the avalanche of performance data. ArrowMedia is now able to manage by exception and have more confidence in their reporting.

ArrowMedia has seen impressive results – they have decreased their clients’ cost-per-order by 20% on average, and reduced the amount of time spent on low-value tasks by 40%. For more details, read the full case study here. And a big thanks to ArrowMedia for allowing us to earn their business and share their story!

Farnell element14 is a high-service distributor of technology products and solutions for electronic system design, maintenance and repair in Europe, the Americas and Asia Pacific. We are happy to have their business, and thank Farnell element14 for allowing us to share their story in one of our newest case studies.

Farnell element14 stocks over 500,000 products from over 3,000 industry leading suppliers. It also operates in 30 European markets with 27 different language campaigns. Managing their search campaign at this sort of scale presented many challenges including a huge number of keywords and difficulty increasing spend while maintaining ROAS.

Since choosing Marin Software, Farnell element14 has taken advantage of Marin Dimensions to “tag” campaign elements for segmentation and analysis; this ability provides key insight right down to the keyword level. The team also uses Marin’s predictive bidding algorithm to automate keyword level bidding, maximizing financial performance while still maintaining ROAS. Farnell element14 has seen great results including a 29% increase in revenue, 66% increase in CTR, and 38% increase in conversion rates. To learn more and read the full case study, click here.

Marin is happy to announce a new case study with Trendyol, the leading online fashion retailer in Turkey. We’d like to thank them for allowing us to share their success story.

Prior to working with Marin, Trendyol was using two separate platforms to manage their search and social advertising. Not only was this very time-consuming, but it also led to inconsistency in data and tracking. The Trendyol team also struggled with bidding; because they didn’t have confidence in their previous black-box bidding solution, they were calculating bids manually.

When Trendyol deployed Marin Software, they realized major benefits from having everything united and integrated within a single platform. Tracking is now accurate across both search and Facebook, the team can set unique targets on a product-by-product basis, and appropriate bids are calculated automatically. Furthermore, Marin’s Facebook Campaign Wizard has reduced the time it takes to set up new Facebook campaigns from two hours to only 20 minutes.

Enhanced campaigns are talk of the town, no matter which town you’re in; today’s blog post tells the story of how one London-based independent media buying agency, the7stars, successfully migrated to enhanced campaigns using Marin Software.

When Steve Wright, Head of Biddable Media, first heard about Google’s enhanced campaigns he was concerned about the amount of work that would be required to migrate and also the potential impact on performance. He was, however, excited about the enhancements that would streamline workflows across multiple devices and the ability drive incremental revenue for their clients with increased visibility across all devices.

For Steve and the team at the7stars, knowledge is king and they spent time learning as much as they could about enhanced campaigns, including reading Marin’s white paper, listening to our webinar and most importantly documenting a migration plan with Marin’s Client Services team. The migration plan included: identifying parent and sibling campaigns to be merged, updating all URLs to include the {device}, {ifmobile}, and {ifnotmobile} ValueTrack parameters, calculating mobile bid adjustments, and deciding when to push the migration live based on each client’s marketing schedule.

The actual migration involved no campaign down time or loss in tracking and was completed in less than a day. Most importantly Steve and the team report that migrating was stress free and easy to implement. In other words, they never once lost focus on their ultimate goal of helping their clients succeed! Steve and his team are now busy monitoring performance and refining their strategy. We look forward to hearing their findings in a few weeks' time.

Launched in 2005, the7stars is a London-based media buying agency, clients include Suzuki, Pizza Express and CityJet. Steve Wright is a seasoned media professional with a keen interest in digital technologies and their application.

Prior to working with Marin, Fastweb was challenged by disparate technology and struggled to attribute downstream revenue back to search and display clicks. As a result, their CPA-driven bidding strategy generated a disproportionate amount of low-cost, low-revenue leads. To drive high-revenue leads and optimize their search and display programs, Fastweb needed a bidding solution that could automatically maximize revenue while hitting their ROI goal.

By integrating their tracking system with Marin’s revenue upload functionality, Fastweb seamlessly stitches their downstream revenue with daily publisher clicks and cost. With meaningful ROI-driven performance data, Marin’s adaptive bidding algorithm enables Fastweb to calculate optimal bids for keywords that drive high-revenue leads. A portfolio-based spend trade-off between keywords and groups, along with the flexibility of setting a single bidding goal across all of their campaigns, has increased Fastweb’s revenue-per-month by 750% since deploying Marin Software.

Marin is very pleased to announce our recent case study with Fastweb. We would like to thank them for allowing Marin to earn their business and share their success story with others. As part of the Monster Network, which includes Monster.com, Fastweb is the premier online resource for paying and preparing for college. Their success stems from their commitment to empower the lives of students through scholarships, financial aid tips, and job and internship matching.

Congratulations to Fastweb on a fantastic win! We certainly hope there are more success stories like this one in the near future.

Marin is excited to announce our recent case study with SurveyMonkey. We want to thank SurveyMonkey for allowing Marin to earn their business and share their success story with others. As the world’s leading provider of web-based survey solutions, SurveyMonkey provides businesses and organizations with quality data through a powerful solution for making smart and informed decisions.

Prior to using Marin, SurveyMonkey was challenged by a limited cost-per-acquisition model where all three of their professional account signups were treated equally, despite each having varying customer lifetime values (LTV). Furthermore, SurveyMonkey’s push to expand their business abroad was limited by language barriers, publisher reach, and the difficulty of copying campaigns, which span three business units, across multiple countries.

By identifying and optimizing high-value keywords based on geo-specific LTVs, Marin’s patented bidding algorithm increased SurveyMonkey’s overall LTV by 150% for key international campaigns. As a result, SurveyMonkey successfully doubled their spend internationally. With Marin’s Dimensions and AB Testing tool, they also reduced the amount of time spent on campaign management by 40%.

Congratulations to SurveyMonkey! We certainly hope there are more success stories like this one in the near future.

Marin is pleased to announce our recent video case study featuring iProspect, one of the world's largest online ad agencies. iProspect has partnered with Marin in over 30 markets to provide services across search, display and social marketing. Marin Software has helped iProspect support and expand their customer base which spans across a variety of industries, from international retailers to entertainment and gaming companies. Check out the case study below!

Marin is thrilled to announce our recent case study with Vistaprint. We want to start by thanking Vistaprint for allowing Marin to earn their business and share their success story with a broader audience. Operating over 25 localized websites and shipping to more than 130 countries, Vistaprint offers small businesses and consumers a broad selection of customized printed products for making impressions and expanding business.

Prior to using Marin, Vistaprint was challenged by their need to scale keyword expansion efforts across a large portfolio of products. Furthermore, they struggled to gain insights into product performance across multiple business segments and needed a solution that would allow them to bid effectively, unconstrained by account structure.

By leveraging a combination of Marin bidding and forecasting, Vistaprint achieved an 8% incremental increase in clicks while hitting revenue and margin targets. Using Marin Dimensions, web query reports and bulksheets, they also reduced the amount of time spent on campaign management and reporting by 40%.

Congratulations to Vistaprint! We certainly hope there are more success stories like this one in the near future.

Marin is excited to announce the release of our case study with Blue Shield of California. We’d like to start by thanking Blue Shield and AMP Agency for allowing us to earn their business and share their success with a broader audience. Founded in 1939, Blue Shield of California is a not-for-profit health plan that offers a wide range of commercial and government services throughout the state of California.

Prior to leveraging Marin’s bidding solution, Blue Shield was challenged by their need to maximize lead volume at a target cost-per-lead (CPL). Furthermore, they needed help scaling their campaigns to balance volume and efficiency. By implementing a combination of time-of-day and position-based bidding, Blue Shield increased their lead volume by 78% and cut their CPL by 16%.

Congratulations to Blue Shield and AMP Agency! We certainly hope there are more success stories like this one in the near future.