A leading women’s accessory retailer wanted to extend its digital advertising from search to social. Its ultimate goals were to drive conversions directly on its website while generating maximum revenue.
To meet its objectives, the retailer wanted to run successful prospecting ads on social, testing different creatives and targeting scenarios, without expending too much time or too many resources. Initial prospecting efforts involved lookalike audiences based on a customer email list. Since it didn’t have sufficient experience or historical data to implement efficient lookalike prospecting, however, it wasn’t sure which of its product types would perform the best on social.
Because of this—as well as laborious, manual setup of product sets, product audiences, and creatives—the retailer struggled to produce any ROI.
The Perfect Search and Social Fit
The retailer put Marin Software’s Smart Sync for Dynamic Ads into action. For normal Dynamic Ads campaigns on Facebook, the product set is defined at the ad set level. With Smart Sync for Dynamic Ads, advertisers are able to use a simple workflow to clone top-performing product groups on Google into product sets on Facebook, that sit at both the ad set and ad levels.
By using the knowledge it gained from Google Shopping, the retailer was able to determine the product groups generating the highest ROI in its Google Shopping campaigns. Then, it was able to leverage these insights to quickly create more effective product sets on Facebook for better prospecting campaigns.
Aligning Search and Social for Better Results
The retailer’s business is vast, with many items in stock. Because of this, it was able to leverage Dynamic Ads prospecting to show the right products to the right users at the right time.
With Smart Sync for Dynamic Ads, the retailer was able to show thousands of tailored ads to the right target audience most likely to convert. As its end goal was to sell specific products, Dynamic Ads prospecting made it easy to showcase the broad variety of products to its customers, driving them down the funnel and leading them to conversion.
With Smart Sync for Dynamic Ads, the retailer was able to detect the highest revenue-generating product categories based on ROI, and clone the structure already proven to be successful in Google Shopping directly into Facebook.
To increase sales, the accessory retailer tested performance of manual means of prospecting campaigns against the automated product sets, which increased ROI by 456%.
456% better ROI
163% better CTR
80% more revenue
69% drop in CPA
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White paper
PPC for B2B: a Performance Marketing Survey Report for 2023
To help you stay on the leading edge of performance marketing, we surveyed over 300 B2B marketers to uncover actionable insights that will help you improve the performance of your PPC investment. Through a Marin and LinkedIn partnership, we sought out to understand what B2B marketers face right now and how they are dealing with a complicated market. Read the full report to get a better understanding of how B2B marketers are changing their approach this year.
What You'll Learn from the Report:
How budgets have changed through the years 2020 to 2023 and how budgeting complexities affect the work of advertisers this year.
What challenges are most prevalent this year and how other marketers like you are adapting.
The critical role audience targeting plays in your success, especially during a recession, and some interesting trends relating to targeting techniques.
The types of content and campaign management techniques are currently helping advertisers move buyers through the sales funnel.
What paid social or PPC channels are providing the best ROAS or conversions for B2B right now.
The limitations of smart bidding and why your paid search campaigns deserve more
Arguably the biggest innovation the paid search industry has seen in the past decade is the advent of Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bidding solution. I remember when I first entered the industry as an Account Coordinator… Ah, the good (or bad?) old days. A majority of my time was spent manually updating CPC bids for every keyword in my client’s Google and Bing Ad accounts. I would analyze how each campaign was pacing toward my client’s KPI and calculate new bids multiple times a week.
Enter Google’s tROAS and tCPA smart bidding strategies. I remember my Google account reps encouraging my team to test these automated strategies and how skeptical we all were. The only automated bidding we had heard of in the past was through Marin! But as the years went by and Google’s automation won more and more bidding tests, Smart Bidding became the norm.
Now manual bidding is a thing of the past – manual CPC isn’t even an option anymore. And what paid search marketer isn’t relieved to be freed of the tedious tasks associated with manual bidding?
These publisher bidding strategies are great… but they’re an incomplete solution. What if you want budget pacing, not just ROAS or CPA, to be considered in bidding decisions? Can you ask Google’s algorithm to do that? Not without a complex custom script… and I certainly don’t know how to code.
Managing budget pacing still requires manual intervention – that is unless you use Marin! Read on to understand some of the ways Marin makes smart bidding even better.
Manage everything in one place
Jumping across publisher tools can be time-consuming and fragment your workflows and data. With Marin, all your different campaigns across Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more are unified in one UI.
Marin unifies publisher data from tools like Google and Microsoft ads with backend data from tracking solutions like Google Analytics. We even have our own tracking solution, Marin Attribution, which is a more straightforward alternative to Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
All that data comes together in our interactive, customizable reporting grids. From campaigns, all the way down to individual keywords, front-end metrics – like costs and clicks – are married to backend metrics – like conversions and revenue – and attributed to the correct source. You can even create your own custom columns with the calculations that matter most to you. That means no more spreadsheets.
Transitioning your reporting and analysis from an Excel grid to the Marin grid eliminates the need for any manual data wrangling, saving time and improving data accuracy. Check out how easy it is to analyze performance in Marin.
Marin makes it easier than ever to analyze cross-channel performance and clearly determine what is working well and what needs attention. If you decide to take any action based on that analysis, Marin makes that process easier than ever, too.
Edit smart bidding settings across publishers
After using Marin’s reporting grid to determine what’s working and what’s not, you can use our multi-edit functionality to make changes. Update your smart bidding settings like strategy, target, bid cap, and more in Marin and avoid wasting time hopping between unintuitive publisher UIs.
Maximize ROAS with Dynamic Allocation
If you find yourself grappling with questions of how much you should spend on each of your campaigns, let Marin solve them for you. Our budget allocation solution harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible across campaigns and channels.
It all starts with your goals. First, you’ll meet with your Marin team to discuss your KPI targets and spend goals. Next, you’ll group your campaigns into different spend groups. Some examples of typical spend groups are brand, non-brand, retargeting, and prospecting.
Marin’s AI will take it from there. It will analyze how each of your campaigns is currently pacing toward your KPIs and review impression share metrics to determine if there is more room for a campaign to spend in the SERP or if that campaign is already dominating. It’ll then allocate your budget across all the campaigns in the given bucket based on each campaign’s potential.
You can either auto-apply Marin’s budget recommendations, or review them in the Marin app and apply them manually as you see fit. Manage it all in Marin’s budget pacing dashboard, which showcases not only how your budget groups are pacing toward spend goals, but revenue and ROAS trends as well.
Get unbiased recommendations for improvement
The publishers all provide recommendations to improve performance. But if you look closely, these recommendations always seem to lead to you spending more money on ads — not necessarily getting you any closer to hitting your KPI targets. Marin’s recommendation engine is free from publisher bias and has complete context on how all of your campaigns are doing across your customer lifecycle. This makes it more accurate than Google or Bing’s recommendations. And just like Google’s recommendations, they can be applied with one click.
If you’re only using publisher tools for paid search media buying, you're limiting your marketing program. Marin can help you save time and improve your ROAS or CPA in countless ways. The best part? Marin is completely customizable. Unlike the publisher tools' one-size-fits-all approach, we can adapt our software to your business’s specific needs. Share your struggles with a Marin rep today and learn what we can do to help!
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If you’re still unsure what Marin can do for you, see some of our favorite features in action.
Marin Increases Amazon Revenue by 150% for Online Retailer
Background
A leading distributor of components and solutions for electronic system design, production, maintenance, and repair turned to Marin Software to help optimize their paid eCommerce campaigns. They are a global technology leader with over 80 years of experience. Their multi-channel approach includes 48 transactional websites, contact centers, a field sales force, and an online community.
Whether researching a new technology, designing an electronic product, or looking for parts to repair an existing system, this merchant is the trusted global source for engineering solutions in today’s most in-demand application areas.