[STUDY] Data Shows Search & Social Go Better Together

By Dan Morris April 23rd, 2014

You already know the data on search and social channels is compelling –  more than 92% of the global internet population uses search engines, and more than 73% use social platforms. But when it comes to managing spend across these two channels, marketers are still figuring out what works best.

We recently conducted a study into search and social marketing programs drawing on the Marin Global Online Advertising Index, an advertising data set from leading global brands that manage more than $6 Billion in annualized ad spend through Marin’s platform.

The results show that customers are more valuable when they engage with both search and social ads, but also that integrated search and social campaigns perform better than campaigns run in isolation.

Here are some key takeaways from our new white paper, The Multiplier Effect of Integrating Search & Social Advertising:

1) Customers Who Click on Your Search and Social Ads are More Likely to Buy: Users who clicked on both an advertiser’s search and social ads had an approximately 2x greater conversion rate than users who clicked on the search ad only. The impact of a cross-channel touch was even greater when examining social clicks. Users who clicked on both the search and social ads had a click-through rate approximately 4.5x times higher than users who only clicked on social ads.

2) Customers Who Click on Your Search and Social Ads Spend More: Users who clicked on both a search and social ad contributed approximately 2x more revenue per click than users who clicked on search ads only. Multi-channel touch points are even more valuable for social advertising. Users who clicked on both a search and social ad contributed 4x more revenue per click than users who clicked on a social ad only.

3) Search Campaigns Perform Better When They Are Managed Alongside Social Campaigns: According to the study, search campaigns that are managed alongside social advertising campaigns have 26% higher 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 68% higher revenue per conversion from their search campaigns when they are managed together with social advertising campaigns.

For more data and actionable best practices, make sure to download The Multiplier Effect of Integrating Search & Social Advertising. How are you running your search and social campaigns? Drop us a line in the comments.

Best Practices Take Flight: easyJet Case Study

By Jennifer Madison April 21st, 2014

Lots of Marin customers operate in challenging markets, and easyJet is a prime example. The largest airline in the United Kingdom, easyJet operates in the notoriously competitive travel vertical, where a multitude of airlines vie for the same keywords alongside travel comparison sites and tour operators. Keyword lists are continually growing, and bids must be carefully monitored.

easyJet faced the challenge by teaming up with Resolution Media and making great use of Marin Software. Our interface is designed to deliver ever-improving financial results even in the toughest markets. Take a look at how easyJet achieved their goals, and pick up some tips for your own campaigns:

Folder-based Bidding

• Using the automated Folder-based bidding solution, Resolution Media is able to optimize at the keyword level. They segregate brand and generic terms, and set different performance targets to make the most of each keyword and achieve easyJet’s goals. Keyword bids are calculated across all routes and updated daily.
• Pro Tip: Use the time-savings you’ll gain to fully test your campaigns, refine your strategy, or even leave the office a little earlier!

Marin Dimensions

• Resolution Media created a virtual reporting structure native to Marin Software that does not impact campaign structure, leaving the team free to adhere to campaign structure best practices and preserve Quality Score.
• Pro Tip: Use Marin Dimensions to “tag” campaign elements for segmentation and analysis. Categorize and compare the data sets that matter most to your business.

User Journey Report

• Marin Software’s User Journey Report allows the team to understand which type of booking the keyword is actually driving. This facilitates ad copy and budget optimization, and also informs bid strategy in terms of knowing which routes need additional support.
• Pro Tip: Turn to the User Journey Report for valuable insight on the best performing times of day and days of the week. Then put the insights into action with our day-parting functionality.

Since adopting Marin Software, Resolution Media and easyJet have seen significant improvements including 111% improvement in ROI, 51% decrease in cost per booking, and 29% increase in bookings. Learn more about their goals and success in the full case study.

Finally, thanks to Resolution Media and easyJet for allowing us to share their story!

3 Basic Tweaks to Improve Your Paid Search Ad Copy & Increase CTR

By Brenda Ton March 27th, 2014

Paid search involves a million moving parts, but today we want to call out ad copy as a particularly important aspect. Good ad copy is convincing, drives click-through rates, and makes your ad stand out relative to your competitors. All this can lead to better quality scores and lower costs.

However, if you’ve ever stared at the blinking cursor with a case of writer’s block or wished you had more time to test and optimize, you’re not alone. Many search marketers are guilty of neglecting their ad copy from time to time. Even search marketers who take the time to fully test different ad copy and decide on a winner may not be refreshing it as often as needed to continually combat ad fatigue.

In this post, I’ll walk through some basic methods to increase your ad copy CTR and make it stand out:

1. Use Your Value Proposition - What’s the reason why searchers should visit your website? What benefits do you offer and why should people choose you against your competitors?  In the example ad below, the value proposition is clear and straightforward, offering people a way to create a custom website quickly and easily. Someone looking for this service might be enticed by the 100+ design selections offered and simplicity of the “3 Easy Steps” messaging.

2. Capitalize the First Letter of Every Word - There’s evidence all over the web that capitalizing the first letter of every word in your ad will help increase CTR. Consider the two ads below, and it’s clear to see which one stands out more.

3. Use a Strong Call to Action – What should people do after reading your ad? A strong call to action will instruct searchers on the next step they should take, and create a sense of urgency for them to click on the ad. For example, if you were selling life insurance, “Get a Free Quote Today” is a call to action telling searchers to visit the site right away for a quote.

Keep in mind that optimizing for a boost in CTR doesn’t mean that the conversions will magically appear. Just because you create outstanding ad copy to make a searcher click doesn’t mean they will convert. Search marketers need to look at all these different elements in a holistic way and use data to evaluate how effective their ad copy is in terms of both click-through rate and conversion rate. For example, if you are driving a CTR of 10% and generating new traffic, but bounce rates are high and conversions are low, then chances are your ad copy isn’t relevant to the landing page you’re driving them to and needs to be re-evaluated.

Good luck, and happy ad copy writing!

3 Essential Ways to Optimize for Online and Offline Conversions

By Kye Mou January 28th, 2014

Brands that seamlessly tie offline conversions to online events are positioned for success, but it’s easier said than done!

Most businesses have a wide variety of customer touch points: website visits, social media interactions, phone calls, email, proposals, quotes, surveys, tech support, ordering, delivery, you name it. While it’s terrific to have so many diverse touch points, they can be a source of great complexity for digital advertisers.

A gap between the online and offline can result in an incomplete picture of paid search performance, as downstream revenue from offline conversions remains unattributed to the keywords and creative that drove those conversions. On top of that, not all interactions result in revenue conversions. The inability to define unique revenue values for each event and tie them to a single customer and keyword results in a bidding strategy that ignores lifetime customer value and fails to calculate optimal keyword bids.

So how can search marketers bridge the gap? Here are three tips for optimizing for online and offline conversions:

1. Track customers with order IDs. Assigning order IDs allows advertisers to bridge the gap between their data warehouses or CRM systems and online customer activities. Search marketers are not only able to attribute offline conversion and revenue back to the paid click and subsequent online event, but they can also modify attributed revenue based on refunds, cancellations, and other downstream revenue adjustments.
2. Optimize for multiple conversion events. Different consumers will represent different value to your business. For example, a visitor who requests a quote may be worth more than a visitor who signs up for a newsletter. The flexibility to assign a unique value to non-revenue conversion events in this scenario enables advertisers to measure the true value of each visitor and keyword to their business. Tying these events to publisher data allows search marketers to react quickly to top-of-the-funnel activity, and measure the impact of website engagement on downstream revenue and lifetime customer value.
3. Calculate optimal bids with portfolio optimization. Maximizing conversions or revenue across a set budget requires making spend tradeoffs between keywords within a portfolio. Calculating optimal bids for all keywords simultaneously enables search marketers to maximize online and offline conversions and revenue across their account while taking into consideration business goals that vary across campaigns, products, services, and other business requirements. This approach to bidding requires an automated solution that can capitalize on new keyword opportunities without an expensive “learning” period.

These tips are adapted from our white paper, Navigating the New Paid Search Landscape. It’s a must-read for any advertiser in the financial services sector, and we also recommend it for marketers operating in a particularly competitive market.

To Every Bid There is a Season: 4 Quick Tips for Seasonal Optimization in Paid Search

By Kye Mou January 23rd, 2014

The holidays are over, but seasonality should be a consideration for search marketers all year round.

Seasonal shifts in consumer behavior influence paid search performance, and create a constantly changing bidding landscape. Fortunately, this opens up some great opportunities to grow both conversions and revenue. With a little effort to manage seasonal data and constant promotional changes, optimizing for seasonality can be an excellent way to edge out the competition.

Let’s take a look at 4 quick tips for seasonal optimization in paid search:

1. 1) Schedule bid adjustments based on forecasted performance. We recommend deploying boost schedules, where bids are increased or decreased for specific time periods, in order to optimize for fluctuations in conversion rate. Assigning individual boost schedules across products and services provides the flexibility to bid aggressively or dampen bids for in-season and off-season products and services. Also utilize a time-of-day or day-of-week strategy based on significant conversion rate trends in order to optimize campaigns for cyclical effects on consumer behavior.
2. 2) Factor conversion latency into bid calculations. Depending on your business, the time between an initial click and the eventual conversion and revenue can range from the same session to several months. In order to optimize bids using a complete picture of ROI, it’s best to find an automated way to exclude the most recent days from bid calculations. Account for latent conversions and revenue by dynamically extending or shortening a rolling date exclusion window based on your business needs.
3. 3) Identify and exclude outlying data. Advertisers occasionally experience atypical increases and decreases in conversion rate due to promotions and competitor activity. Use a platform with multi-layer filters and alerts to quickly identify these changes and manage by exception. A platform will make it easy to exclude specific dates and date ranges from bid calculations across campaigns, products, and services – saving you a lot of time and hassle.
4. 4) Schedule campaigns to align with products and promotions. Make sure to update your ad creative to reflect seasonal promotions and expand campaigns to align with seasonal interest. A platform can be helpful in providing a streamlined workflow and automation for these tasks. By effectively executing on your promotional calendar, you’ll be better able to engage with your audience about in-season products and services.

These best practices were adapted from a recent Marin Software white paper, Navigating the New Paid Search Landscape. With a focus on the financial services industry, the paper is a good read for anyone running paid search in a highly competitive vertical. It includes tips on efficient budget allocation, online/offline conversions, building brand equity, and adapting to changing business requirements.

Marin Software and BlueKai Team Up to Announce Audience Connect

By Dan Morris December 12th, 2013

For as long as we can remember, the keyword has been the fundamental anchor of the search marketing industry. Through the keyword, search marketers have historically “pulled” customers from the discovery to the consideration phase by trying to map a message (creative) to their search intent (query). Through this process, seasoned search marketers have created massive databases of “intent,” which have allowed them to fine-tune messages and investments based on the “intentions” most likely to drive the ideal ROI.

Intention based marketing through search keywords has been the quintessential strategy in any serious marketer’s toolkit for some time now. But with all it’s benefits, it’s clear to see that the keyword does have its flaws when used in isolation.

While keyword-based marketing tells us a wealth of information about potential intentions, it tells us nothing about the quality or lifetime value of the customer. Is the searcher a current customer or a potential customer? Are they likely to purchase low margin or high margin products? What types of products are they looking for when they come to your website from a branded term? And what is the potential ROI of the searcher one month, six months, two years from now? The search marketing industry has long been seeking a solution to answer these questions, and a way to run search campaigns targeting both intentions and audiences at the same time.

Today, Marin announced Audience Connect, the digital marketing industry’s first ever keyword and audience based marketing solution. Audience Connect is made possible through a partnership with BlueKai, the only independent SaaS solution for data management, analysis and activation in marketing. Through BlueKai, Audience Connect unites advertisers’ first- and third-party audience data with keyword intelligence. It pulls from over 40 thousand attributes of audience data across 400 million profiles, including intent data, demographics, and behavioral insights.

Advertisers can now target more effectively, customize creative and optimize bidding by specific audiences for search campaigns as well as display, video, analytics, native advertising and site optimization. Audience Connect also makes it possible for advertisers to build truly customer-centric programs across all digital marketing channels.

Over the coming months, Marin looks forward to continuing to help our customers reach their ROI objectives while offering them new capabilities through Audience Connect. These include:

1. Audience Analytics – Ability to combine the power of your users with audience insight, purchase intent and demographics to maximize ROI
2. Look-alike Modeling for Audience Expansion – Ability to expand audiences to find more high-value customers, based on keyword search and online browsing history.
3. Intent-Based Retargeting – Ability activate new performance-driven audiences across search, social and display channels in one interface
4. Audience-Centric Bidding on Search Terms - Customer-centric bid optimization to deliver high-value conversions by audience segment

For more information on Audience Connect and our BlueKai partnership, please check out our press release.

Croud Keeps Quality Scores High with Marin Software

By Rebecca Momberg September 27th, 2013

From time to time Google makes changes to the algorithms that calculate Quality Score. If those changes result in a drop in Quality Score, advertisers are negatively impacted; position is likely to drop and harm the click through rate. Maintaining the same position will likely result in higher CPCs, meaning fewer clicks and conversions within a given budget. Staying on top of Quality Score changes is therefore crucial, but we all know that manually running reports can be time-consuming.

Leading UK agency Croud’s mission is to make digital marketing accessible to all advertisers, regardless of their size and budget. They follow a strict set of best practices designed to keep accounts in tip-top condition. To monitor Quality Score, Croud set up a series of automated alerts using Marin Software’s reporting suite. It was through these alerts that they spotted a recent change in AdWords Quality Score and assessed the impact it had on their accounts. Google does not store historical Quality Score, so without Marin, Croud would not have been able to do this without taking the time to manually record data each day.

Last week, AdWords started reporting lower Quality Scores across many clients. Brand terms and high-volume generic keywords were affected most, and in some instances the drop lasted for two days. By being alerted to this change as soon as it happened, Croud was able to optimize their account accordingly to remain as efficient as possible and manage client expectations.

Google Validates the Importance of Bridging the Online to Offline Divide

By Kye Mou September 16th, 2013

In a time where consumers are increasingly engaging with brands online, advertisers are faced with the challenge of tying conversions occurring offline, back to the online clicks and events that led to those conversions. Particularly in industries like financial services and automotive, applications and online leads result in offline verifications and approvals at brick-and-mortar locations. This disconnect between customers’ online and offline engagement results in an incomplete picture of ad performance as downstream revenue from offline conversions remains unattributed to the clicks and events that drove those conversions.

The requirement for this level of visibility is becoming more apparent, and the industry as a whole is shifting to solve this challenge. In fact, earlier this month Google introduced the ability for advertisers to measure offline sales with AdWords’ conversion import feature. This new AdWords feature helps advertisers measure and optimize for the complete end-to-end purchase process. It’s exciting to see publishers beginning to understand and support this level of marketing complexity. Providing marketers with online to offline visibility allows brands to realize the true return of their online advertising investments and enables them to better optimize their programs.

In early 2012, Marin addressed this same challenge by introducing Revenue Upload by Order ID (RUBOID). By assigning order IDs—for example an applicant or quote number—this feature enables advertisers to bridge the gap between their data warehouses, or CRM systems, and online customer activities. Marketers are not only able to attribute offline conversions and revenue to back to online clicks and events, but also modify attributed revenue based on refunds, cancellations, and other downstream revenue adjustments.

In the case of AMF Bowling, the world’s largest owner and operator of bowling centers, online coupons are used to drive customers to one of their 285 bowling centers across the country. However, this online to offline engagement created challenges in tracking and measuring coupon effectiveness. They lacked visibility into the bowling centers that benefited most from their coupon redemption program. Six months after integrating their program with Marin’s RUBOID technology, monthly revenue attributed to paid search was over 10 times higher than the revenue attributed in the first month of the program. The ability to optimize with a complete picture of ROI enabled AMF Bowling to lower their cost-per-conversion by almost 70% over a nine month period.

With 5 Months of Consecutive Growth, PLA CTR Up 19% Year-Over-Year

By Kye Mou August 27th, 2013

From October through December 2012, when Google first transitioned shopping results in the US, PLAs experienced an almost exponential growth in impressions and clicks. Since then, retailers have continued to embrace the richer and more engaging ad experience, providing online shoppers with highly relevant creative that include product details, images, and price.

To help search marketers prepare for this holiday season, Marin has released a report, “Google Shopping Ads: Product Listing Ads Deliver for Retailers.” This annual report examines the continued surge in PLA adoption and spend, and presents four critical best practices for successfully deploying, managing, and optimizing PLA campaigns in Q4.

Highlights from this report include:

• The share of PLA impressions stalled and dipped in 2013, decreasing 2% in June and 13% in July compared to January 2013
• PLA CTRs have remained higher than standard text ads since November 2012; they were a record 21% higher in June and July 2013
• PLA CTRs increased 19% year-over-year in July 2013 and have increased each month since February
• PLA CPCs soared 34% compared to January 2013 to an all-time high in June

Download the complete 8 page report, “Google Shopping Ads: Product Listing Ads Deliver for Retailers”, here.

Online Retail: 5 Strategies for Search Marketing Success, Part 2

By Kye Mou August 12th, 2013

If you didn’t get a chance to read the first two tips in this series, check out Part 1 here. If you’re already up to speed, we’re going to pick up where we left off and discuss three more strategies to make your online retail search marketing programs a success.

3) Advertise your entire product catalog. Retailers that promote their complete product line and deliver relevant ads are able to differentiate their offerings and maximize their revenue outcomes.

• Dynamically manage campaigns to maximize visibility. Use a management platform with real-time automation and leverage a structured product feed. Align your paid search campaigns with your products in order to advertise your entire inventory at scale.
• Simplify PLA management and optimization. With automated PLA campaign tools, you can make additions and edits in bulk, and efficiently create PLA objects without introducing errors.
• Scale creative management. Successful online retailers use tools to quickly isolate and update creative to align with promotions. Top performing creative should be continuously identified, optimized, and deployed at scale.

4) Convert on-the-go consumers with mobile. Retailers that can successfully and engage on-the-go shoppers will be able to acquire revenue as customers move across devices.

• Segment mobile performance. Use reporting tools that provide analysis of performance by device along dimensions such as product line and geography. This will give you actionable insights for optimizing the mobile shopping experience and implementing mobile-specific bidding strategies.
• Deliver mobile-specific creative. Increase relevance with local cues such as name of a city or region, and use mobile location and call extensions.
• Implement mobile-based bidding strategies. Identify trends in mobile searches and conversion rates to inform a strategy that will allow you to engage mobile shoppers at the right time. To combat competitors, continuously adjust bids based on segmented performance.

5) Optimize for seasonal shifts. Retailers that account for seasonality will maintain an advantage and accelerate revenue outcomes during critical buying periods.

• Schedule bid adjustments based on forecasted performance. Use a bidding solution that automatically adjusts bids according to expected shifts in seasonal performance. Deploy boost schedules to proactively optimize for revenue-per-click fluctuations.
• Factor conversion latency into bid calculations. Since the time between the initial ad click and the purchase can range from the same session to several months, most online retailers can optimize bids by using an automated solution to exclude the most recent days from their bid calculations.
• Identify and exclude outlying data. Periods of irregular paid search data can wreak havoc on your bid calculations. Account for these times by excluding the specific dates and date ranges from bid calculations across campaigns and product lines.

Are you a search marketer in the online retail industry? Share your tips for success in our comments section. And make sure to download a copy of our white paper, “Revenue Acquisition Management for Online Retailers,” for more in-depth discussion of these winning strategies.