Fastweb Increases Revenue by 750% with Marin Software

By Kye Mou May 21st, 2013

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.

Feature Spotlight: Facebook Campaign Wizard

By Simon Whittick May 14th, 2013

The Feature Spotlight blog series highlights and discusses the use cases for new and popular features within the Marin platform. Today we’ll be taking a look at the recently released Facebook Campaign Wizard, a time-saving feature for social advertisers.

One Year after the Facebook IPO

It’s been a busy year for Facebook since their IPO last year, as highlighted in our recent infographic. There have been many innovations, with a strong shift towards more socially relevant and mobile-centric ad technology. As Facebook advertisers have become more sophisticated, their best practices have also matured. Marin has captured and presented these best practices in our new report, The Marketer’s Guide to Driving ROI from Facebook Advertising: Top Tips for Building Awareness & Generating Financial Returns. This paper reviews the top tips gathered from global advertisers and agencies using Marin Software to manage their Facebook advertising.

The Facebook Challenge

While Facebook’s ad innovations have grown at a rapid pace since the IPO, social marketers continue to face scaling challenges when creating new Facebook campaigns—building out effective audience targets and generating engaging creative at scale is still very resource intensive. Large advertisers leveraging hundreds of images, ad creative, target audiences, and campaign combinations struggle to build high quality Facebook campaigns that drive successful ROI.

Marin’s Solution

The Facebook Campaign Wizard makes it easy for Facebook marketers to create new campaigns and ad creative. The step-by-step interface provides a quick and easy, streamlined workflow for creating successful Facebook campaigns. Four simple campaign creation screens guide users through building a new campaign, setting audience targeting, generating creative, and deploying automated bidding. With Facebook’s ever-changing environment of new ad types, formats, and placements, Marin’s Facebook Campaign Wizard makes it easy for Facebook marketers to stay ahead of the curve and get the most out of their social advertising initiatives.

For more information on Marin’s Facebook Campaign Wizard, please contact info@marinsoftware.com

Experts Gather at Marin Masters NY to Share Industry Knowledge

By Samantha Lee April 25th, 2013

Last week, we hosted our bi-annual client educational event, Marin Masters, in NYC. Over 100 search experts in the tri-state area, from top agencies and global brands, gathered in the Screening Room at the Crosby Street Hotel to share their experiences and best practices with the Marin platform.

We had some great content presented at Marin Masters thanks to our customers. Themes included bidding, optimization and call-tracking. Marin’s VP of Products, Wes MacLaggan, also showcased the future of Marin and where we see the landscape unfolding.

A special thanks to Yahoo! for sponsoring and presenting their study released earlier this month on ad copy insights and optimization within the travel vertical. Some of the highlights from their presentation included:

We would like to thank all of our attendees for making Marin Masters NY 2013 such a huge success! Please enjoy some photos from the event.

Google Shopping Ads: Driving Relevance and Revenue with PLAs

By Kye Mou April 8th, 2013

Product Listing Ads (PLA) provide a richer and more engaging search experience for shoppers. With the share of spend on PLA campaigns increasing 600% in Q4 of 2012, online retailers will undoubtedly continue investing more time and budget towards this ad format in 2013. In fact, in Q4 of 2012, online retailers allocated as much as 30% of their AdWords budget to PLA campaigns. As a result of this recent surge in adoption and spend, Marin Software has published a white paper that examines PLA performance throughout 2012 and presents five best practices for deploying, managing, and optimizing PLA campaigns.

Insights Include:

• PLA performance versus standard text ads
• How to differentiate your PLAs from your competitors
• Using PLAs to dominate the SERP
• Strategies for setting granular product targets

Download the comprehensive 8 page PLA white paper here.

Introducing the BoostCTR Account Performance Grader – Optimize Your Campaigns Today

By Kamal Thakarsey April 2nd, 2013

For many search marketers, identifying opportunities for optimization within paid search campaigns is challenging. Monitoring and maintaining top performing ad groups, keywords, and ads is a standard best practice; but as campaigns grow, keyword lists expand, and creative tests multiply, this approach fails to scale and provide incremental improvements in paid search performance. With so many optimization opportunities hidden in an ocean of data, how can search marketers give the required attention each campaign deserves? Where do you even start?

To help search marketers answer these questions, Marin Software is thrilled to announce our partnership with BoostCTR to offer a free paid search diagnostics tool that not only provides insight into account performance, but also opportunities for optimization. The Account Performance Grader is designed to analyze historical performance across keywords, ads, quality scores, and ad groups for AdWords and Bing Ads campaigns. Simply sign up and enter the required information to receive your customized report.

Among other best practice recommendations, this report will provide actionable insights for pausing poor performing keywords and ads, as well as reveal quality score trends that identify areas where keyword relevance can be improved. With the Account Performance Grader, search marketers can remove the guesswork out of campaign optimization and focus their time on more strategic, high impact tasks.

Sign up here and start optimizing your campaigns today!

The Truth about Real-Time Bidding in Paid Search

By Rebecca Momberg April 1st, 2013

Calculating and pushing keyword bids in real time is one of the most talked about paid search bidding strategies. However, this approach is easier said than done. Accounting for consumer behavior and collecting enough performance data minute-to-minute or hour-to-hour is difficult and often results in sub-optimal bids. Today we’ll discuss the challenges that online marketers face when attempting to calculate bids in real time and the requirements that need to be in place to execute a successful bidding strategy.

Consumer Behavior

Consumers often click on multiple ads before converting. In many cases, they conduct research using several different search queries over the course of days, weeks, or in some cases months. Often times a consumer will validate their decision with one final burst of research just before converting. This delay between the initial ad click and subsequent conversion is known as conversion latency. To measure this latency, advertisers rely on tracking solutions that identify each unique user and follows them through the conversion process. The conversion and any associated revenue can then be attributed across each touch point; for example, the three paid search clicks that occurred prior to a purchase. Achieving this level of visibility enables automated bidding solutions to calculate accurate and optimal bids for all keywords that contributed to the conversion.

Display Retargeting vs. Search

Real-time bidding was born in the world of display retargeting, where advertisers bid to deliver ads to specific users based on information collected about them, such as which products or pages they’ve previously viewed on a company’s website. In this scenario, an automated bid, calculated and pushed out in real time, enables advertisers to target their spend and impressions towards consumers who are more likely to convert. The likelihood of a conversion is estimated using large datasets; the behavior of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of visitors to a website is analyzed before implementing an optimal bidding strategy. This is a fundamental difference when approaching real-time bidding in display versus search, where the amount of data collected for display retargeting is significant enough to inform bidding decisions in real time.

Real-Time Bidding in Paid Search

In paid search, the data collected for a keyword in real time is minimal. Calculating keyword bids based on such a small dataset is extremely risky as these bids often leverage an insignificant amount of data that doesn’t account for consumer behavior.

To address this challenge, Marin developed a patented bidding algorithm that utilizes Bayesian Estimation to minimize the risk of bidding on low volume keywords. Additionally, to account for consumer behavior, Marin allows online marketers to exclude performance data from bid calculations across a custom rolling date range. For businesses that experience high conversion latency or a large proportion of latent conversions, this means optimal bids based on accurate and complete performance data. Finally, Marin analyzes time of day paid search performance across multiple weeks in order to identify significant trends. These trends are used to inform daily and hourly dayparting recommendations, which can be implemented with just a few clicks.

Execute a Sound Strategy

When making bidding decisions, online marketers must ensure that they have a complete picture of performance. For paid search campaigns that are subject to conversion latency, this means sacrificing real-time bids in favor of implementing rolling date exclusions across a significant amount of performance data. Search marketers that execute their bidding strategy with this in mind are positioned to calculated optimal bids that maximize keyword performance.

For more information on Marin’s bidding solution, please contact info@marinsoftware.com.

Tablet Devices and the Future of Paid Search

By Kye Mou March 27th, 2013

Over the last three years, the rapid proliferation of tablet devices has changed the way consumers and advertisers interact across the search landscape. Consumers now rely on their tablets more than ever before to gain access to local business information, product details, reviews, coupons, and competitors. And advertisers responded with relevant ads targeted towards these tablet users.

However, the way these devices are used by consumers today has resulted in a seismic shift in thinking by Google. In an effort to simplify the management of paid search campaigns across devices, location, and time of day, Google upgraded AdWords with enhanced campaigns in early February. According to Google and their data, the line between desktops and tablets is blurring, with search behavior and engagement on the two devices aligning.

A recent 2013 mobile report: The State of Mobile Search Advertising – How Smartphones and Tablets are Changing Paid Search released by Marin Software supports Google’s claim that consumer behavior on tablets and desktops share increasing similarities. However, the data also validates the perception that desktops and tablets are inherently different and perform accordingly so. Regardless, to remain successful in a multi-device world, search marketers must embrace enhanced campaigns and continue delivering a relevant and engaging ad experience.

What Does the Data Say?

Over the last two years, tablets have become a device segment that search marketers can’t ignore. In fact, the share of overall paid search clicks served by Google on tablets increased from 6% to 10.7% in 2012. Consumers are increasingly using tablet devices to research and make purchases on-the-go and, more importantly, in the comfort of their home where desktop devices have traditionally reigned. Marin projects that by the end of 2013, the share of tablet clicks will double in the US, accounting for 20% of Google’s paid search clicks.

In 2012, paid search conversion rates for tablet devices increased by 31%, while smartphone and desktop conversion rates increased by 9% and 7%, respectively. By December 2013, Marin estimates that tablet conversion rates will surpass those of desktops. In addition to this rapid rise in conversion rate, Marin also found that tablet ads are continuing to outperform desktop ads. Click-through rates (CTR) for search ads on tablets were 37% higher than ads delivered on desktops, with the average cost-per-click (CPC) on tablets 17% lower than on desktops. As a result, advertisers increased paid search spend on tablets to capitalize on this opportunity; and by the end of 2012, the share of spend on these devices had increased to 10%, eclipsing the share of spend on smartphones for the first time in history.

Different, But Equal

Tablets will certainly play a crucial role in the future of paid search, but whether the line between desktops and tablets will continue to converge and blur, or diverge and remain distinct, has yet to be seen. Even though these two devices share similarities in search behavior, they continue to perform differently. Perhaps this is a result of their unique user experiences—desktops with their large screens, mouses, and primarily fixed locations; versus tablets and their touchscreens, smaller search real-estate, and portability. Marin’s mobile report appears to support the notion that different user experiences result in varying ad performance. As a result, we expect Google’s enhanced campaigns to evolve as the market demand for additional functionality becomes evident.

The New Multi-Device World

With the migration to enhanced campaigns underway, search marketers must now prepare for a desktop-and-tablet-combined world. Gone are the days of separating campaigns to target these devices individually. Campaigns and landing pages must now be optimized with both the desktop and tablet user in mind. Two strategies that marketers are implementing today include: limiting the amount of Flash-based content on websites, as iPads don’t support Adobe Flash, and using finger-friendly buttons and links.

In an already highly competitive search landscape, enhanced campaigns will change the way advertisers engage with consumers. Sophisticated search marketers will need to continue investing in technology and reestablish best practices in order to successfully drive media and acquire revenue in the new multi-device world.

Download the comprehensive 15 page global mobile report here.

Feature Spotlight: Sitelinks URL Builder

By Simon Whittick March 21st, 2013

The Feature Spotlight blog series highlights and discusses the use cases for new and popular features within the Marin platform. Today we’ll be taking a look at the new sitelinks URL Builder, a time-saving feature released earlier this month.

We Love Sitelinks

Users anticipate a relevant and engaging search experience, where the messaging and landing pages align with their needs. Unfortunately, organic links often deprioritize high-value landing pages or leverage ineffective language. As a result of these shortcomings, sitelinks have become one of the most popular ad extensions for advertisers. These additional links that lead to specific, relevant content deep within a website, create a richer and more relevant ad experience for users. In fact, many advertisers experience a dramatic improvement in their ad performance for keywords that trigger sitelinks, with some advertisers seeing a 30% increase in click-through rate.

The Sitelinks Challenge

In order to optimize keyword bids, advertisers need the ability to attribute the conversions and revenue resulting from sitelink clicks back to the keyword that triggered the sitelink. In the past, search marketers had to manually append tracking parameters to individually assigned sitelink URLs in order to effectively track and gain complete visibility into keyword performance. With some advertisers leveraging sitelinks across hundreds of campaigns, this tagging process is not only time consuming, but it’s also prone to errors.

Marin’s Solution

Marin’s sitelinks URL Builder tool enables search marketers to automatically build out custom tracking parameters for sitelinks based on their existing URL structure. This not only eliminates user error, but also allows marketers to spend less time managing sitelinks’ tracking and more time executing high-value optimization strategies. Furthermore, having a complete picture of keyword conversion and revenue data enables search marketers to calculate optimal bids that truly maximize keyword performance.

If you are a Marin user looking for more information on the sitelinks URL Builder, check out the Help article on this topic.

The 2013 SMX Biggest Search Geek Crowned

By Samantha Lee March 15th, 2013

Congratulations to Renato Del Vento for winning the 5th annual SMX Biggest Search Geek Contest sponsored by Marin Software!

Renato bested more than 2,700 contestants across the US, UK and Australia with a score of 84% in 5 minutes and 39 seconds. Renato’s prizes for winning the competition were round-trip tickets for two to SMX West, an award on stage by Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan and an iPad mini.

The quiz is still live for those remaining search marketers who want to test their SEM knowledge.

The Great Debate Over Enhanced Campaigns at SMX West

By Kye Mou March 13th, 2013

In the two days spent speaking and exhibiting at SMX West this week, it was clear that Google enhanced campaigns are at the top of every search marketer’s mind. With the mid-year migration deadline around the corner, marketers were keen to ask the important questions. Throughout our time in the Expo Hall and during two of our speaking opportunities, Marin engaged in several candid discussions regarding enhanced campaigns and what Google’s recent change to AdWords means for search marketers. Here’s what we heard.

Everyone’s On the First Page

Many search marketers were unaware of enhanced campaigns when it was first announced in early February. Without the formal beta process that Google typically leverages—a process used for major features like Product Listing Ads, remarketing, Dynamic Search Ads, etc.—enhanced campaigns was unleashed upon the search world in one fell swoop. Some search marketers we spoke to are struggling to understand what it means for their day-to-day campaign management and optimization tactics.

Think Everybody. Think!

Success in the age of enhanced campaigns hinges on the ability to establish “enhanced” best practices. Though the testing of enhanced campaigns appears to be limited so far, it hasn’t stopped search marketers from making assumptions and applying their expertise towards new tactics and strategies. Below are two of the “best practices” we overheard at SMX West:

• Specify device within ad creative: To engage users on specific devices, specify the device of choice within the ad creative. Including device-specific tokens like “mobile” remains a best practice, but these become even more critical for search marketers to include in their ad creative for increasing relevance. For advertisers who only want to engage tablet or smartphone users, use the tokens “tablet” or “iPhone” for example. This may reduce the number of desktop clicks on ads intended for tablet users or miscellaneous smartphone clicks on ads intended for iPhone users.
• Separate campaigns by location target: Continue splitting out campaigns by location targets. This enables search marketers to continue tracking conversions and revenue by geography and calculate bids based on segmented performance. Furthermore, generate ad creative that leverage geo-specific identifiers. For example, within a campaign that’s targeting San Francisco, use the keyword “San Francisco” within ad creative to increase relevance and user engagement.

Enhancing the Enhanced Campaign

When enhanced campaigns were first announced, many mobile app and gaming companies expressed a desire to target campaigns to a specific mobile device or device operating system (i.e. iPhone, HTC, iOS, Android). After speaking with a few marketers who attended the session on enhanced campaigns, it appears that Google will allow advertisers to target specific mobile devices and device operating systems for the display network with enhanced campaigns. Given market feedback it wouldn’t be surprising to see Google begin tweaking enhanced campaign features to provide marketers with these additional controls.

The Clock Is Ticking

Marin Software supports enhanced campaigns now. Establishing new best practices before the upcoming migration deadline is important. Conferences and expos like SMX West provide an invaluable look into what search marketers are thinking and what they require to be successful in the age of enhanced campaigns. Marin will be exhibiting at SES NY later this month and we look forward to another great forum for discussing enhanced campaigns. We hope to see you there!