Introducing the DS Brand
Since the iconic Citroën DS car hit the market in 1955, the DS line has continued to grow in popularity under legendary French carmaker Citroën. In 2015, Citroën decided to spin off DS into a standalone premium brand coinciding with the launch of their fifth-generation model. This represented a crucial opportunity to make a splash for the DS brand name, so the team decided to live stream a launch event around the world.
Orchestrating a Massive Launch Event
DS chose Facebook as the optimal channel to drive awareness and promote their launch event across 39 countries. Yet scaling across a broad geography and executing on an exact schedule required a high level of coordination and advanced marketing capabilities. To ensure a successful launch, the DS team selected Marin Social to help them orchestrate and manage this special brand awareness campaign.
Executing on a Multi-Phase Strategy
DS developed a video advertising strategy with three phases: pre-launch teaser, livestream launch event, and post-event video replay. First, DS created page post video ads with Reach & Frequency targeting to maximize exposure for their pre-launch teaser. Marin Social made it easy to build relevant audience clusters, for example by targeting strategic keywords and interests optimized for CTR.
Second, DS took advantage of remarketing audiences to re-engage users who previously watched the teaser video with a link to the livestream event. This ensured DS was connecting with users who had already demonstrated interest, and who would likely want to view the livestream. Third, DS ran additional page post ads following the event to promote a video replay and reinforce brand awareness. These ads targeted users in the best-performing countries and strategic markets, as identified by Marin Social’s advanced reporting.
Each step of the way, Marin Social’s easy-to-use campaign management and reporting helped DS take their strategy to the next level. DS kept the campaign on track with custom scheduling to run ads at select times, and maintained control at all times using budget auto-pause. Marin Social was also key in being able to scale this three-phase campaign around the world in just five days.
Spreading Brand Awareness Around the World
The innovative approach DS took by combining video and sequential advertising strategies paid off. They achieved massive exposure from the Reach & Frequency phase of their campaign, with over 36 million impressions and nearly 8 million video views. Phase two of their campaign also produced a great response, garnering over 9 million impressions and generating steady traffic to the livestream launch event. Finally, DS effectively engaged their existing fan base with an impressive 20% engagement rate.
Running ads across Google, Bing, Amazon, and social media is necessary for online vendors and sellers. So why is analyzing the performance of those ads so complicated?
Data fragmentation and walled-garden publishers create roadblocks for retail marketers. You’ve got ASINs on Amazon, SKUs on Google Shopping, Meta Advantage Plus, and more – making it hard to align data and get the full picture of a product’s performance. Manually unifying cross-channel data for each product is a tedious process that you honestly don’t have time for.
It’s time to break down data silos with an AI-powered reporting and optimization platform like Marin. Here are five problems you’re probably facing today that Marin can solve.
1. It’s hard to compare product performance across channels
Retail marketers need to be able to compare conversion rates by publisher to spot sales trends. What if a product suddenly starts driving a significantly higher conversion rate on Amazon than on Google? You’ll want to identify that variance immediately to understand what’s working on Amazon and apply what you've learned to your search and social campaigns.
We make it easy to analyze how every product is performing across publishers. No more pulling data from each ad platform and unifying it in a spreadsheet. Marin marries cross-channel data for each SKU – and pulls in conversions and revenue from your source of truth, too. It also matches SKUs to ASINs, making it easier than ever to compare performance between Amazon and your other ad channels.
Thanks to Marin’s data visualization suite, you’ll never need to do manual data pulls or create visualizations again. The data model is unified and built-in. It’s all right there in the app, so you can move at the speed of business when making critical decisions about where to spend your next dollar. And if you like using spreadsheets, it’s one click to open our reports in Excel.
2. Your sales are impacted by social media trends
If sales for one specific product suddenly skyrocket, congratulations - an influencer may have recommended it to their audience. If you sell in the beauty, lifestyle, fashion, or wellness spaces, you’ve probably experienced this more than once. It’s important to recognize those surges the second they happen so that you can capitalize on them.
Marin’s Alerts will keep you on top of unexpected shifts in performance by sending a report straight to your inbox. The Alert’s thresholds are totally customizable, but a common one is for campaigns where spend has increased or decreased more than 70% day over day. If any campaigns meet your chosen thresholds, you’ll be emailed a report with all the relevant data and details, making it easy to decide what to do next. And once you’ve determined your next move, you can update budgets, bids, and settings for all your ads right in the Marin grid.
If you’re looking for something more turnkey, our Anomaly Detector might be for you. This AI-powered alerting tool doesn’t require any setup. It automatically identifies deviations in performance and sends a sharable, actionable email explaining what changed and what to do about it.
3. You need an optimization suite that understands the big picture
Jumping from one ads manager to another can be frustrating, especially since some UIs work better than others. And many campaigns share the same goal across publishers, but thanks to those pesky walled-gardens, you have to navigate through each interface to change ROAS targets for a campaign group. But not with Marin.
Our optimization suite is a command center for all your bidding needs. Tweak bids or targets for all your different campaigns in one grid. Or, unify everything with Marin Bidding. Our bidding algorithm runs across all your channels, so you can map Google, Bing, and Amazon campaigns that share a ROAS target to one Strategy in Marin, making optimization management easier than ever. With one click of a button, update targets across all your PPC publishers. You can also mix and match Marin Bidding with publisher bidding if you prefer.
The TL;DR? You tell the AI what to do. You handle the strategy because that’s what you rock at. Marin automates implementation and performance monitoring based on the strategy you choose.
4. Distributing budget across campaigns and channels is complicated
What if you could ensure that every campaign always has the most efficient daily budget possible? With Marin, you can. Simply set a monthly spend goal for a category of campaigns that share a budget, like brand, non-brand, or by geo. Then, choose a ROAS target. Once you’ve customized your settings, Marin’s AI will allocate your overall budget across campaigns by updating publisher daily budgets, giving the majority of spend to the products with the most marginal opportunity to drive revenue. The algorithm runs daily, so it’ll pick up on any shifts in the SERP and adapt daily budgets as needed. Sounds blissful, right? Let our AI take budget allocation off your plate. Learn more about Marin’s industry-leading budget allocation tool here.
5. Expanding to new channels is daunting
If TikTok gets banned in the US, are you ready to start advertising on Lemon8? Retail moves fast, and your brand can’t take years to establish a presence on the next major social media app.
Marin simplifies the process of testing new channels. You can review the performance of your products at the SKU level by publisher to decide where to start. For example, if you’re seeing success with Amazon Ads and want to test out Google Shopping, simply navigate to Marin’s Product Performance report to understand what your top-performing ASINs are.
Then, you can use our bulk-create tool to build Google Shopping campaigns for those products that you already know drive sales. That way, you’ll put your best foot forward when launching on Google. And you can do all the analysis, campaign creation, editing, and performance monitoring necessary to test a new publisher without leaving Marin. No more hopping from Amazon Ads to Google Ad Manager. Marin will be your mission control center, making it possible to do all your reporting and editing in one window.
…And so much more!
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what Marin can do for your retail media and shopping campaigns. Our customizable platform can solve almost any paid media problem, and automate almost any optimization or reporting workflow. But don’t take our word for it – we’ve got a plethora of case studies detailing how Marin has revolutionized one paid media program after another. And if you want to discuss your unique business needs with a Marin expert, we’re more than happy to chat.
