When I was a senior in college, all I wanted was to work at a prestigious marketing agency. I dreamed of the fast-paced corporate life. I imagined going to fancy client dinners and building creative, influential ad campaigns. And I did it! I secured a job at an agency with a great reputation, and working there taught me so much about the paid media world.
But it wasn’t all glitz and glamour, it was stressful. Balancing many client accounts, making sure to spend their budgets in full, and hitting efficiency targets was a lot to handle. I often felt overwhelmed with the amount of work on my plate. I also felt there must be a way to automate some of the tedious daily tasks. As an entry-level Account Coordinator, one of my main responsibilities was building out reports to present on weekly client calls. Every time I performed this manual work, I couldn't shake the feeling that there had to be a better way. And well, I was right!
When I discovered Marin, I was shocked at how much time the platform saved me. The Marin team is full of ex-agency employees, like me. We’ve built a product that would make daily work easier for our past selves. (And, of course, for current agency clients!) Here are 4 ways Marin helps agencies save time and improve performance.
1. Manage budget at scale
Budgeting is arguably the most stressful part of managing client ad accounts. The goal is to spend as much of the client’s budget as possible without ever going over the monthly limit. And you have to ensure that you distribute spend properly across campaigns. It’s stressful – but it doesn’t have to be anymore because Marin can do it for you.
Pace to spend targets
With Marin, you can group your campaigns into budget buckets and allocate a monthly or quarterly spend allowance to each bucket. Let's say your client gives you different budgets for brand, non-brand, and retargeting. Those would be the buckets, and you would place a group of campaigns inside each bucket. Marin would then visualize how each bucket is pacing toward its spend goal and forecast projected spend for the month or quarter.
Dynamically Allocate Spend for Optimal Performance
Marin can take it one step further and automatically allocate budget across the campaigns within each bucket for you based on forecasted performance. Our algorithm would analyze the historical performance of all the campaigns in the budget bucket. It would also consider impression share metrics to determine the best possible allocation of spend across the campaigns in the bucket. Then, it would set the monthly budget for each campaign. And it’ll reallocate the budget throughout the month if performance trends shift. This solution enables you to spend your budget as efficiently as possible without manual intervention.
Pause campaigns when they hit their target
If a bucket spends its full budget before the month is over, Marin will automatically pause the campaigns in that bucket. Marin will also re-enable them when a new month starts. So you can rest easy knowing you’ll never have to reimburse a client for overspend again.
Cross-channel budget management
This solution can also run across publishers. Therefore, Google, Bing, Meta, and other campaigns can all live within one budget bucket. Our cross-channel budgeting solution makes it easy to manage your client’s entire marketing program. It can even help with upselling. You can approach clients with, "Hey, we're managing search spend with Marin. Why not let us use it for Meta as well?" And suddenly you have more client spend on your books!
We know that every client is different, so we’ve made our budgeting solution customizable. Our technical team will work through the setup with you. We’ll make sure that Marin is optimizing toward the performance goals that are important to your client.
Marin is like a guard dog. It always protects your campaigns, ensuring they hit spend goals and stopping them from going too far. You can’t work 24/7, but our algorithms can.
2. Automate reporting across channels
Creating reports for clients used to involve pulling front-end data from various publisher tools, gathering backend data from a tracking system like Google Analytics, pasting everything into a Google sheet, and then converting it into charts and graphs. But Marin does all that for you, every day, without you having to lift a finger.
The power of a marketing data pipeline
Marin is a Marketing Data Pipeline. It connects to all your different data sources via API. It brings in data from your clients’ publishers and revenue systems in near real-time, normalizes it, and attributes it to the proper campaigns and ads.
Data visualization at your fingertips
Marin’s dashboards allow you to build whatever charts and graphs you need, and the data updates daily from all your different sources. You can share a read-only link to a dashboard with your clients and use the visuals to talk through weekly performance. This means that all you’ll need to do to prep for a client call is prepare talking points. All the charts, graphs, and unified data will already be ready for you to share.
You can also view cross-client data in Marin’s charts, graphs, and dashboards. If you’re managing many client accounts in MarinOne, you can get a high-level overview of performance for all of them.
A cross-client dashboard is where lots of agency teams start their day. The multi-client performance overview informs which clients need attention and directs focus for the day ahead. If you need to make optimizations, you can do so directly in the Marin UI for all clients. This leads me to my next point…
3. Manage and optimize all client accounts
Marin’s ‘All Clients’ view enables you to optimize all your different accounts in one place. It's a one-stop shop for agency Account Managers. Our "territory" filter lets each Account Manager label the accounts they are responsible for. When they enter Marin, they’ll only see the accounts that they work on. This makes things less busy while still providing a unified optimization and reporting suite.
Create and edit objects for all clients in one place
Our bulk uploader enables Account Managers to create and edit campaigns, groups, ads, and more for multiple clients and publishers with one sheet. This saves agency teams countless hours.
I remember having to create four separate bulk sheets for my client’s different Google and Bing accounts every time we launched a new paid search initiative. I’d have to go into each Google and Bing Ads Editor and upload numerous bulk sheets for campaigns, then groups, then ads, then keywords. This process would often consume an entire workday. But never again! Marin enables you to do it all with a few clicks.
Quickly Edit Objects in Marin’s Grid
One Marin client manages over 20 different ad accounts. The biggest value they see from Marin is being able to manage all those accounts in one place. With Marin’s easy-to-use unified grids, they change bids and budgets, pause and enable ads, and much more.
4. Seamlessly integrate client data
Marin can integrate with any of the programs your clients use for reporting, management, and data tracking. No more learning new platforms because you have a new client. You can just reach out to your Marin rep, and we’ll set up an API integration. Marin can unify many backend tracking systems as well. The options for conversion types to pull into Marin are endless!
Learn more about our integrations here.
Those are a few of the ways Marin helps agencies win. And this is just a preview – there are tons more to discuss. If you’re interested in learning more, schedule a demo with our team. We’ll help solve the issues that are keeping your team awake at night!
