A Little Background
Chain Reaction Cycles (CRC) is one of the world’s largest online bike shops. The CRC journey began in 1984 as a small family business in Northern Ireland, serving and supporting local cyclists. It’s been an incredible ride so far, with the company growing to over 450 cyclists, swimmers, runners, and passionate professionals supporting a global community of cycle and multi-sport athletes. In addition to cycling goods, Chain Reaction sells triathlon equipment, swimming products, and casual sports / outdoor apparel.
Marin allows us to optimise budget and campaign performance without the need for constant monitoring and manual campaign amends. Allowing us to focus on higher-level coordination as opposed to hands-on tasks involved in running a successful promotion. Having a single access portal to view and manage campaigns across multiple accounts and markets has been extremely helpful for us as a business which works across multiple countries and currencies at any one time. From the tool we have seen impressive results which we may not have achieved without using this.
The Challenge
Chain Reaction Cycles continues to expand across global markets and benefit from the increasing popularity of cycling, all while promoting over 500 brands in its catalog. On top of such rising interest and rapid growth, the team tasked with driving volume found it difficult to properly manage a complicated promotional matrix where multiple sales are running simultaneously, across anywhere from six to 12 countries and time zones. As an example, a sale may be a 20% discount in the UK, but 10% in the US. The activation/evergreen times are all different, and then factor in nuances to creative copy for language and positioning—and, of course, the core duty to deliver results to hundreds of vendors who count on CRC to sell its product.
There was also the critically important task of allocating budgets to the most effective audience at any given time, across multiple interest-targeted and lookalike audiences. CRC sought a tool that would reduce manual optimization work on the account, and help them shift and reallocate budgets effectively across their Facebook audiences. The main goal was maximizing volume while reducing cost per acquisition. This was an important midsummer clearance campaign, and they needed to sell as much as possible to seize the opportunity while keeping costs low.
Solution
The CRC team applied Automatic Budget Allocation for Marin Social to automatically redistribute budgets in real time. The budget algorithm allocated ad spend between interest-targeted and lookalike ad sets based on which were performing the best. This freed up the CRC team to plan for emerging markets and focus on efforts like strategic copy testing.
Additionally, the simple yet powerful bulk creator enabled the team to quickly create multiple ad variations targeting multiple audience segments at the same time. Uploading within a single portal helped the team keep messaging consistent and created a cohesive voice around a sale while maintaining nuances to each market.
Results
After turning on Budget Allocation, conversions for the UK accounts increased by 90% relative to the the prior two months. At the same time, CPA was down by 47%. With such high volume in the spring/summer months as cyclists are gearing up for the riding season, the ability to automatically shift budgets between campaigns where they’re most effective is (unsurprisingly) very useful. Though sometimes difficult to quantify, the time saved by leveraging automation for budget allocation was substantial and allowed the team to focus on more strategic directives (and, the occasional break or late lunch).
If you’re a PPC marketer, your budget allocation process probably looks like this:
Management gives you an overall budget to spend on paid media each quarter. You’ve created budget ‘categories’ like brand, non-brand, remarketing, local, display, etc, and every quarter, you review performance for each category over the past few quarters, analyze which categories have the potential to spend more or need less, and distribute the budget across those categories, then across the campaigns within those categories.
This process takes a few workdays to complete. Then, throughout the quarter, you occasionally check in on those categories and campaigns to adjust the budgets slightly. At best, you are driving by looking in the rear-view mirror. And after all that work, your paid media campaigns still don’t even hit your spend goals, let alone their full potential.
It’s frustrating. And in the age of AI, there’s a better way. Most marketers could get more conversions out of their current budget if they began automating with a budget allocation AI.
The customer journey is more dynamic and fluid than ever due to new search options and evolving ad types – not to mention evolving user behaviors and expectations. Things are changing fast. Over 50% of Gen Z say TikTok is their go-to search engine. So, how can marketers keep up with these shifts in traffic between channels? As market share shifts by category and vertical from search to social and back again – setting static, manual monthly budgets for each of your marketing channels means you cannot capitalize on unpredictable consumer trends.
If social traffic spikes or inventory runs out, your current optimization models can react in real-time, but only WITHIN their respective platforms. For example, a social ad outperforms expectations and drives more customers to convert than search or e-commerce. But your social and search budgets are static - meaning Meta can optimize your newly successful ad until it caps out your set monthly budget. With AI monitoring performance and predicting future opportunities, the budget can be automatically moved from Search to Social to ensure your next dollar goes where the opportunity is greatest, in line with your cross-channel marketing goals.
Alumni Ventures, a Marin client, wanted to optimize their paid social budget allocation across Meta and LinkedIn campaigns. They found that although the audiences they targeted on both Meta and LinkedIn were similar, there was no consistency in how each channel performed across networks. Some audiences strongly outperformed on LinkedIn and others on Meta, making it difficult for them to optimize spend by audience. Allocating budgets by alumni audience and channel over a defined period was tricky and time-consuming. They needed a more adaptive approach that could automatically adjust for both spend pacing and channel performance trends.
By deploying AI-powered dynamic budget allocation, as Marin Ascend offered, cross-channel changes can be accounted for in near real-time without waiting for a team member to analyze, strategize, and deploy a budget adjustment manually. By the time this manual work is completed - the budget could already be moved to your most successful campaign asset before you’ve been able to traffic the changes. And if the opportunity proves to be fleeting? The budget is moved back to where it will most impact achieving your account-wide monthly targets
I’m not trying to tell you that your paid media performance is bad… you’re an experienced professional, and I’m sure you know what you’re doing. But why not multiply your expertise and time with a powerful AI companion that can take hours of not-so-fun work off your plate so you can focus on the strategic stuff you actually find interesting? And as a bonus, this AI companion can help you find at least 10% more conversions within your current budget.
Enter Marin.
We spent the last few years building Marin Ascend, the budget allocation system that my 23-year-old Account Coordinator self dreamed of. All those budget distribution steps I mentioned above? Ascend can do them better and faster and take advantage of every opportunity to shift budget to top-performing campaigns. So, what makes Ascend so much better than manual budget management?
- Access to more signals: Our AI uses proprietary forecasting models and a tried and true algorithm to determine where you should spend your next dollar.
- An understanding of the full picture: Our platform automatically pulls data from all your advertising platforms and your source of truth for conversion and revenue data. It unifies all that data to get a cohesive picture of your entire paid media program before making decisions.
- Unified reporting: Our pacing dashboards allow you to monitor performance vs. plan in real-time across all accounts and publishers.
- Daily updates: Ascend will reallocate spend every day if it finds better opportunities. Human budgeting decisions are less frequent, more time-consuming, and strategically fallible. AI is consistent.
- Unified bid and budget management: Ascend can manage your budgets and bidding targets in unison. This way, you’ll avoid having targets that are too loose with budgets that are too low, which can lead campaigns to run out of budget in the middle of the day. The last thing you want is for your ads to stop running during those precious evening hours, and Ascend ensures that doesn’t happen.
If you’re not using AI to manage your budgets, you’re leaving money on the table. But don’t take our word for it – we’ll prove it by giving you a free Media Mix Audit.
With the audit, you’ll get a report that outlines exactly how much money you’ll save and how much more revenue you’ll get with our AI-powered budget allocation tool. Our system will use publisher and proprietary forecasting models to understand each campaign’s potential and showcase the results you’d get with Ascend.
Maybe you’re not ready for AI to take over yet, and I get it. The robots scare me, too. Regardless, there’s no way grabbing this free audit is a bad idea. Click here to request yours today.
