Crazy in Love grew to adopt a simple but effective social advertising strategy that now generates a considerable return on investment with Dynamic Ad campaigns on Facebook. The project started with an unsettling comment—“Client has excellent knowledge of search advertising, has little confidence in social.” We had our hands full. If the CPA spiraled out of control, Crazy in Love would instantly lose any temptation to test Facebook advertising.
Baby Steps
During initial meetings, Marin wanted to impart knowledge, so we explained the rules, techniques, and skills involved in Facebook advertising.
For starters, we ran a simple campaign structure with a conversion objective prospecting a 1% lookalike of the website’s website visitors. A simple campaign structure and objective would allow the Crazy in Love team to learn the basics.
After achieving moderate results (10% greater than target CPA), they were willing to test a similar structure across two other markets it was advertising in. We saw similar results.
A Growth in Confidence
As the client began to better understand how to optimize social ads, it became quite transparent that the social spend was generating revenue. Although we weren’t yet hitting the target CPA all the time, we were floating within 10-20% of our target across three markets.
Conversations shifted to Dynamic Ads, and how effective Dynamic Ads campaigns are in achieving a low CPA. After a week or so of working closely with the team on its product feed, and ensuring the Facebook pixels were correctly installed at each touch-point of the purchasing path, we launched DA in one market.
Since the particular market has significant web traffic, the results were instantaneous—we succeeded in decreasing the CPA by 66%.
Scaling Up
With DA successfully set up in one market, it once again provided a learning environment for Crazy in Love. Our account rep touched base a couple of times a week, suggesting change recommendations, offering a coherent reason every time, and building their knowledge.
Luckily, as the campaigns indicated a sound ROI, Crazy in Love pushed to self-educate and took every recommendation on board. At this stage the client was running Facebook campaigns for four months, and it became clear that it trusted that with successful optimization and strategy, there was a high chance of achieving a valuable ROI.
Testing and Lessons Learned
Crazy in Love's CPA was a purchase, so that became the focal point. To ensure top-notch DA campaigns, we taught them about the need to ‘feed’ our retention audiences. They understood the theory—however, because a purchase conversion was the main objective, they decided to use conversion campaigns as prospecting ‘feeding’ audiences.
Although conversion objective campaigns achieved some conversions, the total number of clicks weren’t enough to ‘feed’ our DA product audiences on Facebook. The DA CPAs started to spiral out of control, and as the client stumbled into the Christmas shopping period, it was noticeable that the campaigns weren’t being given the same care and attention. Ad scores began to fall, and frequency, CTR, CVR, and CPA all began to spiral.
The ads were becoming expensive. It was time to realign the strategy and ensure adequate optimization time.
Getting Back on Track
After agreeing that conversion objective campaigns were not optimum for ‘feeding’ DA campaigns, they agreed to test an outside traffic objective, in an attempt to drive more traffic with more clicks.
As the DA CPAs began to spiral we decided to rebuild our DA campaigns. This provided an opportunity to analyze attribution windows, to align retention days for optimum results.
By running Lookalike Prospecting campaigns with an Outside Traffic objective across all markets, we drove considerable traffic to the website that was later picked up by the DA setup. The results were excellent.
The Grand Finale
To highlight the success of this strategy we compared the data from Q4 2015 and Q4 2016. We noted an 86% increase in conversions, with a 400% decrease in CP purchase (€60.35 to €11.97).
- Decreased CPA by 68% by switching to feed-based Dynamic Ads
- 86% increase in conversions
- 400% decrease in cost per purchase
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.
