Fastweb, premier online resource for paying and preparing for college
Part of the Monster Network, which includes Monster.com, Fastweb is the premier online resource for paying and preparing for college. For 17 years, they have excelled in providing students with the resources needed to realize their educational pursuits. From $3.4 billion in scholarships and financial aid tips to job and internship matching, Fastweb’s success stems from their commitment to empowering the lives of students through information and innovation. Fastweb relies on an integrated online marketing program to drive internet users to their website. To help manage, grow, and optimize their search and display programs, they selected Direct Partners, a digital media agency, and tasked them with driving monthly revenue.
Our data integration into Marin was critical to our success. Within the first month of integrating our backend revenue and enabling Marin’s bidding solution, we saw massive efficiency gains. We uncovered new revenue opportunities we had previously overlooked and increased our revenue-per-month by 750%.
Lifetime Value attibution more accurately guides advertising effort
Fastweb acquires revenue from advertisements they convert on their website. However, attributing the downstream revenue back to search and display clicks was challenging because their systems were not integrated. As a result, Fastweb relied on a cost-per-acquisition (CPA) to drive their bidding strategy. Since each reader generates a variable amount of lifetime revenue, a CPA became an inefficient metric for optimization. To gain visibility into the return-on-investment (ROI) of their programs and maximize revenue, Fastweb required a solution that could fully integrate and attribute their revenue across search and display.
In a CPA-driven model where all conversions are treated equally, Fastweb was generating a disproportionate amount of low-cost, low-revenue leads. Driving high-revenue leads was challenging for them as their aggressive CPA goal could not differentiate between potentially high-revenue leads and low-revenue leads. To effectively optimize their search and display programs, Fastweb needed a bidding solution that could automatically maximize revenue across keywords and groups by targeting a single ROI goal. However, to quickly identify and capture new high-revenue lead opportunities, while maintaining ROI efficiency, they required a bidding solution that could calculate optimal bids and also provide manual overrides for maintaining control over revenue outcomes.
Marin’s bidding solutions allows Fastweb to bid more appropriate on marketing segments
Direct Partners selected Marin Software to solve Fastweb’s challenges. Marin’s revenue upload feature integrates Fastweb’s tracking system with their search and display programs. An automated feed of daily revenue is seamlessly stitched across their Google and Bing accounts using unique tracking IDs, enabling them to attribute revenue back to the clicks that converted into leads. Accuracy and data integrity is maintained through Marin’s URL Builder, which automatically appends and fixes tracking parameters across all keyword and creative destination URLs. By aligning their revenue with the cost of converting a lead, Fastweb can successfully optimize their campaigns based on meaningful ROI-driven performance data.
To maximize revenue, Fastweb relies on Marin’s adaptive bidding algorithm. Profit maximizing bids are automatically calculated for keywords and groups that drive high-revenue leads as well as for those that drive low-revenue leads. This portfolio-based spend trade-off between keywords and groups, along with the flexibility of setting a single bidding goal across all of their campaigns, enables Fastweb to continuously maximize search and display revenue while maintaining ROI efficiency. Using Marin’s excluded dates functionality provides Fastweb more control over their bidding strategy by excluding outlying performance data from bid calculations. Additionally, Marin’s boosting functionality allows for proactively bid increases to account for performance fluctuations due to seasonality and changes in the bidding landscape.
Exponential increase in revenue while maintaining ROI
With Marin Software, Direct Partners was able to deliver impressive results to Fastweb. Marin’s flexible integration has provided complete visibility into the attributable search and display revenue generated from Fastweb members. By identifying and optimizing keywords and groups that drive high-revenue leads, Marin’s patented bidding algorithm increased Fastweb’s revenue-per-month by 750% while hitting their ROI target. The time savings received from Marin’s automated bidding solution has also allowed Direct Partners to invest more time into testing and optimizing new search and display opportunities to grow Fastweb’s business and acquire more revenue.
