Are you spending too much time managing a large number of budgets?
Could you get more from your campaigns by reallocating spend to top performers? Fusion92 asked these questions about their paid search program, and Marin had answers. Marin's performance management tools helped them save time and improve conversion volume.
Background
The Fusion92 team has a client that provides non-clinical administrative services to private dental practices. The client manages the business side so the doctors can focus on serving patients. The client also offers search marketing services to help practices acquire new patients, and the Fusion92 team manages those paid search campaigns.
“Making mistakes with our client's budget isn’t something we can afford. With Marin, we’ve automated budget management, saving us 15 hours of manual work weekly and improving performance for our client’s campaigns.”
Challenge
Fusion92 manages paid search marketing for nearly 1,500 dental practices, each with unique goals and budgets. The programs combine brand and generic campaigns across traditional search and local campaigns. The team aims to spend the entirety of the monthly budget allotted for each office to maximize conversion volume. However, they must refund their client if they spend more than the allotted amount. They also want to get the most efficient CPAs possible.
Solution
Fusion92 now automates budget pacing and allocation with Marin. Each dental office’s campaigns are assigned to a Strategy with a corresponding budget. Once the budget is set, Marin’s powerful AI evaluates the marginal opportunity of each campaign and adjusts the campaign’s budgets and bidding targets to get the best overall performance for each office. Marin monitors each campaign's projected spend and CPA throughout the month, adjusting budgets and bids to ensure goals are hit. If a Strategy’s spend reaches the monthly budget, Marin automatically pauses its campaigns until the start of the following month to prevent overspend.
Results
Fusion92 ran a test to measure the impact of Marin’s automation on performance. They picked 18 dental offices to test and compare to a control group of similar offices.
Throughout the two-month test, the test locations significantly outperformed the controls in terms of budget allocation and conversion volume. Before Marin, only 9% of campaigns were ending the month having spent within 10% of their target. With Marin, 96% of campaigns were on target.
Budget compliance is essential, but better allocation also leads to improved performance as the budget is shifted to higher-converting campaigns. The test group saw a 10% increase in conversion volume, while volume for the control group remained flat.
The results were so promising that the Fusion92 team scaled the solution out across all their client’s Google and Bing campaigns. Marin is now automating budget allocation and bidding for over 10,000 campaigns and counting. It’s been a year since the rollout, and not a single strategy has exceeded its monthly budget. What’s more, the Fusion92 team doesn’t have to worry about pacing anymore. This is great for their mental health and allows them to focus on strategic initiatives and scaling out new campaigns.
Is this how you budget?
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.
There's a better way...
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.
Real-world results
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.
Validate your Allocation
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.
