Background
Lucid Software is the parent company of two cloud-based visual workspace applications, Lucidchart and Lucidpress. Lucidchart combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation, while Lucidpress is used to create brochures, flyers, newsletters, business cards, posters, magazines and presentations. Combined, they are utilized in over 180 countries by more than 27 million users worldwide.
Since using Marin Bidding, we’ve been able to dramatically improve our acquisition efforts. Not only have we been able to garner more qualified conversions, using Marin has freed up time previously spent managing individual keyword bids, to allow our team to work on more strategic initiatives.
Challenge
In the past, the Lucid team had been optimizing their bidding using only manual techniques. Managing over 30,000 keywords, and given the dynamic nature of Google’s auctions, they found that an appropriate bid can often be a moving target that’s challenging to reach at scale when using manual bidding. As such, they were interested in leveraging an automated bidding solution that would take the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids to meet their performance goals.
Solution
The Lucid team decided to test out Marin Bidding in order to increase traffic and boost conversions with the aim of sustaining the company’s rapid growth. What initially proved to be really helpful was Marin’s ability to apply the same conversion type across all channels within the same workflow, versus manually implementing by individual channels. This made it possible for the team to quickly onboard their Bing campaigns onto Marin Bidding, alongside their Google campaigns.
The Marin Software team also recommended that they leverage Marin Bidding’s Custom Modifiers, which automatically assigns bid values based on factors outside of the auction, increasing or decreasing bids based on the criteria specified by the advertiser. In this case, the team set up custom modifiers to adjust by conversion type–so whether a user signed up for a free trial, paid for an individual product, or registered for the enterprise version, Marin was able to detect which keywords were driving high-value actions and boosted the bid for those keywords automatically.
But the power of Marin Bidding wasn’t only limited to sales — the tools also helped the team in other unexpected ways. Lucid found that Marin’s folders provided a cohesive way to stay better organized than with Google’s native AdWords tool, by being able to bucket multiple campaigns and ad groups with the same performance model together. This was especially useful given the fact that Lucid offers its services in 10+ languages, and each language incorporates different KPIs and campaign frameworks, so an easy way to segment campaigns by performance data provided the team with clear, actionable information for better decision-making.
The team also found that onboarding external revenue data was much more seamless in Marin than in Google, which limits you to one revenue value per day. Lucid’s sales cycle is longer than the average business and the paths-to-purchase vary depending on the user-level, so a flexible revenue management framework was important to them. Marin provided a data passback avenue and other connectors to easily integrate with Lucid’s data warehouse, and as a result, Lucid found it easier to analyze customer lifetime value.
“Unlike Google’s bidding algorithms, Marin Bidding is far more customizable to our business needs and can be applied across multiple ad publishers. We’re able to easily upload offline conversion data that can be modified to account for a longer sales cycle. Bidding folders allow us to combine similarly performing groups regardless of their campaign or publisher. Custom modifiers allow us to layer custom business goals on top of traditional bidding strategies” said Mallory Reese, Performance Marketing Manager at Lucid Software.
Overall, Marin proved itself to be a strategic partner to Lucid Software–staying adaptable, experimenting with different approaches, and finding custom solutions to meet the needs of Lucid’s business.
Results
With Marin Bidding, Lucid Software was able to witness impressive growth while hitting key company goals for their search marketing campaigns:
- 20% increase in registrations
- 10% increase in ROAS
- 15% decrease in cost
- An average time-savings of 6 hours per week
Upon implementing Custom Modifiers to their search marketing campaigns, the team also saw an incremental lift of 10% in registrations.
