OVERVIEW
Founded in 2010, Stylistpick.com is a one-stop shop for the latest, hottest accessories, curated by leading celebrity stylists, including MTV presenter Louise Roe. The proposition is founded on edited choice – the stylists pick their perfect pieces and provide tips on how to wear them. Cheryl Cole also designs an exclusive collection for Stylistpick as well as choosing her favourites from the main range. In line with edited choice, there is a strong personalisation element to the proposition – customers can take a fashion quiz and receive a personal showroom that has been picked to match their style profile.
Marin Software is different to many other Facebook advertising management platforms, as they understand that Facebook plays a role further up the sales funnel. The fact you can manage Facebook alongside other channels such as search and display means you can gain an understanding of how Facebook Ads are working as part of your online media mix and not in a silo. Their workflow, campaign management and optimisation features also mean we save a lot of time and gain a greater focus on ROI in a scalable way.
CHALLENGE
Stylistpick have a very successful Facebook page, with over 100,000 likes. They encourage people to take their “Style Quiz” as the first step in the sales cycle, which fits very well with Facebook’s social environment. They were using Facebook Ads to drive signups, but were keen to scale up their Facebook campaigns. Additionally, the number of impressions for Facebook ads meant that consumers were quickly becoming blind to their advertising creative, resulting in low Click-Through-Rates (CTR). Stylistpick needed a solution to facilitate campaign optimisation and automate bidding to an ROI goal.
Stylistpick also wanted to expand their online advertising campaigns across paid search and the Google Display Network. Furthermore, they had existing affiliate campaigns, email campaigns, sponsorships with online publishers, display activity through various agencies and offers on daily deal sites and wanted to understand what impact Facebook had in the path-to-conversion amongst all the other online channels they were using. In particular, they wanted to make the connection between Facebook actions and website conversions.
SOLUTION
Stylistpick turned to Marin Software, the leading online advertising management platform across search, social, display and mobile. Marin Software’s creative rotation functionality helped Stylistpick reduce the impact of ad blindness on Facebook creative. They could also use Marin Software’s predictive bidding algorithm to optimise Facebook ads to drive maximum volume while meeting or exceeding ROI targets. These and other workflow and campaign management capabilities within Marin Software, made their Facebook Advertising campaigns more scalable.
Additionally, because Marin Software’s platform can manage and optimise campaigns across search, social and display, Stylistpick were also able to manage their paid search and Google Display Network campaigns through the same interface as their Facebook campaigns. This meant they were easily able to understand which actions taken by consumers across search, social and display were driving conversions. Furthermore, Stylistpick could integrate click data from their other online campaigns into Marin Software’s path-to-conversion report so they could understand how these channels were working with clicks from search, social and display to assist consumers to a conversion.
RESULTS
Working with Marin Software, Stylistpick was able to identify Facebook’s role in the path-to-conversion and understand the value that Facebook was providing. When Stylistpick looked at Facebook actions taken on a last click attribution model the conversion rate was only 3%. However, when they looked at Facebook on a multi-click attribution model, it showed a 15% conversion rate. Showing that while Facebook is not as powerful as a direct response tool, when used as a channel within a wider online advertising strategy it plays an important role influencing downstream conversion.
Furthermore, Marin Software’s workflow, campaign management and optimisation functionality saved Stylistpick’s team significant time in the management of Facebook campaigns and also generated a CTR increase of 50% within the first month.
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.
