A little about Symantec
Symantec is one of the world’s largest software companies with more than 18,500 employees in more than 50 countries. They provide security, storage and systems management solutions to help their customers – from consumers and small businesses to the largest global organizations – secure and manage their information-driven world against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently than any other company.
Symantec relies heavily on paid search marketing to drive online revenue acquisition. The company operates a large advertising program across a variety of publishers, including Google Search, Google Display, Yahoo!, Bing, and Criteo.
The complexity of our online advertising programs made it time consuming to gain insights and difficult to act on them. In the face of multiple conversion types… Marin brings everything together into one unified view and automatically optimizes our spend, saving us a ton of time and helping us deliver on our financial goals.
The top priority for the online marketing team at Symantec is to drive incremental revenue for their consumer antivirus product through their web site, Symantec.com. Prior to their selection of Marin Software, Symantec faced variety of challenges to managing their large-scale online advertising program.
One of the biggest problems was the management overhead. Each individual publisher account represented its own silo of data, which had to be pulled down into a spreadsheet for analysis. Each insight gleaned from this analysis had to be converted into an action, which then had to be repeated across all publisher accounts individually, representing a significant amount of work. Rolling up reports across this environment was difficult and time consuming.
In addition to management overhead, the team lacked the visibility necessary to calculate bids across hundreds of thousands of ad units. For Symantec, the conversion funnel includes consumers who download a trial version of the company’s popular software. In order to bid effectively, they needed a system that could optimize to revenues at every step of the funnel, from trial download straight through to purchase.
Maximized revenue contribution across the entire conversion funnel
After narrowing their selection to two finalists, Symantec selected Marin Software because of the platform’s unique ability to address their challenges and its proven track record. With Marin, Symantec has the ability streamline the workflow required to create, manage and optimize campaigns across publishers, significantly reducing time spent on campaign management.
Without having to rely on spreadsheets, Symantec has instant access to data sets across publishers, can perform analysis across campaign elements, and easily package information for other executives without delay or error, leading to better decisions, faster. Additionally, Marin’s bid optimization tools enable Symantec to predict and maximize revenue contribution across the entire conversion funnel – from trial through to purchase.
Improved productivity and a 67% ROAS
By integrating the data from all publishers in one place, Marin enables Symantec to quickly analyze and optimize revenue performance on a daily basis, identify the outliers and trends, and apply this information to inform strategy. Despite the complexity of multiple publishers, multiple conversion types and campaigns that span not only search but display and retargeting, Marin’s automated bidding capability enables Symantec to key on revenue maximization—the one financial metric that means the most to their business—and provided a 67% increase in their return on ad spend (ROAS).
Productivity has also improved dramatically since deploying Marin. What used to require significant manual effort—pulling data from multiple publishers, building pivot tables in spreadsheets, creating charts and graphs—has been automated, reducing the time spent on reporting by more than 50%. Symantec now has the ability to create their own dimensions for analysis and automate the generation of insightful reports, eliminating a significant amount of overhead and freeing up more time to focus on higher value activities.
