Authoritative Insight and Analysis on World Affairs
The Economist, a weekly newspaper established in 1843, offers authoritative insight and analysis on world affairs, politics, business, finance, science, technology, and the connections between them. Available across print and digital, online, and via a range of apps, The Economist has a global reach and is enjoyed by readers all over the world.
The Goal: Drive More Subscriptions
For this campaign, The Economist’s key objective was to increase the number of subscriptions to its newspaper across 24 countries, including the UK and the US. The team also needed to keep the average cost of subscriptions under a set level using Marin Social’s campaign management tools.
Meeting Demand with Facebook Video Campaigns
The Economist saw the social demand for authoritative insights and opinions on international affairs in a year rich with events of global significance, such as Brexit and the American elections. To drive subscriptions in a cost-efficient way, The Economist applied a range of retargeting strategies on Facebook.
By retargeting people on social media who had already interacted with the brand, The Economist leveraged two specific ad types—Facebook link posts and animated video ads—to engage their readers and encourage them to subscribe. Performance over the time revealed that video ads had a positive effect on engagement rates, with a CTR of 1.24% on video ads compared to a CTR of 0.51% on link posts. Using animations of the weekly print edition cover, along with other editorial videos including KAL Cartoons, The Economist utilized content to drive engagement and encourage purchase consideration among its social audience.
To manage the complexity of wide regional targeting and tight cost per subscription requirements, The Economist used Marin Software optimization rules to ensure cost-efficiency of new subscriptions. Results showed that different videos sparked different levels of interest in different markets. Therefore, through the Marin Social platform, optimization rules were set up to automatically optimize video ad units relative to regional response rates and key performance indicators.
The managed rules increased the reach of video ad units through automated bid management in strong-performing markets and paused under-performing video ad units in other markets. This strategy delivered the maximum number of subscriptions within a target cost per acquisition.
Definitive Results
Between September and December 2016, Facebook video ad campaigns delivered strong results:
- 66% rise in new subscriptions through video ad campaigns
- 12% lower cost per subscription than through the static image format
- 72% lower CPC for video ad format than static image
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.
