A little about OMD and Virgin Atlantic
Manning Gotlieb OMD (MG OMD), a communications planning and buying agency within the Omnicom Media Group, manage the Virgin Atlantic paid search campaigns. Virgin Atlantic is one of UK’s leading airlines serving the world’s most exciting business and leisure destinations.
It feels like Marin was designed to meet the challenges of any agency. The ability to integrate revenue into our optimization strategies and efficiently report on performance at scale saves us countless hours and has reduced our clients’ CPO by 20% on average.
Challenge
In today’s data driven world, businesses rely on multiple pieces of technology to deliver, optimise and manage their online advertising and website analytics. If these adserving, tag management and optimisation technologies do not integrate, data discrepancies occur and brands risk poor bidding execution.
Secondly, in the highly competitive world of airline travel, airfare prices change constantly across the dozens of routes Virgin Atlantic operate, posing the challenge of showing the best fares to a consumer at time of their search. Manually applying these fare changes is a laborious task that takes up time which would be better spent strategically optimising the accounts and thinking of innovative ways to communicate with Virgin Atlantic’s customers.
Finally, as price per route changes, so does gross profit per booking. This poses a problem for traditional rules-based bid calculations which do not account for the fluctuations in volume and performance that are inevitable in price-sensitive verticals like air-travel.
Solution
Marin integrated seamlessly with existing Tagman and CoreMetrics tracking, which meant there was no need for Virgin Atlantic to re-engineer their advertising technology architecture. MG OMD’s search team quickly and simply deployed Marin’s tracking pixel within the TagMan container tag. In contrast, deploying tags directly on the website often means waiting for a development window to open up and fighting to prioritise the tag deployment above multiple other requests. The benefits of this approach go beyond time saving; data discrepancies are minimised and historical data is preserved which means there is no “learning period” for automated bidding. In fact, bids can be calculated from day one.
Combining these three tracking sources results in an extremely complex URL structure; Marin’s URL builder was leveraged to seamlessly combine the various URL parameters and automate the process of building URLs. This eliminated the need for the MG OMD team to manually build URLs each time new ad copy and keywords were added. The time that was saved could instead be used to optimise the accounts.
Rolling out Marin’s automated bidding has ensured keyword-level bids are updated automatically each day, taking into consideration the most recent performance data as well as seasonal changes, to maximise performance. In addition, Marin’s pixel captures not only conversion and revenue data and the user’s path-to-conversion; it also allows Virgin Atlantic to track specific information such as the cabin category (economy, premium economy, little red, upper class) and route. This allows MG OMD to gain insight into and understanding of the consumer’s research process so it can optimise the account accordingly and interact with the consumer effectively.
To tackle the challenge of frequently updating ad copy with new prices, MG OMD created Dimensions in Marin that group Campaigns by destination and market. When prices need to be updated the team now use Marin’s ‘Actions by Dimension’ capability. This feature allows users to upload a single instruction to Marin to change the price for all ad copy relating to a particular destination. Marin does this by automatically applying the same change to all ads within the Dimension, thus showing the best fares to a consumer. Without this feature, the MG OMD team would have to upload bulk sheets containing thousands of rows, a time consuming and error prone process.
Results
Using Marin allowed MG OMD to achieve significant time savings, allowing for resource to be reinvested into strategic optimisation. In particular, Marin’s URL builder and the usage of the ‘Actions by Dimension’ feature led to:
- 17% decrease in cost per conversion
- 22% increase in revenue
- 10% increase in ROI
In PPC marketing, timely updates can be the difference between hitting your goals and overspending your budget. Marin’s customizable Alerts ensure you never miss critical performance changes. Now you can get them directly in Slack.
Real-time notifications about significant campaign changes allow you to make quick adjustments to get performance back on track. You can also improve collaboration by sending Alerts directly to your team's shared Slack channel. Eliminate the time spent monitoring dashboards and rely instead on the messaging system you use all day, every day. Click here for a guide on linking Alerts to your Slack notifications.
Here are some ideas for Alerts that will help you stay on top of performance changes:
Be aware of changes in spend
Get alerted of significant changes in campaign spending so that you can investigate what caused the spike or drop in volume. This way, you can avoid over or underspending and stay looped into how your campaigns are performing in the SERP. For example, I could have Marin send a Slack notification any time cost changes more than 40% day over day.
Understand changes in the SERP
Use an Alert to inform you any time a campaign, group, or keyword sees a large increase or decrease in impression share. That way, you’ll stay aware of changes in the auction landscape without having to do any manual data analysis. Once you know where potential issues stem from, you can easily investigate them in Marin’s grids.
Flag high- and low-performing keywords
Every PPC manager has their own criteria for what defines a high-performing or low-performing keyword. Use Marin’s dynamic filters to create a keyword performance Alert based on your secret formula. That way, you can capitalize on high-performing keywords and pause out any low-performing keywords that are bleeding spend and not driving conversions. For example, you could be alerted at any time Avg. CPC surpasses a certain number, or when keyword cost is high but conversions are low.
Remedy low CTR keywords
Create an Alert that informs you when any keyword’s CTR drops below a certain threshold. Whenever you receive that Slack notification, you’ll know it’s time to make some changes, like moving the keyword into a separate group and making the ad creative and copy more relevant to the keyword, or pausing the keyword if it’s not worth the money and effort.
Discover issues with landing pages
Uncover ads that have a high CTR but aren’t driving conversions by building an Alert based on your performance thresholds. Then, investigate why people are clicking on those ads but not converting. It’s likely an issue with landing page relevancy but it also could be a sign that your tracking isn’t working properly.
Automate account maintenance
These types of Alerts ensure that nothing is missing from your account setup. By creating Alerts for things like active groups with no active ads, disapproved keywords, or campaigns missing tracking parameters, you can automate a lot of those pesky account maintenance tasks that your intern secretly hates doing. The more you automate, the more time and energy your team has to focus on strategic planning.
…And so much more!
Alerts are fully customizable. If you can filter on a metric in Marin, you can create an Alert based on that data. And Marin has pretty much every metric you can think of! The possibilities are endless. If you're a Marin user and need help setting up Alerts or linking them to Slack, reach out to your Account Rep. And if you’re not a Marin user yet, but think the platform might be a good fit for you, you can learn more and schedule a demo here.
