Wesley has been working with Marin Software since 2008. He is currently CMO at Marin Software. Previously he led the Product team where he was responsible for driving Marin’s roadmap and working closely with engineering to deliver innovative advertising solutions to the market. He has over a decade’s experience developing and delivering analytical enterprise SaaS applications, including four years with Applied Predictive Technologies working on their platform to help retailers maximize the return on their promotional spending. Mr. MacLaggan began his career providing strategic guidance to companies in a range of industries with Mercer Management Consulting. He holds an Economics degree from Dartmouth College.
We’re not calculating CPC bids manually anymore on Google and Meta…there are just too many signals and performance changes too quickly to keep up. So why are many brands and agencies still using manual, spreadsheet-driven approaches to manage their performance advertising spend? This is a problem because planning in spreadsheets has a few fundamental challenges:
Brands and their agencies can and should do better than spreadsheets to get the best return from their marketing investment.
Our goal is simple: we help you sell more with less effort. We built an optimization suite that understands the potential of each of your campaigns across ad platforms and automatically manages your spend allocation. The result is better performance and time savings for your team, whether you are a brand or an agency.
Marin’s optimization is based on Strategies, which are groups of campaigns that share a common goal, such as ROAS, CPA, or spend. Strategies can span ad platforms and include any number of campaigns. For example, if you have specific budgets and/or ROAS targets for different lines of business, all the campaigns associated with each line of business would be grouped into their own Strategy. That way, Marin’s AI can manage them in unison since they’re all working toward the same goal.
To optimize your budget allocation, you need to understand each campaign's incremental contribution to your overall goal. If you just reference past performance, you’re ignoring diminishing returns, seasonality, and other factors that may affect future performance. You’re basically driving forward while looking in the rearview mirror.
Marin’s powerful AI synthesizes publisher forecasts with proprietary models to simulate the future potential of each campaign.
Marin summarizes the change in your allocation before and after implementing our recommendations. Once you turn on our recommendations, Marin will automatically adjust your campaigns’ daily budgets, efficiency targets, and, where needed, the CPCs for all the keywords in the Strategy.
Sleep soundly knowing that Marin is constantly monitoring your strategies and making adjustments to ensure you get the best results based on the strategy targets. Our Strategy Dashboard summarizes performance against plan, and if there are any issues, our team of experts will help guide you through how to address them.
Fusion92, an agency client of Marin’s, used Ascend to increase conversions by 10% while dramatically improving budget compliance and saving time.
“Making mistakes with our client's budget isn’t something we can afford,” said Tom Hammond, VP of SEM & e-commerce at Fuision92. With Marin, we’ve automated budget management, saving us 15 hours of manual work weekly and improving performance for our client’s campaigns.”
Click here to read their success story.
If you’re a marketer looking for more growth and a better return on your marketing spend, it’s time to move beyond spreadsheets. Interested in learning more? Check out our upcoming live product tour, or click here to talk to our team.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick and easy way to visually measure how you’re tracking to plan? In Marin, you can with the new pacing columns on the Strategies and Campaigns grid. At a glance, you can see how your strategies are tracking against their spending or efficiency target and color coding makes it easy to identify strategies that are forecast to miss their targets.
We’ve also added nine other pacing-related columns, including the episode start and end dates, days remaining, and % completion. These new columns bring the power of the Pacing dashboard directly into the Strategies and Campaigns grids.
Strategies are groups of campaigns that map to shared business goals. Strategies can include campaigns across accounts and publishers for easy management at scale. Each Strategy has a goal with specific targets that Marin will aim to hit if you are actively using the platform’s optimization, by changing Campaign Budgets, Targets, and bids.
Hitting your budgets and maximizing the return on your investment often involves too much manual monitoring. The new Pacing columns make your life easier with:
Navigate to the Strategies grid, and open the Column Chooser. You will see a new category called Optimize. The chart is in the Pacing column. You can add this to the grid as you would any other columns. If you are not currently using Marin Strategies, please contact your account manager to get started. Even if you don’t use Marin to manage your performance, the pacing charts can still be used to keep track of your performance vs. targets. If you’re not yet using Marin, what are you waiting for? Talk to us to get started today!
iOS 17 is here, and now tracking parameters that allow cross-site tracking will be removed from Safari private browsing and links shared in Apple messages and mail. UTM parameters are unaffected, but Safari will remove Google and Facebook click IDs.
Apple’s focus on privacy over the last few iOS releases is clear, and iOS17 is no exception. At WWDC in June, Apple announced that Private Browsing mode in Safari will be more private, adding Link Tracking Protection to remove some URL parameters.
Safari doesn’t remove all URL parameters, only those that track an individual user across websites. Apple is not publicizing the list of affected parameters, but we believe that UTM parameters are unaffected. Click-specific parameters will be removed, like those added by Google and Meta upon an ad click. Here’s a site that reports on specific URL parameters but does not yet reflect Privacy Mode on Safari.
In addition, users can opt-in to have Safari remove these tracking URLs even when not in Private Browsing, but most users will not enable this setting.
iOS updates take time, so you should expect the effect to begin this week and ramp up as users upgrade their devices to ~90% adoption by the end of the year.
These changes will not affect most paid traffic on Safari because that traffic comes through a publisher, not an email or message. While Safari private browsing will be affected, Marin estimates Safari private browsing is used by 20% of Safari users, but most users only use Private Mode occasionally. Google is more likely to be affected than Meta properties because ad clicks happen in the browser, not in an app.
If you rely on publisher tracking and don’t want to experience data loss, you can look at a third-party tracking solution, like Marin Tracker, that doesn’t rely on Google Click IDs.
You should also ensure there are no errors on your website if you rely on a URL parameter that Safari removes.
Private Click Measurement is Apple’s privacy-safe alternative if you need measurement that is blocked by Link Tracking Protection. Here’s a video from WWDC’21 giving an overview of the capabilities. As of iOS17, this is also available for Safari Private Browsing.
Apple may start applying this logic to non-private modes. If this happens, advertisers can set up dedicated landing pages for each highly granular sub-topic and concentrate their traffic on fewer criteria (such as keywords). This approach will help provide accurate measurement without using parameters.
We don’t expect Google to follow these changes, at least not anytime in 2024, as they are still working on the long-delated around cookie deprecation and blocking.
Need help navigating these changes? Click here to set up time with one of our experts.
Google is retiring the version of Google Analytics we have all been using for years and requiring us to move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Because GA4 is built on an entirely new data model, we need to set up GA4 from scratch. This post is intended to highlight a few topics for consideration as you manage this upgrade from Universal Analytics (UA).
Mobile First: GA4 is built around an event-driven data model that tracks user interactions across different platforms and devices, providing marketers with a more holistic view of user behavior. UA, on the other hand, is pageview-based, meaning it tracks website pages' interactions and doesn't provide insight into user behavior outside the website. Additionally, GA4 uses machine learning to analyze user behavior and provide deeper insights into audience demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Events First: In UA, Goals were the focus of any conversion-related analysis and were set up in Google Analytics. Not in GA4. Everything is an Event and there are four type of events. Events can be marked as Conversions in GA4 for use in funnel reports.
To get the most from GA4, you will want to configure the events in Google Tag Manager although you can define up to 30 custom events in GA4 directly. Instead of a few pre-defined parameters (Label, Action, etc.), events can have multiple custom-defined parameters to align with how they are used.
Google offers a Goals Migration Tool that can be used for Destination Goals and Events, but they recommend restructuring your events to match the GA4 data model.
Goodbye Views, Hello Data Streams: GA4 maintains Accounts and Properties, similar to UA, but the concept of views is gone. Views were often used to filter your data to focus on a subset. In GA4, each data is collected from one or more Data Streams (websites, apps, or other digital properties), and any filtering must be done in Google Tag Manager.
Farewell Bounce Rate, Welcome Engaged Sessions: Because page-oriented metrics like Bounce Rate don’t translate to a mobile app, GA4 is focused on session metrics. One casualty is Bounce Rate. The closest approximation is an Engaged Session which attempts to determine whether the user interacted with your content. It’s similar in that 2 or more page views should count as an Engaged Session, but it also works on mobile. If the numbers surprise you, remember that it translates more closely to 1 - Bounce Rate.
Built on Big Query: Google’s Big Query underlies GA4, giving you improved access to the underlying data for querying or use in Google Data studio.
Google is attempting to clarify the workflow around analytics by breaking it into separate pieces handled by distinct applications. Many of us already use Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, but GA4 encourages or even requires some of the work to be done in those tools.
Conversion Setup in Tag Manager: As mentioned earlier, you no longer set up Goals in Google Analytics directly. Instead, you set up anything you want to track as an Event, and then you can mark some of your events Conversions in Google Analytics. Many activities you probably thought of as metrics in UA (e.g., Page Views) are automatically tracked. For custom events tied to your conversion funnel, these need to be set up in Google Tag Manager, including things like reaching a specific thank you page or submitting a form, or viewing a video. This gives you tremendous flexibility but requires more forethought in your setup.
Reporting in Google Data Studio: Google envisions Analytics as a tool for Analysis or asking questions about the data. They are pushing pure reporting functions to Google Data Studio. The idea is that you probably have some users who will be overwhelmed with the complexity of analytics (not to mention they might break something in the process) and would be better served with a Dashboard from GDS.
There is configurable reporting in GA4, and one of the first things you may want to do is set up a Library that mimics the reports found in UA to make the transition easier.
Linking Google Ads: GA4 can still be used to power your Google Ads conversions, but you will need to reconfigure your setup to make sure this happens.
First, you need to take the existing conversions from Universal Analytics and make them Secondary Conversions, so Smartbidding does not consider them. Then you will import the new GA4 Conversions by selecting New Conversion Action from Tools > Conversions. Once there, select Import, and you will be able to import any events that are marked Conversions in GA4. Once imported, these will be available for Smartbidding optimization.
Improved Analytics: This migration presents an opportunity to review your Analytics setup to ensure it is up today with the needs of your business. It’s easy to have your analytics on autopilot, even as your website, app, and go-to-market motions change. Take the opportunity to audit the events you want to track, the audiences or segments that are important to you, and the report your stakeholders need. Of course, you want continuity with your existing data, but don’t miss the chance to improve things.
There is no migration of historical data from UA to GA4. Google has stated that historical data will be available in UA for 6 months, but after that, there is no guarantee that you will have access. This is why it is important to set up GA4 tracking as soon as possible if you have not already.
UA’s reporting tools If you work with a 3rd-party PPC platform such as MarinOne, you should be able to import your conversion data as far back as needed
This article isn’t intended to be a complete guide to making the migration, so it barely scratches the surface of what’s possible with GA4. If you find yourself in need of additional bandwidth or expertise, our team of analytics ninjas are ready to help. Click here to set up a free consultation.
This is a story about people doing bad things on the internet. It’s not the first and certainly won’t be the last. We decided to tell our story to help prevent others from becoming victims. Of course we don’t want people misusing our brand, but the people who have spent their precious time and lost money in this are the real victims and are the ones we are looking to protect.
We started getting strange messages to our social media accounts and various company email addresses asking “is this project real?” The project: Translation work from somebody who is using a name very similar to ours and our company logo.
This has nothing to do with our company (if you look closely, you can see the misspelled name). We responded to these inquiries letting the email senders know the project was not real and that they should not communicate with these Scammers (I’d really prefer to use a stronger term here, but my editor would not allow it). We also let the platforms where these conversations originated know what was happening.
As we received more messages, some of them became more urgent. Some of these new Victims were panicked because they had done the work and then sent money to the Scammers. One of them had sent $1,500.
We believe that these scams start with a job posting on sites like Freelancer.com and Upwork. The Scammer then asks the Victim to move their communications off the original platform and to communicate directly through Telegram or another messaging platform, including email.
The Victim is given work that seems legitimate, and completes the task. When the Victim seeks payment, the Scammer then requires the Victim to establish an account for payment, which requires the Victim to send an “account registration fee” to the Scammer. This advance-fee scam is not new. Similar scams have been around in various forms for decades or longer, including the Spanish Prisoner and Nigerian Prince scams.
The Scammer promises that the account registration fee will be refunded upon the Scammer’s payment for the Victim’s work. At this point, many of the Victims realize that they have fallen for a scam. But some Victims, having already done some work and not wanting to walk away from a potential payment, go ahead and pay the account registration fee. A behavioral psychologist might refer to this as an escalation of commitment or sunk-cost fallacy.
In a few cases, the Scammer further escalates the commitment by asking the Victim to make an additional payment to link their account.
According to HR statistics, freelance work in the US has been on the rise, with 53 million registered freelancers in 2014 versus 59 million in 2020. So how can these freelancers protect themselves? The first thing that people can do when working on freelance projects is to always work through the platforms. They have established policies in place to ensure that payment happens once the job is completed and that payment should happen directly through the platform. Being asked to move communication to email or another platform should be a red flag.
Secondly, there is absolutely no reason that we can think of where a legitimate company would ask you to provide payment in order to get paid. If it sounds like it doesn't make sense, it probably doesn't.
Third: watch out for projects that look too good to be true. The pay for the projects that we've seen were quite generous and this of course gets people more interested. If it seems like you are being overpaid for the amount of work involved, keep your guard up.
There are many articles and videos with additional advice on what to watch for.
We aim to work with the freelance platforms and relevant law enforcement to try to prevent these types of scams from happening. Below are some contacts and links that we used so you can use them if needed. If you become aware of a scam online posting, please report the posting and/or the user to the relevant platform.
US Agencies
Online Platforms
Also, provide a way for people to contact you. People who have lost money are very resourceful about getting in touch with someone who can help. We have seen direct messages on social networks, emails to every alias listed on our website, and well as personal telephone outreach to team members and their families. By posting a link on our Contact Us page, we have made it easier for people to connect with our legal team and get additional information.
As we discussed how to handle this internally, one of the things that we think could provide a significant Improvement in the freelance ecosystem would be to allow companies to become certified. This would be similar to the blue check on Twitter. This way, a freelancer would know that the job is legitimate and coming from the official company account. It seems like a step in the right direction. It appears there is something similar for individuals, but we couldn’t find anything for companies.
We are not experts in this area, so there may be other things in place or better ways to solve this problem. We'd love to start a discussion about how we can do that. For now, know that Marin's cyber security practices are strong. If we need any freelance assistance, we will not be contacting anyone through Telegram or Whatsapp.
As we live in a world with increasingly remote employees, we expect that we will all face more of these types of threats. We all should keep our guards up.
Launched last year, Instacart is offering a program supporting black-owned companies by promoting their products at the point of sale through Instacart Ads. Brands can apply for a share of $1M in advertising credits that can be used on the platform.
Instacart is the leading online grocery platform in North America which creates tremendous opportunities for emerging brands to reach their customers as they complete their online grocery shopping.
In addition to advertising credits, brands accepted into the program will get additional resources, including a “designated team focused on supporting participating brands and a monthly training series to ensure brands maximize the impact of their advertising campaigns.”
Instacart offers a range of advertising formats on the platform, including Sponsored Products, Digital Coupons, and more. You can think of Sponsored Product Ads as increasing the digital shelf space for your products. They show on the search page results in addition to checkout and other browsing and discovery placements.
We at Marin are excited to highlight Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives by the publishers we support. You can find the link to apply for this program at ads.instacart.com or see additional details here. Instacart also offers $100 in advertising credits to advertisers getting started with Sponsored Products.
If you need help with your Instacart Ads campaigns, or increasing exposure on other retail marketplaces, set up time to learn more about how MarinOne can help maximize the performance of your marketing investments.
Raise your hands if you shopped on Instacart in the last year? Keep your hands up if you advertised with Instacart last year? Well, if you’re a CPG brand I’m sure you’ve still got your hand up.
Instacart is the leading online grocery platform in North America. The company has partnered with more than 600 beloved national, regional and local retailers, including unique brand names, to deliver from nearly 55,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America. Instacart offers self-service and managed ad services for more than 2,500 CPG brands, including 100% of the Top 25 CPG companies.
Instacart launched self-service advertising in May 2020 allowing advertisers to promote products to appear at the top of their search results and throughout their buying journey. And now MarinOne is here to help.
Our self-serve MarinOne platform unifies lower-funnel Instacart advertising with paid search and paid social campaigns to help generate additional demand. Marketers can align their efforts across channels to ensure they are working seamlessly across the customer journey.
The flagship Instacart Ads offering, Sponsored Product, helps advertisers secure premium digital shelf space across several discovery surfaces throughout the online grocery shopping journey. Consumers discover sponsored items, much like they would in store by being on the right shelf, on an end cap or in the checkout lane.
Sponsored Product placements mirror these in store opportunities and more – whether consumers search, browse and discover, or buy again, Sponsored Products puts relevant products in their sightlines.
One notable difference with Instacart is the geographic considerations: your ads will only be shown to users if there are stores selling your product in that user’s area.
Starting a new ad platform is a big task and it takes a while for the tools to manage and optimize campaigns to mature, especially for larger advertisers with lots of products. That’s where MarinOne comes in.
With Instacart supported in MarinOne, advertisers have the advanced reporting, automation and optimization capabilities we have been refining over the last 15 years. Interactive analytics let you ask questions of your data, flexible charting helps you spot trends or change in your account.
MarinOne’s Insight module automatically identifies opportunities such as Product A/B Testing in your account with estimates of potential value and easy implementation.
The automation tools in Marin make it easy and efficient to manage Instacart Ads campaigns. The optimization tools help identify optimal levels of spend while MarinOne bidding delivers the best possible performance.
Talk to your account manager today to get your Instacart Ads account linked to MarinOne or reach out to our sales team with any further questions.
Marin Software has been recognized as an Apple Search Ads Partner specializing in campaign management. Apple Search Ads Partners are leading companies skilled in helping Apple Search Ads Advanced customers manage, measure and optimize their campaigns. Marin has been helping digital advertisers get the best performance from their advertising campaigns for almost 15 years and has helped manage and optimize over $40 billion in advertising spend.
Our self-serve MarinOne platform has been helping advertisers manage and optimize their Apple Search Ads campaigns since 2019. In the first quarter of 2020, our client’s Apple Search Ads spend grew by 200% year-over-year, a sign of their success with this advertising channel.
As an Apple Search Ads Partner, Marin will work closely with Apple Search Ads to provide our joint customers with the highest level of support and expertise, including sharing best practices and implementing the latest Apple Search Ads features.
“Apps represent an increasingly important part of the marketing mix for many advertisers, not just for app and game developers,” said Chris Lien, Marin’s Chairman and CEO. “Our customers have seen fantastic results using MarinOne to optimize their Apple Search Ads while coordinating with their other search, social and eCommerce campaigns.”
Paddy Power, one of the most popular betting brands in the UK and Ireland, tested Marin Bidding on their Apple Search Ads campaigns to see if they could improve efficiency and lower CPCs and CPAs while maintaining steady app installs and revenue.
“We tested Marin Bidding on Apple Search Ads and our CPAs came down by 30%. Our CPCs became more manageable and we were able to free up budget to re-invest in additional growth opportunities. We’re thrilled with the results, and we plan to keep using MarinOne Bidding for Apple Search Ads on other lines of business in the future,” noted Anthony Elders, Head of Search, Paddy Power Betfair.
The powerful MarinOne platform integrates with leading mobile measurement solutions including Kochava, Appsflyer, Branch and Singular, as well as traditional measurement solutions like Google Analytics to give advertisers a complete view of their return on investment.
Our optimization tools help identify optimal levels of spend while MarinOne bidding delivers the best possible performance. MarinOne’s Insight module automatically identifies opportunities in your account with estimates of potential value and easy implementation.
Automation tools make it easier and more efficient to manage Apple Search Ads campaigns. Advertisers can manage their Apple Search Ads alongside their Google Universal App Campaigns, making it easy to share insights across publishers.
Click here to get started with Apple Search Ads today.
The search for better performance never stops. To help our customers get the most out their digital marketing dollar we have upgraded our optimization tools. MarinOne Bidding is our newest bidding solution that delivers peak performance, improved accuracy, faster bid calculations and increased scale.
Customers upgrading to MarinOne bidding from the previous version saw a 10-20% performance improvement and bidding times reduced by up to 95%.
MarinOne bidding automatically incorporates over 75+ signals for incredible responsiveness and accuracy across audiences, devices, geos and more. MarinOne Bidding is simple to set up but flexible enough to meet the needs of your business. It is especially well suited for advertisers with third-party revenue tracking and longer sales cycles.
No need to choose, with MarinOne bidding you get all three:
Our existing customers using bidding are being upgraded to MarinOne bidding. If you are a Marin Customer looking to get started with bidding, please connect with your account manager.
If you are interested in learning more about MarinOne bidding getting started with Marin, click here to schedule a conversation.
We are in uncharted waters. The changes from Covid-19 are already widespread and they will be long-lasting. Like many other companies, we at Marin have been dealing with working from home, canceled travel plans and figuring out distance learning. I just got off a conference call with 30 kindergarteners and I have to admit it was pretty amusing.
Most countries are significantly restricting social contact to avoid medical system overload. After the initial shock of these restrictions, things will adjust to the new normal, a dramatically accelerated version of the “Stay at Home Economy” trend.
The first priority needs to be the health and safety of our families, the elderly, and our communities at large. As people adjust to the new routines they've been forced into, they will look to fulfill even more of their needs online. And digital marketing will be on the front lines.
I think there are two questions that, as marketers, we should all be asking of our companies:
You’re probably already seeing the impact in your volumes and conversion rates. You know your business better than we do but obviously travel/hospitality is already heavily impacted. Anything related to events will be similar. Companies offering products that make it easier to stay at home could benefit, including eCommerce, meal delivery, and streaming media. People are less likely to be making purchases that require longer consideration cycles at the moment, so we expect lower volumes and conversion rates in automotive and education. Sectors like financial services are less clear. With interest rates coming down and a recently-volatile stock market, expect a lot of activity in this sector.
Focus on how you can help and protect your community of co-employees and customers, not just shareholders. Review your plans and messaging within and outside your team to ensure that you are being responsible to the business, but not look like you are “taking advantage” of the situation. How would you feel reading about your marketing tactics on the front page?
At Marin, we want to help as much as we can. Our team of experts can support you during this time of uncertainty. As with many companies, we are encouraging employees to work from home to reduce the spread of the virus. We won’t be traveling or meeting in person, but our teams are fully equipped to support you remotely. If you need anything, please reach out to your account manager or click here and let us know what we can do.
Let’s all remember to stay safe and healthy, and to be kinder than necessary as we all try and figure how to adjust to and help in this new world.
