Background
Nissan is a leading Japanese automaker and the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, with its innovative plug-in electric Nissan Leaf. OMD EMEA supports Nissan’s efforts to increase brand awareness and engagement with paid search ads on Google and Bing. Their goal is to drive qualified visits to the respective Nissan sites in 22 markets across Europe. The OMD EMEA team develops strategy and targets in tandem with Nissan centrally, and ensures local teams execute and optimize the campaigns in adherence to central strategy through their governance program.
Marin’s bidding took on the challenge of implementing a complex, centralized strategy across 22 local markets and was able to drive significant conversion growth while lowering our cost per conversion.
Challenge
The central challenge for the Nissan and OMD EMEA teams has always been to strike a fine balance between the centralized strategic big picture, and the nuanced local level optimization. In addition to ensuring local search managers align with the centralized strategy, reporting, and optimization approach, there is the additional pressure of delivering efficiencies in a highly competitive landscape while expanding Nissan’s presence based on tight visibility targets.
The OMD local markets needed a tool that would enable them to deliver against seemingly conflicting targets—efficiency and visibility—by managing highly complex and expanded paid search accounts.
The Approach
Utilizing Marin’s centralized reporting capabilities, the OMD EMEA team tested Marin’s algorithmic bidding on a select number of accounts and was able to discern a positive effect of algorithmic versus manual bidding. Marin’s algorithmic solution proved versatile enough to support different targets for different car models and user intent signals, while being intelligent enough to deliver real-world performance improvements.
Based on the initial tests, OMD EMEA in collaboration with Marin worked on a comprehensive bidding strategy aligned with Nissan’s strategy and applicable across all 22 markets.
The team started by mapping all of its search campaigns in different Marin bidding folders by car segment and campaign objective. The folders were set to preview mode with a cost-per-lead (CPL) objective in order to assess the performance impact before the launch. OMD and Nissan were able to see the bids that Marin calculated and review suggested changes.
During that time, the central teams in charge of the project followed progress, market by market, with the help of the Marin Customer Success team and regularly generated bidding insight reports. Once the local markets and the central team were happy with the bidding setup, the folders were set to push bids to the publisher.
The Results
Three months after the bidding strategies were turned on EMEA wide, the performance teams saw conversions increase by 25%, while cost per conversion fell by 20%.
The central team and local markets are now cumulatively saving 3,500 hours per year managing bids.
Arguably the biggest innovation the paid search industry has seen in the past decade is the advent of Smart Bidding, Google’s automated bidding solution. I remember when I first entered the industry as an Account Coordinator… Ah, the good (or bad?) old days. A majority of my time was spent manually updating CPC bids for every keyword in my client’s Google and Bing Ad accounts. I would analyze how each campaign was pacing toward my client’s KPI and calculate new bids multiple times a week.
Enter Google’s tROAS and tCPA smart bidding strategies. I remember my Google account reps encouraging my team to test these automated strategies and how skeptical we all were. The only automated bidding we had heard of in the past was through Marin! But as the years went by and Google’s automation won more and more bidding tests, Smart Bidding became the norm.
Now manual bidding is a thing of the past – manual CPC isn’t even an option anymore. And what paid search marketer isn’t relieved to be freed of the tedious tasks associated with manual bidding?
These publisher bidding strategies are great… but they’re an incomplete solution. What if you want budget pacing, not just ROAS or CPA, to be considered in bidding decisions? Can you ask Google’s algorithm to do that? Not without a complex custom script… and I certainly don’t know how to code.
Managing budget pacing still requires manual intervention – that is unless you use Marin! Read on to understand some of the ways Marin makes smart bidding even better.
Manage everything in one place
Jumping across publisher tools can be time-consuming and fragment your workflows and data. With Marin, all your different campaigns across Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more are unified in one UI.
Marin unifies publisher data from tools like Google and Microsoft ads with backend data from tracking solutions like Google Analytics. We even have our own tracking solution, Marin Attribution, which is a more straightforward alternative to Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
All that data comes together in our interactive, customizable reporting grids. From campaigns, all the way down to individual keywords, front-end metrics – like costs and clicks – are married to backend metrics – like conversions and revenue – and attributed to the correct source. You can even create your own custom columns with the calculations that matter most to you. That means no more spreadsheets.
Transitioning your reporting and analysis from an Excel grid to the Marin grid eliminates the need for any manual data wrangling, saving time and improving data accuracy. Check out how easy it is to analyze performance in Marin.
Marin makes it easier than ever to analyze cross-channel performance and clearly determine what is working well and what needs attention. If you decide to take any action based on that analysis, Marin makes that process easier than ever, too.
Edit smart bidding settings across publishers
After using Marin’s reporting grid to determine what’s working and what’s not, you can use our multi-edit functionality to make changes. Update your smart bidding settings like strategy, target, bid cap, and more in Marin and avoid wasting time hopping between unintuitive publisher UIs.
Maximize ROAS with Dynamic Allocation
If you find yourself grappling with questions of how much you should spend on each of your campaigns, let Marin solve them for you. Our budget allocation solution harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible across campaigns and channels.
It all starts with your goals. First, you’ll meet with your Marin team to discuss your KPI targets and spend goals. Next, you’ll group your campaigns into different spend groups. Some examples of typical spend groups are brand, non-brand, retargeting, and prospecting.
Marin’s AI will take it from there. It will analyze how each of your campaigns is currently pacing toward your KPIs and review impression share metrics to determine if there is more room for a campaign to spend in the SERP or if that campaign is already dominating. It’ll then allocate your budget across all the campaigns in the given bucket based on each campaign’s potential.
You can either auto-apply Marin’s budget recommendations, or review them in the Marin app and apply them manually as you see fit. Manage it all in Marin’s budget pacing dashboard, which showcases not only how your budget groups are pacing toward spend goals, but revenue and ROAS trends as well.
Get unbiased recommendations for improvement
The publishers all provide recommendations to improve performance. But if you look closely, these recommendations always seem to lead to you spending more money on ads — not necessarily getting you any closer to hitting your KPI targets. Marin’s recommendation engine is free from publisher bias and has complete context on how all of your campaigns are doing across your customer lifecycle. This makes it more accurate than Google or Bing’s recommendations. And just like Google’s recommendations, they can be applied with one click.
In the modern paid media landscape, maintaining independence from domineering publisher tools is more valuable than ever. If our blog hasn’t convinced you of that yet, Marin’s unbiased recommendations will.
Say goodbye to publisher walled gardens
If you’re only using publisher tools for paid search media buying, you're limiting your marketing program. Marin can help you save time and improve your ROAS or CPA in countless ways. The best part? Marin is completely customizable. Unlike the publisher tools' one-size-fits-all approach, we can adapt our software to your business’s specific needs. Share your struggles with a Marin rep today and learn what we can do to help!
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If you’re still unsure what Marin can do for you, see some of our favorite features in action.
