40% reduction in time spent on reporting and campaign management
Increased conversions by 11%
SBoosted overall revenue by 20%
Century Novelty, party supplier since 1951
Founded in 1951, Century Novelty offers an extensive selection of party favors, supplies, and decorations for nearly every occasion. Started as a retail store outside of Detroit, Century Novelty became a web-only business in 2004.
To see such a sharp decrease in costs was amazing, as we’ve been increasing our spend on paid search by 50% a year every year – and with Marin we not only cut spending by over 60%, but at the same time increased revenues 20%. We’re blown away at the power
of Marin Software.
Ian MacDonald
VP and General Manager at Century Novelty
Century Novelties paid search programs were getting too large and very complicated
Century Novelty derives over 80% of its revenues directly from paid and organic search, so getting search engine marketing right is crucial to the company’s bottomline. Century Novelty has been using paid search for eight years, making it one of the first retailers to experiment with SEM. Paid search helps Century Novelty attract first-time customers, who are crucial in the party supply industry, where “every customer is a new customer,” said Ian MacDonald, VP and General Manager of Century Novelty. Often, customers make a single purchase for a standalone event, so Century Novelty must use every tool at its disposal to attract new customers on an ongoing basis.
Paid search has delivered impressive results for Century Novelty. Growing its paid search spend 50% a year on average since it began its SEM program, the company has grown overall revenues by 20% a year, every year. But Century Novelty soon realized its paid search program, which today encompasses more than 45,000 keywords, was becoming too large and complex to manage, measure, and optimize with the tools it had been using for the past few years. Century Novelty needed a sophisticated paid search management application that would enable it to accelerate the growth of search-driven revenues, while at the same time continuing to optimize its current SEM program.
Setting granular ROI goals for bid management paid off well for Century Novelty
After a comprehensive review of the paid search management applications on the market, Century Novelty chose Marin Software based on the strength of its robust technology, cutting-edge features, and expert client services team. In addition, Century Novelty chose Marin Software for its easy-to-use interface, cross-publisher automated bidding platform, and sophisticated analytics features. In particular, Century Novelty was impressed with the ability to set granular ROI goals for bid management that take into account the true cost of goods sold at the keyword, ad group, and campaign level, as well as the ability to easily replicate campaigns across all publishers. Century Novelty also liked Marin’s automated reporting features that allow its search marketing team to get an accurate picture of daily ROI and profit margin, comparing results across publishers from one integrated interface.
SEM costs cut by 62%
Marin Software has delivered impressive results to Century Novelty. Due to streamlined bidding across all three publishers, optimized bidding based on granular and true-cost ROI goals, automated reporting and analytics, and increased visibility into campaign effectiveness, Century Novelty was able to decrease spending on paid search by 62% – while at the same time increasing conversion by 11% and overall revenues by 20%.
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White paper
Marketing Data Pipelines: Turning Data Into Insights
Wrangling and making sense of all your marketing data is hard. For longer than a decade, we’ve been helping companies solve some pretty complex marketing data challenges – and we’ve compiled some of the knowledge we’ve gained over the years into a handy guide. The tl;dr? It’s complicated, but with the right tools, namely a marketing data pipeline (MDP), it doesn’t have to be hard! In this guide we break it all down to help you make sense of it, including breaking down:
What an MDP is
The stages of MDP maturity
Some of the key challenges with building an MDP
How to tell if you need an MDP
How to get started
And so much more!
Check out the report to learn all about corralling your marketing data today!
Working in retail media is challenging, fast-paced, and certainly never boring. It’s one of the most competitive spaces for media buyers to operate in. You have to constantly keep your finger on the pulse of industry trends and optimize campaigns daily based on the ever-changing marketplace.
We feel your pain. And we know you’re good at your job. But everyone could use a little help from AI these days! No matter what type of product you sell, Marin can make your life easier.
Our platform was built by retail media marketers, for retail media marketers, because a niche industry requires a specialized solution. We also built Marin to be flexible and customizable so it can meet each user's unique needs. Here are five ways Marin can help you work less and smash your performance goals.
1. Let AI Handle Budget Allocation
Most retail media marketers manage many campaigns in different accounts and channels, and publisher walled-gardens can make it difficult to deploy automation across those channels. Marin was built to solve this problem. Marin’s dynamic budget allocation harnesses the power of AI to ensure your budget is distributed as efficiently as possible, across all your campaigns.
All you have to do is map each group of campaigns with a shared budget to a Strategy and set the spend target for the month or quarter. Then let us know what your goals are - ROAS, conversion volume, impression share, etc. Marin will take it from there.
By comparing each campaign’s performance against your KPI targets and analyzing impression share metrics to determine which campaigns have incremental room to drive more conversions, Marin will intelligently allocate your budget across all your campaigns in Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Meta, LinkedIn, and more. Goodbye, budget pacing spreadsheets!
The beauty of this solution lies in its customizability. We’ll start by meeting with your team and discussing your current budgeting workflow and goals. Then, your Marin team will customize the automation to meet your needs. You just sit back, relax, and watch your campaigns meet those spend targets every month.
2. Identify opportunities for growth
As a busy digital marketer, one of the worst feelings is knowing that there are opportunities to improve performance but not having the time to act on them. Between investigating the next steps and building bulk sheets, even the simplest optimization initiative ends up taking hours. But with Marin, you can optimize your accounts in seconds.
Marin runs hundreds of daily checks on every account linked to our platform and identifies opportunities for growth. From ad copy improvements to changes to bidding targets to improving account structure, Marin covers the basics for you so you can focus on high-level strategy. Recommendations can be applied with one click, so no manual work is needed to act on your Insights.
For example, the above Insight recommends that our client move their top-performing ads into individual dedicated ad groups. This will help them manage the bid for that specific product independently, which makes sense since it's driving so much volume. To act on this recommendation, they simply need to click ‘Apply Changes.’ Marin will then build the new ad groups and pause the ad in the old group for them. It’s that easy!
See it in action:
3. Auto-create ads based on your product feed
Once you link your product feed to Marin, there are countless ways to apply automation based on it. For example, Marin can automatically create a new ad every time a new product is added to your feed. This is extremely helpful for brands that continuously create new products and want Shopping Ad coverage over every product. Rather than spending time every day checking your feed for new products and creating ads for them, automate that tedious process with Marin.
And speaking of shopping ads…
5. Manage all your shopping ads in one place
Marin pulls all your Google, Microsoft, and Amazon shopping ads into one unified view and organizes them by SKU. Understand your top-performing SKUs across channels and compare the performance of different channels for the same SKU to see what's working and what's not.
Create and edit shopping ads with our multi-edit grids and bulk creation tool. No more jumping from one publisher tool to another. Manage it all in one Marin Grid. And speaking of all-in-one grids…
5. Harness the power of data unification
The value of using Marin to clean, unify, and visualize all your cross-channel data cannot be overstated. Our clients often describe Marin as a ‘mission control center.’ We integrate with all the major publishers and backend sources of truth. You can link as many different tracking sources as you want, from Google Analytics to Tealium to Marin’s own first-party tracking solution. Marin supports all the major ad formats like sponsored products, sponsored brands, Amazon DSP, and more.
Look how easy it is to link all your data sources:
Marin also solves the challenge of tracking conversions that start on other ad platforms but end on Amazon. For example, lots of retail media marketers include sitelinks to ‘buy on Amazon’ in their paid search ads. Additionally, marketers may drive traffic from ads on Meta to an Amazon storefront. If you’re just using the Amazon Ads UI for reporting, there’s no way to attribute those conversions back to their original source. Marin’s cross-channel Amazon Attribution solves that problem. You can see Amazon conversions attributed to the paid search or social campaign that drove the conversion right in the Marin UI.
With all your data unified and attributed down to the keyword/product level, reporting on performance has never been easier. Create saved views in our grids to capture data you reference often, or build a custom dashboard using Marin’s data visualization tools. Whether you’re an agency team reporting to a client or a brand reporting marketing performance to upper management, you’ll never have to manually wrangle your data again.
“Marin automates all of our reporting, performance monitoring, and optimization, saving us countless hours per week so we can spend more time focusing on strategy as we expand our presence globally.”
- Philip Ascott, Director of Digital at YOTEL
Check out how quickly you can respond to an ad hoc data request with Marin:
And there you have it! These are just 5 of the countless ways Marin improves the lives of retail media marketers. And don’t just take it from me, check out our case studies where real retail clients have shared their Marin success stories.
The thing that makes Marin more powerful than other marketing automation tools is its customizability. Our technical team will tailor the platform to your needs, and that starts at the very beginning, when you schedule a customized demo with us. We look forward to chatting with you!
PrettyLittleThing Increases App Downloads by 22% with Apple Search Ads and Marin Bidding
Background
PrettyLittleThing is a fast-growing UK-based fashion e-commerce brand primarily aimed at providing trendy, unique clothing to 16 to 24-year-old women. Boohoo Group owns this company that services twelve different international markets.
They are continually expanding their global reach and with successful digital marketing strategies like the one outlined below, they are proving to have the revenue and growth to support this worldwide footprint. The company's main headquarters are in Manchester, with showrooms in London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Miami.