Background
Lucid Software is the parent company of two cloud-based visual workspace applications, Lucidchart and Lucidpress. Lucidchart combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation, while Lucidpress is used to create brochures, flyers, newsletters, business cards, posters, magazines and presentations. Combined, they are utilized in over 180 countries by more than 27 million users worldwide.
Since using Marin Bidding, we’ve been able to dramatically improve our acquisition efforts. Not only have we been able to garner more qualified conversions, using Marin has freed up time previously spent managing individual keyword bids, to allow our team to work on more strategic initiatives.
Challenge
In the past, the Lucid team had been optimizing their bidding using only manual techniques. Managing over 30,000 keywords, and given the dynamic nature of Google’s auctions, they found that an appropriate bid can often be a moving target that’s challenging to reach at scale when using manual bidding. As such, they were interested in leveraging an automated bidding solution that would take the heavy lifting and guesswork out of setting bids to meet their performance goals.
Solution
The Lucid team decided to test out Marin Bidding in order to increase traffic and boost conversions with the aim of sustaining the company’s rapid growth. What initially proved to be really helpful was Marin’s ability to apply the same conversion type across all channels within the same workflow, versus manually implementing by individual channels. This made it possible for the team to quickly onboard their Bing campaigns onto Marin Bidding, alongside their Google campaigns.
The Marin Software team also recommended that they leverage Marin Bidding’s Custom Modifiers, which automatically assigns bid values based on factors outside of the auction, increasing or decreasing bids based on the criteria specified by the advertiser. In this case, the team set up custom modifiers to adjust by conversion type–so whether a user signed up for a free trial, paid for an individual product, or registered for the enterprise version, Marin was able to detect which keywords were driving high-value actions and boosted the bid for those keywords automatically.
But the power of Marin Bidding wasn’t only limited to sales — the tools also helped the team in other unexpected ways. Lucid found that Marin’s folders provided a cohesive way to stay better organized than with Google’s native AdWords tool, by being able to bucket multiple campaigns and ad groups with the same performance model together. This was especially useful given the fact that Lucid offers its services in 10+ languages, and each language incorporates different KPIs and campaign frameworks, so an easy way to segment campaigns by performance data provided the team with clear, actionable information for better decision-making.
The team also found that onboarding external revenue data was much more seamless in Marin than in Google, which limits you to one revenue value per day. Lucid’s sales cycle is longer than the average business and the paths-to-purchase vary depending on the user-level, so a flexible revenue management framework was important to them. Marin provided a data passback avenue and other connectors to easily integrate with Lucid’s data warehouse, and as a result, Lucid found it easier to analyze customer lifetime value.
“Unlike Google’s bidding algorithms, Marin Bidding is far more customizable to our business needs and can be applied across multiple ad publishers. We’re able to easily upload offline conversion data that can be modified to account for a longer sales cycle. Bidding folders allow us to combine similarly performing groups regardless of their campaign or publisher. Custom modifiers allow us to layer custom business goals on top of traditional bidding strategies” said Mallory Reese, Performance Marketing Manager at Lucid Software.
Overall, Marin proved itself to be a strategic partner to Lucid Software–staying adaptable, experimenting with different approaches, and finding custom solutions to meet the needs of Lucid’s business.
Results
With Marin Bidding, Lucid Software was able to witness impressive growth while hitting key company goals for their search marketing campaigns:
- 20% increase in registrations
- 10% increase in ROAS
- 15% decrease in cost
- An average time-savings of 6 hours per week
Upon implementing Custom Modifiers to their search marketing campaigns, the team also saw an incremental lift of 10% in registrations.
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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