Background
Storable is the leading technology provider for the $38 billion self-storage industry. They create technology products that empower self-storage facility owners and operators to do more by giving them the tools they need to maximize their business growth and manage their day-to-day tasks seamlessly.
Some of those tools include facility management software, website and marketing tools, search aggregators, tenant insurance tools, and payment processing services — all of which are centered around self-storage. Storable has won more awards than any other self-storage company, and over 25,000 storage facilities across the globe use the Storable technology — from large scale operations to small “mom and pop” shops.
To have a bespoke solution built for us — from a publicly traded company — is nearly unheard of. I am truly grateful. I’m happy to say that Storable is a Marin customer, and I hope we’ll remain one for many years to come.
Challenge
The Storable team was facing two separate but related challenges. First, they were looking for a bidding solution that would kick off daily at a custom time and could handle planned bidding requirements. Second, because of their extended sales funnel and custom, in-house solution for calculating predicted revenue, they required a full funnel bidding solution that could leverage multiple inputs.
Initial Challenge
Storable decided to test out Marin’s bidding solution against a competitor to see which one offered better performance to meet their unique needs. The competitor they selected, QuanticMind, promised to deliver a custom query that would accommodate both of Storable’s most important inputs: net present value (NPV) revenue and monthly move-in rate (MIR) data.
Storable also requested that the Marin Bidding kick-off times better align with the time that their daily revenue finishes processing.
Secondary Challenge
Additionally, Storable has an extended funnel and leverages a custom, in-house solution to calculate projected revenue in various stages of the customer journey. Because of their complex integration, they require a bid optimization solution that can both integrate their custom data as well as bid using multiple inputs, the most important of which include daily NPV revenue and monthly MIR data.
Solution
In response to Storable’s initial challenge, Marin updated bidding times and delivered superior performance over QuanticMind, which allowed Marin the opportunity to move the relationship with Storable forward and test out additional optimization options.
Once these concerns were resolved, Marin was able to custom build a full-funnel solution for Storable that utilized both MIR and NPV revenue to determine bids. Every day, Storable sends Marin a file of expected conversions and expected revenue. Marin then processes the file and uses these predictions to update bids to target full-funnel values.
Marin’s custom solution includes a bid multiplier based on predicted revenue; this way, keywords that drive relatively more revenue, via move-ins, are valued more than keywords that drive an equal amount of upper-funnel conversions.
Results
At the end of Storable’s bidding test, they stated that QuanticMind had not even come close to delivering on the promised full-funnel solution, nor were they able to provide flexibility to accommodate Storable’s unique needs.
Marin, on the other hand, was able to deliver a 5.4% performance lift in Google MIR and a 42.9% lift in Bing MIR compared to QuanticMind, in addition to offering Storable the world-class support, service, and solutions the Marin team is known for.
- 5.4% lift in Google MIR and a 42.9% lift in Bing MIR, compared to QuanticMind
- 21.5% lift in Google margin and a 46.9% lift in Bing margin
- ROAS of 1.21 for Google and 1.47 for Bing, compared to 1.14 and 1.43 with QuanticMind
Additionally, since switching to full-funnel bidding, Storable has seen an 8% increase in NPV ROAS and a 13% increase in revenue/conversion.
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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