Ads API Profile: Marin Software Provides Audience Segmentation Across Facebook and Paid Search

Facebook’s performance advertising system lets buyers target users based on identity, location, interests, and Facebook connections, but it doesn’t provide the control to utilize these targeting parameters on a large scale. To allow companies to build more powerful tools for designing and managing ads, Facebook released an Ads API last fall. One company offering a tool which make it easy to create segment-targeted ads and optimize for specific metrics is Marin Software. The company comes from having developed search marketing software, and does a notable job providing flexible options for businesses on Facebook who also rely on search traffic. Here's a closer look. Marin Software’s product is designed to save time and maximize returns for enterprise class marketers. Those who license the browser-based tool can create, manage, and track Facebook ads alongside paid search campaigns on a large scale. Users can integrate the tool with other analytics programs, utilize algorithmic bidding, monitor the paths consumers take to conversion, and use advanced segmenting options to target very specific audiences. Company Profile Marin Software was founded in 2006 as a paid search management application developer, building tools for advertisers and agencies spending over $100,000 a month on marketing. While offering some planned services and best practices to help its 200 current clients maximize the value of the tool, it doesn't actually manage any campaigns itself. Upon the release of the ads API, Marin Software assigned some its 130 employees to develop competencies around Facebook ads. This summer, Marin Software entered the social network advertising arena by adding Facebook ad management capabilities to its tool. A dozen clients,including advertisers Education Connection and Macy’s, and agencies Red Bricks Media and Razorfish, are on track to purchase $3 million a year in Facebook ads and track 15 billion impressions through the tool. Clients are charged a percentage based on their total spend volume: 4.5% on $100,000 to $250,000 per month down to 2% on anything over $2 million per month plus prior tier percentages. Marin maintains its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in New York, Chicago, London, and Singapore. The company has raised a total of $33.5 million in rounds led by Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures, with its most recent Series D round also joined by Focus Ventures, Amicus Capital, and Triangle Peak Partners. Segmentation, Optimization and the Road to Conversion Marin Software’s browser-based tool opens to a dashboard in which users can see individual and aggregated graphs and charts of performance statistics from Facebook ads and paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. The ability to see which channel is providing the lowest cost per click helps users determine where to allocate their spend. Different ad variations from across channels can be assembled into groups to allow users to collectively track all their ads linking to a certain product, targeted at a specific region or interest group, or that use a certain creative. For busy managers who don’t want to constantly monitor all their ads, users can manage by exception. Filters allow users to focus on ads and campaigns that need attention, such as only showing those with negative click-through-rate changes. Universal search quickly locates specific ads or campaigns, and a find and replace feature facilitates making edits to multiple ad creatives simultaneously. One-time and recurring reports in categories like traffic/cost or gross profit can be easily generated, customized, and formatted. Specialized conversion/revenue reports can be made to track different business types like hotels, lead generation, phone or email marketing, reservations, and commerce. They can be branded with a company logo, exported to PDF or Excel, or hosted at a URL to allow users to import updates to their analytics whenever they want. The tool can also be integrated with analytics systems like Omniture, Coremetrics, Dart, and Atlas. One of the most innovative features of Marin Software is the ability to optimize bidding based on your business model. Performance marketers can optimize for margin, those looking to generate leads can minimize cost per lead, and e-commerce businesses can optimize for net margin. Users can even optimize for custom conversion types such as capturing an email address. Soon, users will be able to optimize for Facebook-specific conversion types such as visiting a Page or viewing a Facebook video. To keep each ad fresh, users can enable dynamic creative rotation based on time intervals, or decreases in CTR or impressions. For example, a new image or headline could be rotated into your existing targeting parameters every five days or when CTR slips more that 20%. Marin Software’s audience segmentation feature allows users to take an ad or ad group’s audience and divide it into many targets. For instance, an ad aimed at males who like “Hiking” could be segmented into five age buckets and five different states, instantly creating 25 different targets for a single headline, body, image and destination URL. Multivariate testing can be performed and monitored in this way, and spend can be allocated to the targets with the highest conversion rate or revenue. One of the biggest advantages of managing paid search and social network marketing in the same system is the ability to accurately divide spend for the highest ROI. Since Facebook is rarely the last click before a purchase, you can use Marin Software to find out where Facebook is in the funnel. The Paths tab shows the sequence of channels a customer took to make their purchase, such as visiting a company’s Facebook Page, then performing a Google search and clicking on that company’s ad, leading them to convert on the website. Without this feature, despite the Facebook Page swaying the customer’s opinion, you wouldn’t know Facebook had anything to do with the conversion. The Paths tab also reveals insights such as users who visit Facebook then click a search ad spend more per conversion than those who only click an ad. Marin Software is strong where many other ads API tools aren’t. Its audience segmentation, conversion-based bidding, dynamic ad rotation, and analytics are all high quality. While it isn’t as good at producing thousands of ad creative variations as Techlightenment’s Alchemy, the ability to see Facebook ad spend in the context of search marketing campaigns gives users the big picture necessary to optimize returns efficiently. Ads API Spend Will Grow Alongside The Tools Marin Software’s VP of Marketing & Partnerships Matt Lawson believes the ads API industry will grow swiftly over the next few years. As Facebook enhances the functionality of the ads platform, “advertisers will get better ROI and they will shift more dollars to the Facebook channel.” Similar to how spend increased on Google search ads as optimization and analytics tools were released, Lawson sees the same thing happening as Facebook ads API tools develop. Once the allocations between social network and paid search marketing level out, advertisers will need to optimize across channels. “People are interacting with more ads in different mediums and channels – and [Marin Software is] finding what the key levers are to pull.” One pain point for Marin Software’s clients has been around Facebook’s ad creative approval process. Creative rotation is delayed and the edited ad is pulled as Facebook approves an ad’s new image. This is especially frustrating since image approval takes much longer than text approval in paid search. “Hopefully in the future Facebook will allow us to keep an old ad up and running until the new one is approved.” Lawson expects that improved day-parting, a feature requested by many ads API tool clients, will be integrated into the platform in the near future. While Marin Software has some ways around the current lack of functionality, he thinks a platform side solution would result in more consistency in ad inventory and a more uniform experience for Facebook users. While considerably newer than others in the emerging Facebook Ads API industry, like TBG Digital, Marin Software will continue to provide a tool enabling a holistic approach to search and social network advertising.

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Ads API Profile: Marin Software Provides Audience Segmentation Across Facebook and Paid Search

Josh Constine

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