66% rise in new subscriptions through video ad campaigns
12% lower cost per subscription than through the static image format
72% lower CPC for video ad format than static image
Authoritative Insight and Analysis on World Affairs
The Economist, a weekly newspaper established in 1843, offers authoritative insight and analysis on world affairs, politics, business, finance, science, technology, and the connections between them. Available across print and digital, online, and via a range of apps, The Economist has a global reach and is enjoyed by readers all over the world.
The Goal: Drive More Subscriptions
For this campaign, The Economist’s key objective was to increase the number of subscriptions to its newspaper across 24 countries, including the UK and the US. The team also needed to keep the average cost of subscriptions under a set level using Marin Social’s campaign management tools.
Meeting Demand with Facebook Video Campaigns
The Economist saw the social demand for authoritative insights and opinions on international affairs in a year rich with events of global significance, such as Brexit and the American elections. To drive subscriptions in a cost-efficient way, The Economist applied a range of retargeting strategies on Facebook.
By retargeting people on social media who had already interacted with the brand, The Economist leveraged two specific ad types—Facebook link posts and animated video ads—to engage their readers and encourage them to subscribe. Performance over the time revealed that video ads had a positive effect on engagement rates, with a CTR of 1.24% on video ads compared to a CTR of 0.51% on link posts. Using animations of the weekly print edition cover, along with other editorial videos including KAL Cartoons, The Economist utilized content to drive engagement and encourage purchase consideration among its social audience.
To manage the complexity of wide regional targeting and tight cost per subscription requirements, The Economist used Marin Software optimization rules to ensure cost-efficiency of new subscriptions. Results showed that different videos sparked different levels of interest in different markets. Therefore, through the Marin Social platform, optimization rules were set up to automatically optimize video ad units relative to regional response rates and key performance indicators.
The managed rules increased the reach of video ad units through automated bid management in strong-performing markets and paused under-performing video ad units in other markets. This strategy delivered the maximum number of subscriptions within a target cost per acquisition.
Definitive Results
Between September and December 2016, Facebook video ad campaigns delivered strong results:
66% rise in new subscriptions through video ad campaigns
12% lower cost per subscription than through the static image format
72% lower CPC for video ad format than static image
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White paper
PPC for B2B: a Performance Marketing Survey Report for 2023
To help you stay on the leading edge of performance marketing, we surveyed over 300 B2B marketers to uncover actionable insights that will help you improve the performance of your PPC investment. Through a Marin and LinkedIn partnership, we sought out to understand what B2B marketers face right now and how they are dealing with a complicated market. Read the full report to get a better understanding of how B2B marketers are changing their approach this year.
What You'll Learn from the Report:
How budgets have changed through the years 2020 to 2023 and how budgeting complexities affect the work of advertisers this year.
What challenges are most prevalent this year and how other marketers like you are adapting.
The critical role audience targeting plays in your success, especially during a recession, and some interesting trends relating to targeting techniques.
The types of content and campaign management techniques are currently helping advertisers move buyers through the sales funnel.
What paid social or PPC channels are providing the best ROAS or conversions for B2B right now.
The limitations of smart bidding and why your paid search campaigns deserve more
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.
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.