What are the Advantages of Marin Software?

If you are already using Google Adwords day-to-day you will know how time consuming it can be to make constant updates to keyword bids, changes to ad copy and how clumsy reporting can be, especially if you are having to report across multiple account and platforms.

It can also be worrying when your accounts are underperforming and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason or a simple solution to improve performance.

Marin does it all in one platform – with a little bit of setup and monitoring you can automate the majority of your “day-to-day” optimisations 24/7 and increase your campaign performance by up to 30%*

Once the bidding and intricate adjustments are being handled by Marin, you’ll have much more free time to concentrate on the account strategy, keyword research, creating ads and maximising the opportunities within your search space.

Setting Up Bidding Rules In Marin

Marin for search has a few options for bidding rules that will work for various campaign goals.

• If you are selling products, you can set financial goals including target margin, ROI or ROAS.

• If Lead generation is your thing you can set a Cost-per-Lead target.

• If you are looking at the overall visibility of your brand, product or service then you can set a target position (or range) in search results.

Marin will look at these rules and use even a small amount of historical data to try to identify an opportunity to hit your targets or try to bid to your specified position. All of these rules can be set to ‘preview’ and left to run – this will give you an idea of what you might get without affecting your live campaigns.

What If Marin Raises My Bids Too High?

Don’t worry – any bidding options within Marin come with a “Bid Cap” option so you can limit how high your bids will go. In my experience you shouldn’t set these limits too conservatively – Marin is very good at finding Leads – sometimes a seemingly “high” bid on a keyword can be the difference between 1 and 10 conversions.

There is also a “Boost” which will increase bids by a specific maximum percentage on top of the other bidding rules – be careful though – setting this too high can result in rules not meeting targets.

What Else Can Marin Do?

If you spend a lot of time manually adjusting bids, keeping a constant eye on campaign performance, creating new keywords lists, or new campaigns then Marin can save you a LOT of time.

Rules and email alerts can be set up to let you know if something is wrong. Campaign spending too much? ALERT. Ad has 0 Impressions? ALERT. Bounce Rate suddenly spikes? ALERT.

As well as bidding rules, Marin also has some other fantastic features:

The keyword editor allows you to create and change keyword lists easily. You can upload a CSV list of keywords and make bulk changes in a single account, or across ALL accounts simultaneously. This will save you hours of manually adding keywords. Even if you already bulk update keywords, you’ll be doing it on an account-by-account basis – you can still save plenty of time.

Marin’s reporting function is also cross-account. You can produce a single report across all paid search platforms in one place. You can create reports in CSV, PDF or Web Query format with data being split by day, week, month or year. Reports can be scheduled to run as often as you need them and sent straight to your inbox.

If you are using Bing then Smart Sync could be invaluable to you. Marin will look at all of the changes you make to your Google Adwords Campaigns and automatically apply them to Bing Ads. You can do this for all, or just some of your campaigns so you won’t have to make changes again and again.

Can Marin Tell Me How Much More I Could Be Spending?

Yes, it can. Marin has a fantastic Forecasting tool that allows you to look at your account as a whole, or a sub-set of Campaigns and see what additional budgets might realistically help you to achieve.

Marin uses historical information from your accounts to do this so you can’t just login and do this immediately. As with all things in paid search, it’s all about the data you have. Marin will need time to collect campaign data before you can do this sort of analysis but if you do use it, it will help you with that age-old question you probably always get from clients – “How many conversions could you get with an extra £1,000 to spend?”.

What do we think?

All in all, we’re really impressed with Marin. Spending the time learning all about the software and using it with various clients has really increased the effectiveness and efficiency of our PPC Team.

The diagram below shows a month-on-month comparison of Leads vs. Cost-Per-Lead in one of our client’s accounts. We’ve added notes to show each step we took in adding specific rules each month.

The account had already been performing well post-Marin, but once we added the bidding rules and strategy through Marin performance grew immediately with CPL reducing month-on-month. The account continues to grow with adjustments to rules happening on an as-needed basis.

We’re now able to concentrate much more on the strategy behind our clients Paid Search campaigns, while Marin takes care of round the clock bid adjustments and helps us to perform other bulky work in a much shorter time frame.

Using sophisticated algorithms it is also able to help us find Leads/Sales for our clients that otherwise may have been lost had we not had Marin as part of our team.

Marin has now become a must-have part of our PPC Account Management package.