Unifying Search with Performance Media | Benchmark Search Conference 2015
Jon Myers, VP & Managing Director – EMEA
Benchmark Conference, June 2015
Unifying Search with Performance Media
@JonDMyers
Marin At A Glance: 2014
2
Leading Ad Cloud enabling audiences across search, display and social
Note: Annualized spend as of December 31, 2014, based on last month of the year. Gross profit margin is Non-GAAP
$7.2
Billion
Ad Spend Managed
Worldwide
66% US vs 34% Int’l
Revenue Split
29%
Growth
$99.4 Million
in Revenue YoY
The only true
multi-channel platform &
Audience
Marketing
Suite
#1 Ad CloudGlobal leader in search, only independent
vendor to combine search, display and social
through synchronous audiences
36%
of Fortune 100
use Marin
@JonDMyers
Integration between digital marketing discipline
still has a way to go:
How do we remove people
based silos in digital channels?
Can audience data be the glue
which ties together our digital
channels with a focus on the
consumer?
Digital Marketing Manager Censor
Marin Software commissioned independent
market research company Censuswide to
survey 200 digital marketing managers in
October and November 2014. The
respondents all work in companies with an
annual turnover of at least £20 million.
@JonDMyers
The marketing and IT partnership is growing
How can we work with IT to better
surface data from legacy
technologies, which will fuel better
online advertising optimisation?
Over half (54%) of respondents
say they are already working
closely with their IT department,
and one in five (19%) are planning
to do so in future.
@JonDMyers
Increasing Complexity in the Advertising Market
Anytime, Anywhere Access All Brands, Publishers &
Channels
Personalization
Limited Access Mass MarketTop Brands & Agencies
THEN
NOW
@JonDMyers
Search and Social Have Become Go-To Channels
Rapid and
Continuous Growth
Sources: RBC Capital Markets and Advertising Age, “Facebook, Inc.” September 12, 2013, and http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-17-amazing-facebook-stats/and
http://news.magnaglobal.com/ipgmediabrands/press-releases/magna-global-advertising-forecast-2014-ipg-mediabrands.htm ,
Consumer Usage
is Omnipresent
Marketers Are
Embracing
50% of Total
Media Budgets
50% of Marketers
Will Increase
5.7 Billion Google
Searches / Day
1.35 Billion Monthly
Facebook Users
Google / Facebook
= #1 / #2 for ROI
75% See as Critical
for Cross-Channel
@JonDMyers
The Buyer’s Journey is Highly Fragmented
47% of revenue comes from purchases made in more than one day (Google)
65% of revenue comes from purchases made in more than one step (Google)
Search engines and social networks are the top two sources used to research and
inspire purchase decisions (eMarketer)
Sources: Brand Perfect, “Adventures in Retail”
@JonDMyers
Looking at Search and Social Separately Doesn’t Tell the Full Story
Social is more likely to “assist” sales made in other channels
For every Social click resulting in a purchase, there are two clicks assisting another
converting channel
Source: Google http://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/tools/customer-journey-to-online-purchase.html
@JonDMyers
Social Advertising Drives Better Search Performance
44% of Marketers Have Seen Search Performance Improve
Following launch of a Social campaign
Brands Experience a 50% Increase in Search CTR
When their target audience is also exposed to Social ad
Brands Experience a 11% Lift in Brand Searches
If they’re also running FB ads
Consumers Are 2.8x More Likely to Search for Your Brand
If they’ve been exposed your Social ad
@JonDMyers
Customers Who Touch Both Channels Are More Valuable
Search Touches + Social Touches = Better Performance
• 2X higher conversion rate, 2X higher revenue / click than Search only
• 4.5X higher conversion rate, 4X higher revenue / click than Social only
Focus on Acquiring Customers Across Channels
• Focusing on a single channel ignores the customers’ path to conversion
• Focusing on a single channel limits the potential results you can achieve
Google / Bing Click
+ Facebook Click
Facebook
Click Only
Google /Bing
Click Only
3.56% CR
$3.16 RPC
1.88% CR
$1.56 RPC
.76% CR
$.77 RPC
Source: Marin Software’s Combining the Power of Search and Social for Exponential ROI report
@JonDMyers
Female, age 25-35 who has
purchased shoes in the past
Focus on the Customer, Not the Channel
Target Customer
Customer Intention
?? “buy black running shoes”
Social Advertising
• Audience targeting capabilities
• Reach a specific audience based on
demo, behavior, or customer
characteristics
• Use to Push advertising message to
customers
Search Advertising
• Intention targeting capabilities
• Reach customers based on their buying
intentions at a specific moment
in time
• Use to Pull customers into your
advertising message
Female, age 25-35 who has
purchased shoes in the past
@JonDMyers
Search, Social and Display
65% of online revenue comes from purchases with touch points across multiple channels1
Source: Magna Global, December 2014; Magna Global, Programmatic Forecasts, September 2014; Display includes banners, video, display
1. Google Analytics Q4 2012, The Customer Journey to Online Purchase report
SEARCH
is the largest digital ad segment.
SOCIAL
15% of the digital ad
segment with high growth.
DISPLAY
programmatic is the fastest
growing display segment.
MOBILE 47% of digital ad spend expected to be on mobile ad formats by 2019.
@JonDMyers
Use the Strengths of Each Channel
to Reach the Right Customer at the
Right Time
Powering Cross-Channel Revenue Acquisition
Create & Convert Your Most Valuable Audience Segments across Channels
DATA SOURCES PLATFORMS
Google Gemini
Bing Yahoo! Japan
Baidu Yandex
DoubleClick
PubMatic
Rubicon
Open X
Brightroll
Yahoo AX
Microsoft AX
AppNexus
MoPub
Nexage
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Search
Display
Social
@JonDMyers
Capture, build and activate Custom and Tailored Audiences based on search intent, website
behavior, and demographic traits from third-party data sources
Capture
Build
Engage Activate
Target Audience
Cross Channel Audience Activation
@JonDMyers
Audience Segmentation, Optimisation and Reporting
STEP 1:
COLLECT DATA
STEP 2: ANALYSE
INTENT SIGNALS
Audience
Value Map
STEP 3: BUILD
AUDIENCES
STEP 4: CAMPAIGN
MANAGEMENT,
REPORTING &
OPTIMISATION
OutoftheBoxCustomSocial
CRM
Behavioral
Search Intent
Revenue
Lower Intent,
Lower Value
Higher Intent,
Higher Value
High Intent,
High Value
High-value
Prospects
Private Audience
Networks
@JonDMyers
Audiences are built using a combination of different intent signals
High Intent Medium Intent Lower Intent
+ Clicked on branded PPC ad
+ Interested in high-value product
+ Added product to shopping cart
+ Belongs to high-value demographic
+ Recently signed up for promo emails
+ Clicked on mid-value PPC ad
+ Viewed fashion category pages
+ Viewed fashion product page
+ CRM lookalike audience from FB
+ non recent past shoppers
+ Unbranded PPC ad click
+ Viewed home page, left w/o purchase
+ New CRM subscriber
+ Recent in-market data
+ CRM lookalike audience
@JonDMyers
Campaign and Creative Consistency
Creative
Messaging
Contents
• Big, bold product images
• Brand and Product mentions
• Top products
• New offerings
• Strong CTAs
• Dynamic creative
• Time limited offers
• Price breaks
• Strong CTAs
• Pricing information
• Unbranded, high volume terms
• Generic Terms
• Product Info
• Softer CTAs
@JonDMyers
Integrate with leading in-app analytics solutions
Identify desktop users and target them across mobile devices
Target users with premium, global, mobile ad inventory
Cross-Device Targeting and Mobile Attribution
Match users across devices using
blended probabilistic/deterministic model
Cross-Device ID & Targeting
Display in-app and mobile ads
on premium mobile inventory
Serve Targeted Mobile Ads
@JonDMyers
- Worlds Leading Advertising Cloud & Biddable Media Platform
$7.2bn = Twice the size of closest competitors – spend & customer base.
- Leading not just about more spend / customers = being the first to support new publisher products, API updates etc…..
Google’s largest, #1 API partner globally
Benefits of Google relationship…..
Public Company – raised over $120m which has fuelled platform development, product, acquisitions….
In the Past: a Brand reached its audience via TV, radio and print advertising, the market was controlled by Mad-Men style advertising agencies and the consumer was reached through mass-marketing messages.
Today: In addition to TV, radio & print advertising, ad dollars are following the eyes and Brands reach consumers increasingly via search marketing; display advertising; e-commerce; and social media – across mobile devices or laptop/desktops
The strategic role of marketing professionals has changed dramatically as Advertising has undergone a massive disruption. Consumers have shifted their media time away from traditional channels such as television, print, and radio, and towards digital channels such as search, display, video, and social.
These increasingly complex digital channels have become more and more difficult for marketing professionals to manage.
Digital, social and mobile technologies have forever altered the way organizations and marketers need to interact with people.
Search and Social have become our go to channels
First lets take a moment to reflect on why these two channels have become so important to us
By a show of hands, how many people are managing at least one of these channels today? Keep your hands raised if you’re managing both
Well there is a reason why so many of you raised your hands, and why Search and Social have really become our “go to channels” as digital marketers over the past several years.
Fastest growing channels in the digital marketing space with Social at 25% YoY and Search at 16% YoY
Size of the audience – Literally access to billions of potential customers across the globe
Engagement of the audience – Almost 6 billion searches happen in Google every day and 1 billion people use FB once / day. And check newsfeed an average of 14x / day. Also highest CTRs
Measurable – very easy to understand and track the performance of your investments.
When you consider these things, its easy to see why digital marketers consider Google and Facebook the #1 and #2 most important channels for driving ROI and why almost 50% of marketers plan to increase their budgets for these channels this year.
Buyer Journey fragmentation
So how can we explain some of these numbers, and the differences in how the two channels behavior?
Well its easy when you take a step back and consider how a buyer makes a purchase decision today.
As buyers, when we set out to make a purchase, we often use 2, 3 maybe even 10 different sources of information over the course of 20-30 days that span across different channels.
In fact occurring to Google, more than 65% of revenue comes from purchases that involve multiple touchpoints and 47% of revenue comes from purchases that span across several days.
Still, according to eMarketer through all of these different touchpoints along what has become a highly fragmented buyer journey, Search and Social remain the top two most important channels for influencing buying decisions.
http://www.exacttarget.com/blog/20-stats-about-how-social-media-influences-purchasing-decisions/
http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/direct/global-marketers-still-rate-seo-email-marketing-as-tops-for-roi-28385/attachment/econsultancyadestra-channel-roi-ratings-apr2013/
http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Chart.aspx?R=130718&dsNav=Ntk:P_Title|research+and+sources|1|,Ro:5,N:405&Adv=1&SearchTitle=1&All=research+sources
Its no wonder why, according to emarketer Google and FB are considered the #1 and #2 channels by digital marketers. http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/Chart.aspx?R=145069&dsNav=Ntk:basic|roi|1|,Ro:15,N:500-781&kwredirect=n%2cn%2cn%2cn%2cn%2cn
65% of revenue comes from purchase made in more than one step *
Purchases involving 6+ steps have a 30% higher AoV than purchases with one step *
Google Picture
Still despite tall their similarities and parallels, ample evidence supports that Search and Social behave quite differently when we consider how they are used as channels the customer’s buying journey
Google has a great fee resource which I’ve provided a link to below that shows that Social is far more likely to assist other than channels in the conversion path rather than to be the last channel in the path to conversion.
In fact, for every Social click occurs that directly contributes to a conversion, there are two more clicks that occur that contribute to another channel.
So if you’re managing Social media through a vacuum in isolation, you’re likely undervaluing it as a channel and overvaluing other channels. Furthermore, if you look at the performance of these two channels in isolation, you’re really not seeing the big picture of your performance.
We have already seen numerous 3rd party studies that demonstrate the synergies between the two channels when they are run in an integrated manner, particularly how Social advertising is helping to drive incremental lift for Paid Search.
Marketers are more likely to receive brand searches, a better CTR and a better overall performance when they’re running social advertising.
So we really start to see here the ways here your social advertising efforts in particular is assist Search, and help its performance in addition to driving stellar performance on its own.
And not only do we see evidence that the channels can assist each other in driving incremental lift in interest and engagement with your brand, but when we look at this from a customer perspective, we find that those who engage with a brand both through Social and Search are more valuable to you than if they had just engaged with you through one single channel.
Marin recently conducted a study across more than 200 of our Search and Social advertisers and found that audiences who touch both a brand’s Search and Social ads have + 89% higher conversion rate, 367% higher revenue / click than if they had only touched the brand’s Search ad
103% higher conversion rate, 313% higher revenue / click than if they had only touched a brand’s Social ad
So in other words, when a customer touches both your Search and Social ads, they are 1.) more likely to buy, and when they do buy they buy more
And why might this be – Think about your own experience during a purchase decision. Aren’t you more likely to buy and more confident in your buying decision when you’ve gathered information from multiple sources? – Both from recommendations from those you trust and also from your own research?
So if we know that Social and Search help each other to drive incremental performance, and we know that a customer who touches both channels is incrementally more valuable, the question becomes, how can we are marketers target these customers across both channels and measure the performance of these channels in an integrated way?
The next thing you need to do – and this could be arguably the most important thing – is to make sure your strategy is aligned not around the channel, but around the customer.
I think many times we get wrapped into a tunnel vision of what we need to within the context of a specific channel. The keywords, the quality score, the creative, the targeting settings. But at the end of the day, all of these things are secondary to what we really want to be focusing on – Targeting the right customer with the right intentions with the right message.
And to do this, we really have to put the customer first and then as a second step, think about how we can use the targeting strengths of each channel to reach the customer in an integrated way.
Lets go through an example. Social – One of the wonderful things about this channel is the almost infinite ways for you to reach a very specific target audience. If you know that females between 25-35 who have purchased from you in the past have the greatest lifetime value, most social platforms have very accurate ways to reach these types of people on a global scale. The downside with Social is that while you can push your messages to just about any type of potential customer you want, you have no way of knowing what their buying intention is at the time of the impression. For example, I showed you a Facebook ad promoting a new type of car based on your demographics or even your website history, I really have no way of knowing how ready you are to buying the car. In other words I have no way of knowing your buying intentions.
This is where Search comes into play. Why do we love Search? Because its an opportunity for customers to pull in our advertising message based on their buying intentions at the moment in time. There is an awful lot we can tell about the customer in Search by their search query. Where are they in the buying cycle, and what are they looking for? This unique way to reach customers has helped the Search industry grow to $47B. But as valuable as Search is, it still lacks the ability to target customers by who they are, which is where Social comes into play.
So from a targeting, and workflow perspective is how we can reach the type of customer we want to reach not only by who they are, but by what they want. We fail to do this when we manage Social or Search in isolation, but we’re able to accomplish this when we manage in an integrated manner.
So if we really believe in Search and Social as high performing channels, and we know that customers are using both these channels together along a highly fragmented multi step path to conversion – Then the question we are marketers need to begin to start to ask ourselves is not now can we get these channels to perform better, but how can we use the channels together to achieve an overall better performance?
AMS is the most transparent multi-channel advertising solution powered by first-party intent and behavioral data
AMS reflects the inputs of all the possible data Marin can take into account to develop a better picture of your audience, and also the outputs which represents all the different channels for leveraging all the fantastic data that your clients were able to capture.
AMS is the keystone within all this powered by a sophisticated intent and behavioral tracking solution (Marin Smart Pixel), and a demand-side platform with access to all the major display and social ad exchanges
Cross Channel Audience Activation
So how can Marin deliver better ROI for Social advertisers, by using cross channel data? The core underlying technology that powers the cross-channel audience acquisition for Social is our Smart Pixel, a container tag solution that allows us to capture buying signals and lifetime value from people who have visited our website from Search, Social and Display which allows Social advertisers to retarget them with a tailored message to bring them back to their website. Using cross channel data like keyword search and website browsing history, Social advertisers can create sophisticated audiences in Facebook or Twitter in the form of Custom or Tailored audiences. In other words, our Smart Pixel allows Social advertisers to create and target audiences around not just who they might be on Facebook, but what they’re actually interested in buying based on powerful signals picked up outside of Facebook. For example, if you’re an advertiser in the travel industry, selling expensive vacation packages, you might have the suspicion that Facebook users of a certain age range might be most likely to buy. But identifying and targeting people on Facebook who have actually searched for “five start hotels” in the recent past you can actually reach the people who are in market for your vacation package now. This is an extremely powerful value proposition for social advertisers. Using Marin, Social advertisers are able to laser focus their advertising budgets on the Facebook and Twitter audiences and reach social users who not only have the highest buying intent, but the highest lifetime value based on conversion data collected from other channels.
So if we really believe in Search and Social as high performing channels, and we know that customers are using both these channels together along a highly fragmented multi step path to conversion – Then the question we are marketers need to begin to start to ask ourselves is not now can we get these channels to perform better, but how can we use the channels together to achieve an overall better performance?