Background
Nautilus is a worldwide manufacturer of fitness equipment brands including Bowflex®, Nautilus®, Schwinn®, Universal®, and Octane Fitness®, designed to meet the needs of any fitness level. Their products are sold through four diverse channels—direct to consumer, retail, commercial/specialty, and international.
Our Managed Services Team at Marin is top-notch! They are a breath of fresh air. The team provides our company the day-to-day, hands-on management to help us with nuances of multifaceted campaigns. They come to the table with ideas, efficiencies, and strategy. We’re excited for the future as we continue to grow our campaigns with the team at Marin.
Business Challenge
Nautilus was previously utilizing an agency that used their own ad accounts to fulfill Nautilus campaigns on Facebook. As a result, the agency “owned” the data, and was reluctant to share any kind of historical performance.
Without any kind of first-party data to build valuable insights from and optimize towards, Nautilus was eager to foster a relationship with a team that could help them build an audience-aligned social marketing strategy. Their goal was to increase ROAS and further validate the value of social as a highly effective marketing channel. The most crucial key to success, however, was gaining full transparency into campaign metrics and performance.
Solution
Performance Visibility
First and foremost, Marin’s Managed Services Team established a reporting cadence and structure so that Nautilus could track the progress of their campaigns regularly. These reports offered higher engagement opportunity for the regularly scheduled communication with Nautilus, with detailed data interpretation and actionable insights that aligned with their business goals. Furthermore, these insights resulted in an A/B testing framework and calendar, which Marin created, that aims to expand Nautilus’ brand recognition and increase sales.
Less Manual Work, More Strategy
Given that there was no historical data to reference, it was crucial to configure and edit campaigns at scale in order to build an effective audience strategy within a short time span. Marin’s Mass Editor helped reduce the time spent on manual campaign edits and refreshes, allowing Nautilus to ramp up quickly and get their ads in front of the right people in record time.
In addition, Marin’s DPA wizard, an easy-to-use tool that incorporates “Creative Templates,” helped the team at Marin configure many of the manual elements of DPA creation into a single step, further contributing to time savings and efficiency. With less manual campaign legwork, the team was able to focus more on campaign optimization.
Hyper-Targeted Optimization
Marin put forth a full-funnel optimization strategy, which reaches potential consumers based on where they fall within the purchase journey. Marin was able to create exclusion lists, lookalikes, and remarketing audiences for more personalized messaging and experiences on Facebook by:
- Incorporating customer lists for each of the Nautilus products
- Deploying the Facebook pixel on the website to track online user behavior
- Segmenting users who had engaged with Nautilus’ video content
Together, Marin’s Managed Services Team and the MarinOne platform were able to deliver on time savings and efficiency, total transparency into campaign results, and performance uplift.
Results
The US exceeded the Nautilus ROAS KPI by 132% within a three-month timeframe, with its counterpart Canadian market exceeding that goal by 30%. The remarketing campaigns in both the US and Canadian markets were also a huge success, with a 388% increase from the initial ROAS goal.
Running ads across Google, Bing, Amazon, and social media is necessary for online vendors and sellers. So why is analyzing the performance of those ads so complicated?
Data fragmentation and walled-garden publishers create roadblocks for retail marketers. You’ve got ASINs on Amazon, SKUs on Google Shopping, Meta Advantage Plus, and more – making it hard to align data and get the full picture of a product’s performance. Manually unifying cross-channel data for each product is a tedious process that you honestly don’t have time for.
It’s time to break down data silos with an AI-powered reporting and optimization platform like Marin. Here are five problems you’re probably facing today that Marin can solve.
1. It’s hard to compare product performance across channels
Retail marketers need to be able to compare conversion rates by publisher to spot sales trends. What if a product suddenly starts driving a significantly higher conversion rate on Amazon than on Google? You’ll want to identify that variance immediately to understand what’s working on Amazon and apply what you've learned to your search and social campaigns.
We make it easy to analyze how every product is performing across publishers. No more pulling data from each ad platform and unifying it in a spreadsheet. Marin marries cross-channel data for each SKU – and pulls in conversions and revenue from your source of truth, too. It also matches SKUs to ASINs, making it easier than ever to compare performance between Amazon and your other ad channels.
Thanks to Marin’s data visualization suite, you’ll never need to do manual data pulls or create visualizations again. The data model is unified and built-in. It’s all right there in the app, so you can move at the speed of business when making critical decisions about where to spend your next dollar. And if you like using spreadsheets, it’s one click to open our reports in Excel.
2. Your sales are impacted by social media trends
If sales for one specific product suddenly skyrocket, congratulations - an influencer may have recommended it to their audience. If you sell in the beauty, lifestyle, fashion, or wellness spaces, you’ve probably experienced this more than once. It’s important to recognize those surges the second they happen so that you can capitalize on them.
Marin’s Alerts will keep you on top of unexpected shifts in performance by sending a report straight to your inbox. The Alert’s thresholds are totally customizable, but a common one is for campaigns where spend has increased or decreased more than 70% day over day. If any campaigns meet your chosen thresholds, you’ll be emailed a report with all the relevant data and details, making it easy to decide what to do next. And once you’ve determined your next move, you can update budgets, bids, and settings for all your ads right in the Marin grid.
If you’re looking for something more turnkey, our Anomaly Detector might be for you. This AI-powered alerting tool doesn’t require any setup. It automatically identifies deviations in performance and sends a sharable, actionable email explaining what changed and what to do about it.
3. You need an optimization suite that understands the big picture
Jumping from one ads manager to another can be frustrating, especially since some UIs work better than others. And many campaigns share the same goal across publishers, but thanks to those pesky walled-gardens, you have to navigate through each interface to change ROAS targets for a campaign group. But not with Marin.
Our optimization suite is a command center for all your bidding needs. Tweak bids or targets for all your different campaigns in one grid. Or, unify everything with Marin Bidding. Our bidding algorithm runs across all your channels, so you can map Google, Bing, and Amazon campaigns that share a ROAS target to one Strategy in Marin, making optimization management easier than ever. With one click of a button, update targets across all your PPC publishers. You can also mix and match Marin Bidding with publisher bidding if you prefer.
The TL;DR? You tell the AI what to do. You handle the strategy because that’s what you rock at. Marin automates implementation and performance monitoring based on the strategy you choose.
4. Distributing budget across campaigns and channels is complicated
What if you could ensure that every campaign always has the most efficient daily budget possible? With Marin, you can. Simply set a monthly spend goal for a category of campaigns that share a budget, like brand, non-brand, or by geo. Then, choose a ROAS target. Once you’ve customized your settings, Marin’s AI will allocate your overall budget across campaigns by updating publisher daily budgets, giving the majority of spend to the products with the most marginal opportunity to drive revenue. The algorithm runs daily, so it’ll pick up on any shifts in the SERP and adapt daily budgets as needed. Sounds blissful, right? Let our AI take budget allocation off your plate. Learn more about Marin’s industry-leading budget allocation tool here.
5. Expanding to new channels is daunting
If TikTok gets banned in the US, are you ready to start advertising on Lemon8? Retail moves fast, and your brand can’t take years to establish a presence on the next major social media app.
Marin simplifies the process of testing new channels. You can review the performance of your products at the SKU level by publisher to decide where to start. For example, if you’re seeing success with Amazon Ads and want to test out Google Shopping, simply navigate to Marin’s Product Performance report to understand what your top-performing ASINs are.
Then, you can use our bulk-create tool to build Google Shopping campaigns for those products that you already know drive sales. That way, you’ll put your best foot forward when launching on Google. And you can do all the analysis, campaign creation, editing, and performance monitoring necessary to test a new publisher without leaving Marin. No more hopping from Amazon Ads to Google Ad Manager. Marin will be your mission control center, making it possible to do all your reporting and editing in one window.
…And so much more!
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what Marin can do for your retail media and shopping campaigns. Our customizable platform can solve almost any paid media problem, and automate almost any optimization or reporting workflow. But don’t take our word for it – we’ve got a plethora of case studies detailing how Marin has revolutionized one paid media program after another. And if you want to discuss your unique business needs with a Marin expert, we’re more than happy to chat.
