Many marketers experience downstream revenue in their sales funnel, tracking customer journeys and attributing conversions at every step of the funnel -- from signing up for a trial all the way to the final sale. 

A common question for these marketers is: 

What is the best bidding strategy to maximize value from the final conversion event (sale)? 

Marin's Full Funnel Optimization helps answer this question. 

Use Cases

Marin always recommends optimizing toward the final conversion event because it's ultimately the step of the funnel that represents real business value (and real revenue).

For example, an education company might choose to optimize toward a Purchase sales conversion event instead of a Request Information lead event. However, the recommended bidding implementation depends on the length of the sales cycle. 

• If the sales cycle is short (for example 90% of purchases happens within 3 days of completing a lead form), we recommend excluding the last 3 days from calculation and following a standard bidding setup guide. 
• With longer business cycles (for example 30 days), advertisers often use conversion events from the top of the funnel (with low latency) and assign expected value from the sale (bottom of the funnel, long latency). Applying excluded dates is not optimal, as the algorithm will not react to the recent market changes. 

Full funnel optimization helps automate this workflow by re-calculating expected value from the sale at the keyword level.

Benefits

• Accurately reward keywords that are higher drivers of downstream revenue by use systematic lookbacks that look back over years of data.
• Lookbacks can be user configured, allowing you to specify how far the engine should look back to track downstream conversion behavior.

Checklist And Setup

There are two common types of advertisers that will benefit from Marin's Full Funnel Optimization feature. 

• An advertiser who want to optimize revenue from a downstream conversion type (such as a sale) subject to a Margin/ROAS target.
• An advertiser who wants to optimize downstream conversions (such as a sale) subject to an average Cost Per Sale.

We'll review the checklist for each below. If your account qualifies for either scenario, reach out to a platform representative to learn more.