• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 26, 2011

Marin is rolling out a recommendation engine designed to identify tips for improving paid search, social media and display campaigns. The tool -- Marin Next -- suggests opportunities to improve budgets, bids, creative optimizations and campaign structures in Google, Bing, and Facebook, among others. It's the first automated recommendation engine supported by a digital marketing platform provider with roots in search marketing.

The tool analyzes campaign structure. A proprietary algorithm determines the correct recommendations. Each recommendation comes with an automated workflow to save marketers time. A handful of enterprise customers have been testing the platform for about six months, but search engine marketers at Fang Digital Marketing began about two months ago.

At Fang, the log-in screen for Marin's platform integrates a variety of recommendations from Next into the welcome message to make campaigns more successful. It may suggest new keywords, make adjustments to the budget, or test new creative pieces.

Fang specializes in SEO and paid search, social media, display media, affiliate programs, email, and more, supporting companies, such as eHarmony, CBS Local, Harbor Freight Tools, 35 Degrees, and more.

Jeff Ferguson, Fang's CEO, said some clients have seen an increase of traffic between 5% and 10%, or cost savings of between 10% and 20%, especially for the longer-term clients. He believes taking action on accounts "as action gets noticed" makes a difference, though sometimes a "gut check" overrules a task because it's too early to make a campaign change. Automation saves the team time, but how much has yet to be determined.

Next ties into Marin's methodology for managing campaigns, explained in an accompanying white paper. In it, Marin explains advanced paid-search marketing tips, ranging from adjusting bids to testing.