• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 14, 2014

Marin Software joined the parade of companies offing support for Bing Shopping Ads and Google Shopping Campaigns, but this platform focuses on automating campaign creation, based on inventory and feed management data alongside social and other types of media.

Addressing the ad industry need for real-time programmatic-style buying, the platform automatically creates and optimizes shopping campaigns in real time using Marin's dynamic campaigns tool.

It formats product feeds and applies custom labels to work with Google's Merchant Center to save time and eliminate complexities of managing multiple product feeds.

It also captures shopping and product purchase intent data to build audience segments brands can use to target advertisements across social and display ads. It integrates data from virtually any source to measure revenue from Shopping Campaigns and automates bid strategies based on product-specific revenue targets, optimizing bids in real-time based on product lines, SKUs, promotions, seasonality, availability, and customer lifetime value, explains Dan Morris, director of product marketing at Marin.

"We will begin to see PLAs extend to other verticals aside from retail, such as travel and automotive because consumers like to see images in ads," Morris said.

Based on data from advertisers' use of its platform, advertisers increased spend on PLAs nearly 300% in 2013, and one-out-of-five paid shopping clicks last year was on a PLA, according to a Marin report published in January 2014. The research shows PLA click-through rates are often 50% higher than traditional text-only ads. Marin estimates retailers will allocate one-third of their entire paid search budgets to Google Shopping campaigns this year.

Last week, the company announced the resignation of chief revenue officer Peter Wooster. The sales management team now reports to CEO David Yovanno. The company also said that second quarter revenue, ending June 30, 2014, would come in at around $23.6 million, with the recent acquisition of Perfect Audience contributing about $300,000. Total, Q2 2014 revenue should reach $23.6 million.