Corresponding white paper and webinar will help brands navigate the Google ecosystem

Merkle, a leading technology-enabled, data-driven performance marketing agency, has launched a new Performance Marketing Lab. The Lab comprises a cross-functional team of data scientists, developers, analysts, media experts, and product engineers, who develop proprietary solutions and leverage best-in-class products to help brands ensure their adtech and martech investments deliver greater digital marketing value.

The new Lab is led by Matthew Mierzejewski. Previously Merkle’s senior vice president, search capability lead, Mierzejewski brings deep search expertise to his new role of managing director of the Performance Marketing Lab. He will be overseeing a team of experts and Google certified specialists across media, data science, IT, product development and design, market research, and analytics.

“I’m excited to kickstart this hands-on Performance Marketing Lab to help brands develop better cross-channel marketing strategies, as we continue to see tremendous advancements in platform automation and adtech consolidation,” said Mierzejewski. “Merkle’s performance Marketing Lab is ideal for advertisers who are sitting on a mountain of first-party data, but aren’t quite sure how to put it to work in their marketing campaigns. The Lab helps connect all available datasets to develop rich, personalized advertising models that lead to scalable and automated advertising across digital channels. Brands are often challenged by internal organizational silos that create miscommunication between developers and marketers. The Lab’s collaborative environment offers new opportunities for these brands to integrate and leverage their first- and third-party data assets across their people-based marketing objectives.”

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Sweetwater, a leading online retailer of music instruments and professional audio gear, works with Merkle’s Performance Marketing Lab. “Sweetwater understands customers at a uniquely personal level,” said Mike Clem, Chief Digital Officer for Sweetwater. “We develop true relationships with our customers and invest time to understand their individual musical goals & motivations. Merkle has been so valuable in helping us translate this rich customer understanding into innovative marketing that adds value toward each customer’s goals.”

“We worked with Sweetwater to take a statistical approach to customer segmentation”, said Mierzejewski. “By modeling thousands of customer signals, we were able to suppress customers who showed a low likelihood to purchase in our digital marketing campaigns. Moreover, we achieved this coupling Google Analytics data to Sweetwater first-party data, and activating on these customer segmentation model in near real-time.”

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Most marketers wish to mature their advertising by leveraging more automation to better connect customer touchpoints. Merkle’s Performance Marketing Lab specializes in maximizing customer and brand value through a maturity framework, leveraging a standardized decisioning process that includes project design, data collection, data transformation, marketing/experience activation, and optimization. Sample projects include automating purchase propensity models, LTV scoring connected to conversions, and audience message sequencing across search and display campaigns. Since its launch, the Lab has helped clients such as Sweetwater and rugs.com to incorporate various site behavior attributes into predictive models and provide a better understanding of where to invest their marketing budgets.

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