Do you ever wonder what happens when you press that “optimize” button in your campaign management tools? If you’re optimizing across multiple publishers or media channels on Skai, it comes down to something called Marginal ROI, which goes all the way back to something you forgot from calculus class in high school or college.

You can learn about this and more in the new Skai white paper, Maximizing Paid Search Potential By Measuring Marginal ROI. Our friends over at Microsoft challenged us to find a data-driven approach to understand if there might be missed opportunity for investments on Bing, so we identified several advertisers who had their Skai profiles separated by publisher. This allowed us to deconstruct how Skai optimization works when multiple publishers are considered together, and see what Skai sees when it decides where to spend the next dollar in an optimized program.

In short, each publisher has a forecast curve and a current level of investment, and the slope of that forecast curve at the point of the current investment level determines the Marginal ROI of the next dollar spent. By comparing the Marginal ROI of all the publishers in a program, we can decide where the next dollar should go.

When we ran this analysis against this select group of nine pairs of Skai profiles, we saw that Bing did, in fact, have a better Marginal ROI in five of the cases. And as marketers are faced with an increasing number of publishers and channels in the future, this type of cross-program calculation is only going to become more important for driving overall growth and efficiency of your programs. Independent third-party tools like Skai are well-positioned to deliver broad, unbiased analysis across multiple channels and publishers.

For all the details, download your copy of this report now.