Performance Marketing in 2022

What is the difference between performance marketing and digital marketing?

The answer lies in the end result of your marketing campaign.

Although performance marketing and digital marketing channels overlap each other, their ad campaign goals often differ.

Digital marketing usually strives to increase metrics like reach, likes, followers. These metrics are good to build brand awareness but may not drive an actual sale. On the other hand, performance marketing focuses on driving revenue and generating high-intent leads.

That is the fundamental difference between digital marketing and performance marketing.

So how does performance marketing work?

Performance marketing focuses more on the way you pay and get results for your campaign. So it works accordingly.

You can choose a payment model based on your marketing needs.

Here are the most common performance marketing payment models:

• Pay per conversion/acquisition: Pay only for the conversion/sale generated by your ad campaign
• Pay per leads: Pay on the leads, inquiries you receive from your ad
• Pay per installs: Pay on the app installs that happened directly due to your ad
• Pay per click: Pay on the clicks on your ad that lead the audience to your landing page

Based on the payment model, you can run ad campaigns on various performance marketing channels. Let us delve into that.

Display ads support a variety of content formats, such as text, banner, image, rich media, interactive and video ads. Similar to search ads, for display too, you can choose a payment model of PPC (pay-per-click), CPC (cost-per-click), CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions).

The most popular platforms to do display ads are Google Ad Words and Bing Ads.

Learn more about display advertising here.

What are the benefits of performance marketing?

The principal benefit is that you pay only for what you get. Other key benefits that come with doing performance marketing from an automated marketing platform include:

• Track and measure campaign results from across channels
• Automate audience targeting to reach high intent buyers
• Optimize campaigns automatically to increase conversions
• Reduce wasted ad spend and run cost-effective campaigns
• Optimize bidding and targeting
• Set budget based on pre-estimated results
• Run full-funnel ads across channels from one place

As you see, all the benefits focus on bringing you business from ads.

Alright, so far, we have learned what performance marketing is, why we should do it, and the channels through which we can do it.

Now let us learn about how to do performance marketing in a smarter way.

Performance Marketing Strategies - Key Insights

Add value to your performance marketing experience.

1. Use data from one channel to other

Apply learnings from a campaign on one channel to a campaign on a different channel. For example, the Search report in AdWords can help you determine what people are searching for on Google Search. You can use the performing keywords while building campaigns on other platforms. Thus you apply one channel’s findings to another.

2. Do not classify channels by the funnel stage

Generally, e-commerce sites like Flipkart are called low funnel stage channels - where the customer is more likely to buy a product than learn about the product. On the other hand, a brand’s website is considered a relatively higher funnel channel where people first get acquainted with your product.

However, there have been times when people first discover a product through adverts on sites like Flipkart. They later search for those same products on Google by ‘product name + Flipkart’. Eventually, they end up landing on the product’s official website to make a purchase.
As we see, Flipkart worked more like a top of funnel channel by helping the customer discover the product.
It shows us that we cannot categorize channels by a funnel stage. It also points out that we can build a full-funnel strategy within a single channel itself.

3. Create short-term and long-term goals

If you do not target people who can be new to your marketing funnel, you will run out of people searching for your product. So as part of your long-term strategy, you need to keep on building your marketing funnel as you focus on your short-term business goals.

An example is of people who know you, search for your brand term. However, you have to capitalize on the non-branded search terms to find new prospects who will enter your funnel.

4. Ensure goals add business value

Performance marketing is all about adding value. Rather than focusing on vanity metrics that most digital marketing strategies focus on, you have to determine what metrics add value to your business. It is not necessarily just about sales. It can also be about building brand awareness which will in the long term contribute to your sale.

5. Understand channel synergies

You need to adopt a sort of an independent system to track and measure results from your campaigns. It is because different channels have their own measuring systems. While collating data across channels, one often misses out on critical insights. It is where an independent, unified view system can help. Such systems can adopt algorithm attribution to give you cross-channel insights.

6. Experimentation

Businesses need to take a data-driven approach. Brands make a common mistake of thinking they know about their customers. In reality, customers behave much differently. Shoppers do not often even realize why they make the choices they make...

While running an experiment like the A/B test, you might find out otherwise how customers behave so differently. It is best to conduct A/B tests rather than relying on intuition. For example, let us say you might want to compare two Facebook ad campaigns with each other.

So you first decide upon your campaign goal - such as increasing conversion rate or downloads. Then for A/B testing, you need to limit your test variables. So you might run two ads under one ad set directed to your best audience. You can select two different images or call-to-actions or maybe use two captions for each of the campaigns. Once the campaign gathers pace, you can determine what is working and what is not. You then optimize your campaigns further by using the variables that are working.

7. Align your marketing goals with your marketing budget

Media planners often get paid more than their flat rates only to publish the ad campaign. In return, they deliver the vanity metrics that we talked about earlier that do not help the business much. So it is critical to align your campaign goals with your marketing budget.

Now, programmatic advertising powers performance marketing. Automated bidding strategies and keyword optimization are available for channels like Google Display and Search ads. These reduce your cost per acquisition or cost per lead, improving ROAS for Google ads.

How Mediaqart helps with performance advertising

With Mediaqart, you can take a data-driven approach to run performance marketing digital ads.

• You get to select highly targeted ready campaigns audiences for your product or service. They can be the ones who are more likely to respond to your ad.
• You get to know the kind of results your campaign can fetch even before you start one. It helps you make informed decisions about your budgeting and defining marketing goals.
• Get a unified view of campaign performance reports from across channels in real-time.
• Optimize campaigns automatically across channels.

While performance-based advertising is one of the most effective promotion techniques, pair it with other forms of marketing to achieve maximum results. Combining paid advertising with organic efforts is a good marketing strategy.

What are your views on performance marketing in 2022? Let us know in the comments.