Performance Marketing

January 29, 2025

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What are the benefits of investing in performance marketing for my brand?

Performance-based advertising is on the rise; for marketers, however, this form of marketing can be difficult to find the right cadence as there are so many types of performance marketing channels and campaigns. Thus, there isn't a "one-size fits all" approach.

Performance marketing is essentially a "pay for performance" process where payment only occurs when there are measurable results. For example, in 2023, Domino's sought a 30 percent increase in sales for the company, as well as enhance brand preference.

To do this, the brand utilized a "perpetual campaign" on TV and social media. According to the ANA case study, the company "employed data-driven insights to target and measure campaign impact. The brand optimized channel choices, shifting resources from TV to digital, catering to changing consumer behavior. Further, the company continuously adapted the brand communications strategy based on real-time results, fine-tuning campaigns for maximum impact. Different markets received tailored approaches, reflecting local consumer behaviors and competitive landscapes, ensuring a cohesive yet adaptable campaign."

In addition, 40 percent of the campaign's budget was spent on mobile to enable targeting and real-time changes. Ultimately, the campaign achieved a 30 percent increase in sales, ad-induced revenue garnered a 16 percent augmentation, and TV ROI saw a 25 percent increase.

When it comes to differentiation, which is essential to boost performance, Kevin Goodwin, VP of digital marketing at New Engen, noted that "true distinction and staying power along the way may not come easy. So, it's important to not only focus on distinctiveness and memorability but to commit to developing creative intended and likely to convert over time. That kind of creative should look quite different than creative intended to drive initial awareness and memorability. At the top of the funnel, brands should be very focused on distinct, "saying something differently," messaging that cuts through the noise and that begins to prove its staying power by reaching and influencing large audiences and continues to build."

In addition, it's crucial to have strategic conversations with the c-suite not only to have buy-in, but to set expectations and align on goals. Scott Smigler, division president and founder of Agital, wrote in an ANA piece that "strategic discussions with top executives can likewise help align marketing strategies with the overall business objectives and metrics. These conversations help ensure that marketing strategies are not only aligned with but also contribute to achieving the company's long-term business goals. It involves identifying key performance indicators that are reflective of both marketing effectiveness and business performance."

Smigler also stated that "this alignment necessitates a shift in mindset, strategies, and measurement practices, ensuring that marketing not only drives immediate efficiencies but also contributes to long-term business success."

The following resources provide insight on successful performance marketing trends, best practices, and examples.

Best Practices and Trends

The Power of Performance Marketing. ANA/Wunderkind, March 2024.
In the pursuit of the ultimate consumer experience, brands will need to do more to build direct relationships with their addressable audiences to amass loyal customers. Businesses that are agile and lean in will win the day and exceed their revenue goals.

First-party data should still be the priority for brands that want to build long-term relationships with their customers. The impact of traditional remarketing via paid channels is still in decline. Bolstering your owned channels such as email, text, and your web properties, is the key to success. In fact, global consumer studies have found that email beats display ads by over 100 percent for delivering a click to purchase. And personalizing your messaging across email and text delivers even higher results. Wunderkind's report digs into what performance marketing looks like from 2024 and beyond.
18 Smart Ways to Prepare for Tomorrow's Performance Marketing. Forbes, January 2025.
Performance marketing has traditionally relied heavily on last-click attribution and basic demographic targeting, but as marketers have witnessed, this space is rapidly evolving. Smart brands are already using AI-powered predictive analytics and real-time behavioral data to not only improve their understanding of actual campaign performance and improve attribution but also facilitate the seamless delivery of highly personalized customer experiences across channels. Here, 18 members of Forbes Agency Council share tips for how brands can best prepare for the future of performance marketing today and ready their resources to thrive amid this continuing evolution.
How to Succeed on the Full Funnel Journey. ANA, March 2024.
The marketing industry is transforming, as brands grapple to find the sweet spot between performance-driven tactics and long-term brand-building strategies. Historically, the industry has been divided between brands in two categories: performance brands or brand-building brands. What we are seeing now is a reconciliation of this divide. Marketers who understand the dynamics of driving this shift to integrate the two will evolve and experience more powerful outcomes.
Are You Investing in Performance Marketing for the Right Reasons? Nielsen, May 2024.
Campaigns rely on the seemingly delicate mix of brand and performance needed to maximize full-funnel visibility. Having analyzed hundreds of thousands of marketing mix decisions, Nielsen has seen the pendulum swing hard from brand to performance in recent years. Consider that it was barely ten years ago that Binet and Field published The Long and the Short of it and proposed their famous 60:40 rule — that is, to maximize marketing effects and returns over time, 60 percent of a media budget should be allocated to brand marketing and 40 percent to performance marketing. Yet according to results from Nielsen's 2024 Annual Marketing Report, 70 percent of marketers plan to increase performance marketing spend at the expense of brand building. What gives? There's the right mix of brand and performance for your business. Just make sure you base your decision on hard data and not just perceptions.
Creators Move Down Funnel to Performance Marketing. ANA, May 2024.
Creator marketing has officially moved down the funnel and become a true performance marketing channel. Whether they're paid affiliate commissions, flat fees per post/video, consulting fees, or a combination of the three, today's creators are motivated to increase their marketing partners' sales.
'It's just going to be a competition of attention': Why performance marketers are shifting their priorities to build the brand. Digiday, April 2024.
The moment of reckoning for performance marketers seems to have finally arrived. For years, marketers over-emphasized performance marketing, especially as the return on ad spend became even more important amid economic uncertainty. But as the digital advertising marketplace gets more crowded, expensive and riddled with data privacy initiatives, performance marketers find themselves at an inflection point. Recently, the focus has shifted back to brand building and awareness marketing tactics, striking a better balance between performance and brand marketing to stand out from competitors. Essentially, advertisers need to boost brand awareness and strengthen relationships with shoppers.
Marketing Performance Versus Business Performance: What to Prioritize? ANA, January 2024.
Traditionally, marketing performance has been evaluated through channel-specific metrics. However, this approach often overlooks the broader business objectives, leading to a misalignment between marketing efforts and overall business performance. To achieve sustainable growth, marketers need to shift to incorporate both mindsets in their day-to-day decision-making. Focusing solely on immediate marketing efficiencies can be detrimental in the long run. While short-term gains are important, they should not overshadow the significance of building brand awareness and establishing a connection with new audiences, which are crucial for future growth.

This view often results in missed opportunities for brand building and long-term customer engagement, ultimately impacting on the company's growth potential. Marketers should invest in brand awareness only to the extent they can correlate these investments with overall growth. In other words, they should adopt a performance marketing mindset and apply it to the full consumer decision cycle, from awareness all the way through to advocacy. Creating awareness among new audiences lays the foundation for future market expansion and revenue growth. It is a critical component of a sustainable business strategy.
6 Reasons Performance Marketing Is Recession-Proof. ANA, July 2023.
Employing internal teams to market, optimize, and drive ROI is an expensive, fixed cost for Fortune 500 brands. The same can be said about service fees for an agency partner running brand awareness advertising. In times of economic uncertainty, performance marketing is a crucial conversion funnel due to its emphasis on accountability, measurability, flexibility, and risk mitigation. A performance marketing partner can absorb what was a fixed cost for your business – employing, empowering, and expanding a marketing team; this turns it into a variable cost where you only pay for a desired outcome. This article looks at six principles that demonstrate the value of performance marketing.
The Anatomy of a Performance Marketing Organization. ANA, March 2023.
Why do organizations struggle to set up a true performance marketing engine, whether in-house or outsourced? Numerous studies reveal the most common reasons are lack of clarity regarding performance analytics, tactical issues with collecting and preparing data, and the talent mismatch associated with it. It's also fundamentally important to acknowledge that performance marketing goes beyond looking at specific channels (e.g. SEM, SEO, Social, affiliates etc.) or reporting out the metrics associated with these channels (CPCs, CPMs etc.). To move beyond this siloed myopia, performance marketing teams, which all too often sit in isolation, need to be integrated into the entire client structure; otherwise, they perpetuate short term revenue by channel behavior.

A holistic approach to performance not only involves building new data science enabled solutions to increase channel output and throughput, but it also needs to overlay rich analytics across every channel and touchpoint to truly maximize business outcomes. This includes new product development, improving margins, delivering a better customer experience that stands out from the noise, improving lifetime value and using it recursively in marketing decisions. Realizing the benefits of performance marketing starts with an understanding of what an organization's maturity is toward practical and advanced use of data. At the heart of this self-reflection is an assessment of how performance improvement is expected to impact the organization. Will it result in cost containment and revenue growth? Will it grow the customer base? Once these bigger, existential questions are answered, then one can look more granularly.
Why Performance Is Paramount for Brands. ANA, January 2023.
Performance strategies often lead marketers to focus on closing the attribution gap, specifically how their efforts drove the ideal outcome – growing revenue. And yes, revenue matters, but so do clicks and likes, returns and refunds, time on page, and bounce rate. The list goes on, with no shortage of things marketers can and should measure to prove their effectiveness and improve their strategies. Executing and refining nimble performance marketing will be one of the most important aspects of advertising. Performance is a discipline that, when executed well, can preserve customer relationships and revenue. This article offers a few specific strategies marketers can employ as they look to budget wisely, increase return on ad spending, lower customer acquisition costs, and build lasting customer relationships.
A Global Marketing Executive's Perspective on Brand Versus Performance Metrics. ANA, August 2022.
Emily Culp, a global marketing executive, former CMO of Keds, and Board Member at Mizzen + Main and Stio & Cordial, sat down with the ANA's Michael Berberich, senior director of content and marketing, to discuss her views on brand versus performance metrics and how marketers can make the right decisions for their brand.
Brand Advertising vs. Performance Advertising: Which Is Right for You? GreenBook, September 2020.
Deciding between performance and brand advertising has been a long-standing debate. Here Joel Rubinson of the GreenBook provides a framework on better understanding when you should choose one over the other. He includes this table:

Examples

Nike Will Emphasize Brand-Building in New Effort to Drive Growth. ANA, December 2024.
Nike is running in a new direction. Senior managers said the sports apparel company is winding down performance marketing and promotional activity and dialing up investments in branding and upper-funnel programming. Branding, or showing what a company stands for rather than just making money, is becoming a much bigger consideration for marketers of all stripes. The challenge is how to convert the benefits of branding into metrics that the C-suite will understand.
How MANSCAPED's CMO Convinced the C-Suite to Invest in Brand Marketing. ANA, December 2024.
MANSCAPED CMO Marcelo Kertész shared how he compelled his organization, which had a performance marketing culture, to invest in branding efforts by comparing the revenue of established incumbent companies that invest in brand to their disruptive newcomers.

Domino's: Modeling Media Playbook for Growth. ANA, September 2024.
The strategic objective of this campaign was to achieve a 30 percent increase in sales for Domino's in fiscal 2023 while fostering strong brand affinity and competitive advantage. It aimed to strike a balance between brand marketing and performance targets. The brand faced challenges such as budget constraints and heightened competition in the quick-service restaurant (QSR) sector, exacerbated by the post-COVID-19 landscape.
How Uber Combines Performance and Influencer Marketing. ANA, April 2024.
Matt Yager, senior manager of performance marketing creative optimization at Uber, discussed how his brand leverages performance marketing techniques within its influencer marketing strategy. He discussed key principles for doing so and the ways in which Uber evaluates content performance.
Maximizing Impact: Activating Brand-Building Campaigns with a Performance Mindset. ANA, November 2023.
Unleash the power of a performance-driven mindset in brand-building campaigns with BabyBjörn's captivating success story. BabyBjörn is a family-owned brand that is known worldwide for their quality baby gear. This year, the brand celebrated the 50th anniversary of their iconic baby carriers. Performance marketing manager Morgan Graham revealed how the team transformed a heritage campaign into a dual force of awareness and conversion utilizing media partners and traditional performance channels. Explore the strategies that seamlessly blend BabyBjörn's rich history with present innovation, forging lasting brand affinity. See the full presentation by clicking here.
Inside Look at an In-House Performance Team. ANA, June 2023.
Going in-house has allowed the University of Phoenix to ramp up its agile practice and lean into performance marketing.

Performance Branding: How Bloomberg Media Connected Brand to Demand to Drive Sustainable Growth. ANA, October 2022.
Chris Marino, global head of performance marketing and media at Bloomberg Media, shared how his company launched its first global performance branding campaign with the goal of driving sustainable demand for the business through a full-funnel media strategy.

Webinars and Podcast

The Performance Marketing Versus Branding Debate Heats Up. ANA, May 2024.
Lou Aversano, chief brand and marketing officer at The Cigna Group, thinks that the choice between performance marketing and branded advertising is a false one, and says B2B marketers need to change their mindset — and nomenclature — to reflect dramatically changing demands among customers and prospects. "Part of our problem is, at worst, we've made branding a layer that is susceptible to budget reduction, as opposed to a driver of differentiation and competitive advantage," Aversano says. Regardless of where they are in the cycle, he adds, B2B buyers increasingly want to know what the company stands for, what it does (precisely), and why people should familiarize themselves with the organization. Aversano joins host Matthew Schwartz to talk about how B2B marketers start to answer those questions and boost their value in the process.

Collaborate to Win: How Brand and Performance Marketing Work Together. ANA, August 2021.
This webinar will walk through the key differences of what a brand agency and performance marketing agency can offer, why you need both, and how to create processes and workflows between each to drive results.

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