Top results, or how to run a good performance marketing campaign?

Performance marketing activities have been growing in popularity for some time. An IAB report shows that performance marketing campaigns account for up to 67% of marketing budgets in the US, one of the largest advertising markets in the world.

This is why we decided to create this blog post to introduce the topic of performance campaigns, how to run them properly and how to choose the best performance agency.

Performance marketing – what is it?

It is impossible to write a good text about performance campaigns without explaining the overarching slogan, i.e. what performance marketing is. Performance marketing is one of the most appreciated forms of Internet marketing – many factors contribute to its popularity, including predictable costs, accurate analytics and the possibility of paying for the expected effect.

Performance marketing is about persuading an audience to take a specific action. It is not limited to a single channel or advertising model – it can be online advertising, email marketing, positioning, remarketing. However, they all have a few things in common – the ability to accurately analyse actions and their effectiveness, predictable costs and very precise targeting.

Performance campaign – what is it?

A performance campaign is a form of online advertising designed to drive users to take specific, measurable actions – such as visit a website, click on content, watch a video, leave an email address, make a purchase, etc. Each of these actions can be an important part of a user’s ‘journey’ through your business.

They can be executed across a really wide range of channels – Google search, social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn, but also, for example, through email communications or positioning.

What are the benefits of running a performance marketing campaign? Well, there are many:

• Predictable costs – many advertising ecosystems are able to provide costs and potential number of conversions even before the campaign starts;
• Cost-effectiveness – in most cases of performance campaigns you only pay for results, e.g. clicks or sales;
• Effectiveness – performance campaigns are considered to be one of the most effective activities on the internet, allowing you to achieve the expected results with a relatively low financial outlay;
• Control – you have full control over what happens to your campaign, you can optimise it on an ongoing basis or, for example, switch it off on certain days;
• Targeting – you no longer need to put your ads in front of everyone and hope that a few of them are interested in your product or service. Performance campaigns have a wide range of personalisation options and targeting settings mean you can show your ad only to those who are interested.

How can performance campaigns be billed?

There are a number of billing models for performance campaigns, which differ mainly in the type of objective achieved and are applicable to specific cases:

• CPC – Cost Per Click – the most popular and basic billing indicator, important for campaign optimisation, although a click is not always the goal of the campaign;
• CPL – Cost Per Lead – the cost of obtaining data (e.g. email address or telephone number) from people potentially interested in our service or product;
• CPA – Cost Per Action – the cost of taking a specific action, such as putting your credit card on our system;
• CPS – cost per sale.

When it comes to invoicing between your company and the agency, there are several options:

• Billing for results – in practice this is a very rarely used model, the final sales result is influenced by many factors for which the agency is not always responsible;
• Percentage of media budget – on the other hand, this is one of the most commonly used billing models – the agency takes a percentage of the media budget as its fee. In practice, this ranges from around 10% (for very large budgets) to around 30% (for the smallest);
• Monthly subscription – a very popular practice is a monthly payment regardless of the budget used;
• Bundles – very often performance campaigns are sold in bundles with, for example, a website positioning service, which can dilute the final cost of the campaign.

How do you create a good performance marketing campaign?

A process that we can improve with each iteration.

The steps that make up the process of creating a performance campaign:

• Planning / Strategy – this is the first stage without which you cannot launch. This is where you set out all the key assumptions about your campaign – objectives, resources, channels, audiences, how to measure them;
• Execution – this is when your campaign moves into the execution stage; you create creative, copy, campaign settings, review analytics;
• Optimisation – this is one of the most important stages, which you need to repeat until you get satisfactory results. This is where you check if you could have done better at any stage and, if so, implement changes;
• Reporting – this stage may not seem important unless you are working for someone else, but it is very important – it allows you to track the progress of your activities over time.

So you’ve done all the steps, what’s next? Repetition! In performance campaigns, there is always room to do better, to get to know your customers better, or to learn more lessons that, when implemented in the next iteration, will yield better results.

How do you choose an agency for your performance campaign?

Choosing a performance marketing agency to run a performance marketing campaign for you can be one of the most important decisions you make in your business. Having spoken to a number of clients, we have identified some of the most important qualities that a performance marketing agency should have:

• Transparency – this is probably the most important – the client needs to know at all times what the agency is working on, how much it is costing and have access to the data even after the relationship has ended. Very often we come across a situation where after a period of working together the agency “takes away” access to accounts, e.g. Google Ads or Google Analytics, claiming that they own them. This is a very unethical attitude that is designed to make the client dependent on the agency – remember, you can’t afford to do this because you and your company own the data, no one else;
• An honest approach to results – one of the drawbacks of performance marketing is that results can be manipulated to satisfy the client (who is not necessarily an expert in the field), even though the results are not positive for their business. Examples include overcomplicating reports or drawing attention to irrelevant figures. It used to be common practice for SEO agencies to charge clients ‘per position’ – agencies would position their clients’ sites for ‘long tail’ keywords that no one visited.

• Fast response time and continuous optimisation – Agencies often set up a campaign and forget about it, or come back a few days later. With a performance campaign, you can see results within hours and the initial data set allows for rapid optimisation. You can’t afford to be a client of an agency that doesn’t have time to develop your business.
• Work together towards the same goal – remember that an agency that does not work with you and understand the nature of your business is unlikely to deliver results that will satisfy you. Look for an agency that will make time for you, take the time to get to know your business before you launch your campaign, and then meet with you regularly to deliver even better results for you.

Performance Max campaign in Google Ads

One of the most interesting examples of such a campaign may be the Performance Max advertising campaign on Google Ads. Google Ads is an advertising ecosystem built around Google’s search engine, allowing ads to appear both on the search engine itself and on blogs built around the platform.

Performance Max is the latest model for running such a campaign, which Google says will be the main one in the future. It is largely based on artificial intelligence and algorithms that collect data from various Google channels such as search, YouTube, email, etc. and automatically tailor the content to the preferences of the people who see the ad to increase the chances of them converting.

In practice, this means that we create a campaign within Performance Max and run it across all possible Google ad channels, handing over a lot of control to artificial intelligence.