What is Performance Marketing? Detailed Guide

Do you think your brand is strongly represented in the digital world? With the right marketing method, it is possible to activate your target audience step by step and to establish a tight communication between yourself and your audience. For this, it is necessary to get support from marketers who are experts in their field, to use Screpy’s tools when necessary, and to be in a continuous analysis & optimization process. There is a concept that covers all of these together and allows you to become a master of the digital world: Performance marketing.

The Screpy team is aware of the ever-evolving innovative digital world. Accordingly, we know that marketing means understanding the target audience, analyzing their reactions and accordingly reaching the best with continuous optimization. In this content, we will introduce the concept of performance marketing that will enable you to become the master of marketing processes.

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What is Performance Marketing?

Before explaining what performance marketing is by definition, let’s clarify the following: Performance marketing is a very popular digital marketing method performed through various channels such as local advertising platforms, sponsored advertising agreements, affiliate marketing, social media advertising, search engine advertising (SEM). The main purpose of the method is that you can create ads that appeal to your target audience in the most powerful way and maximize your chances of getting conversions, and catch this type of language and style. You should use performance marketing to optimize when and in what method your brand’s ads will be shown to which audience segment.

An advertiser who performs performance marketing can target a sale, a click, or a traffic increase at the end of the ad. Regardless of the purpose, the realization of the goal is dedicated as a “conversion” and the main goal is to build advertising and marketing strategies to maximize this goal.

Performance marketing means proactively optimizing ads and marketing processes. Analyzing the marketing processes in detail and analyzing the data of these processes, then determining where the errors might occur and re-planning for the better form the basis of performance marketing.

Let’s see some examples of performance marketing:

  • Social Media Platforms: Numerous platforms support performance marketing that statistically shows the audience-based results of your advertising performances and enables you to deliver a personalized experience by delivering your ad to certain segments. For example, when advertising via Facebook or Instagram, you can choose which audiences your ads will be shown to, create various demographic segmentation and change these filtering options according to access statistics.
  • Google: Unlike the marketing approach in traditional media, such as television, platforms such as Google, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook do not show every advertisement to everyone. Instead, they all aim to boost statistics and contribute to performance marketing by putting the ad in front of the audience that ads appeal to.

How To Create a Performance Marketing Strategy?

A person who wants to create a performance marketing strategy can try to achieve the best result with specific segmentation and budget planning. For this, we will talk about various methods generally preferred by professional agencies. Let’s start if you wish.

Target Audience Analysis and Segmentation

The greatest advantage of digital marketing tools and technologies has been as follows: We can now easily identify and separate target audiences within the framework of the digital data they provide, and analyze their consumption and navigation behavior through their digital footprint. This gives us very important ideas about whom we should show ads with which language in marketing processes. For example, if we are serving as a women’s clothing boutique on Instagram, we can ensure that our ads are shown to women and individuals of a certain age group who are dressed in the style of clothing we sell.

Target Audience Analysis and Segmentation with Performance Marketing
Target Audience Analysis and Segmentation with Performance Marketing

When publishing an ad on Google, we can choose the language, keyword and more according to the segmentation we have determined. Then we know very well what we should do to increase the efficiency of advertising and marketing processes:

  1. Getting to know our audience
  2. Identifying them as a large cluster
  3. Divide this large cluster into meaningful chunks to deliver ads that guarantee maximum efficiency to each of them.

There are numerous tools you can use to identify your target audience and segment them. Nowadays, it makes sense to use Google Trends to understand what trends your audience is after. Google Trends makes it easy to appeal to what’s popular in your target area by telling you which keyword searches have recently been on the downtrend and which ones have gone up.

A little bit of information: Did you know that Screpy works in sync with Google Trends? Now may be the time to try the Keyword Tracker tool!

Bidding and Setting Aside a Budget for Marketing

Did you know that the majority of digital channels work with biding logic? For example, if you want to advertise on Google search today, your bid on ad exchanges determines how much your ad will be visible on which keyword. The strength of your competitors in the keyword you advertise and the competition rate of the word closely affect how many visitors you can receive compared to your bid.

You need performance marketing skills to come up with the right biding strategy, get the best bids on CPC type ads, and keep your marketing advantageously with a target audience focus.

You know that Google’s advertising strategy works with a cost-per-click logic. So let’s say you have an ad on the SERP. This ad is charged by how many people clicked on the ad, not how many people saw that ad. Therefore, the cost-per-click determined for advertisements determines your total marketing expense to a great extent.

So, how is the cost-per-click determined?

Bidding and Setting Aside a Budget for Performance Marketing

In fact, many factors determine the cost per click, such as the difficulty of the industry, your competitors’ bids at the auction, or the rate of competition of the keyword in question. But in an environment where all other factors are constant, your quality score is one of the variables that highly determines what the cost per click will be.

To keep your cost-per-click low, you have to keep your quality score high. Quality score depends on the number of people who decide to click on your ad after seeing it. If Google, which shows your ad to a large number of people, realizes that nobody finds this ad reliable and does not click on the ad, your quality score will decrease and the ad will start showing less people even though you pay a high amount of money. Moreover, Google increases the money it gets per click in this process.

Conversion Rates and Performance Marketing

If an advertising strategy is updated proactively, what values ​​do you think is evaluated and proactive updates are made? Let’s say it right now: Conversion rates!

Conversion is the very action you want a consumer or any individual in the target audience to take. For example, if you want the person to go to your site and click an ad on your site by reading the content, the conversion will occur when this ad is clicked.

  • If you own an e-commerce site, every time users make a purchase, it means a conversion.
  • If you have a blog site, every time users see you in the SERP and click on your page, click the “Share” button and share your blog content, it shows a conversion.

By examining the conversion results of an ad sharing you have made, you can decide whether the method you just tried is effective. For example, let’s assume that you are marketing content to rise in a keyword for digital marketing. Later, you entered Screpy and you noticed that your SEO score decreased and your rank on the keyword decreased through the Keyword Tracker. In this case, you can immediately realize that the strategy you have just started trying does not work for your business in terms of conversion, and you can optimize by trying a new strategy accordingly.

It is that simple to take data-based steps!

Exploring Potential Pitfalls

What causes your success rates to decrease while doing performance marketing may be not determining negative keywords, an incorrect bidding strategy, or setting up the ad with the wrong language. In all of these cases, the success rate you will receive from the campaign may decrease.

That is exactly why performance marketing requires constant data monitoring is an extremely advantageous situation. Continuous data monitoring allows you to be informed as quickly as possible when any of your settings causes your ads or marketing processes to bleed. In this way, you can realize the problem without wasting any time and without any further problems due to this low performance.

Best Tips for Succesful Performance Marketing Process

So, what details do you need to pay attention to to make sure you are building a strong enough performance marketing strategy? We want to help you optimize your process by sharing a few valuable tips with you. Let’s get started if you wish, folks!

Don’t Avoid Experiments and Optimization

Hey, what’s the experiment in digital marketing? Let’s say it right: There are many experiments you can do today to discover how to get the highest conversion rates from your target audience. For example, AB experiments allow you to create two different versions on your website and randomly present one of these versions to your target audience. You can then make the right optimizations in your advertising and marketing processes by examining the statistical rates of each version.

Don't Avoid Experiments and Optimization - Performance Marketing
Don’t Avoid Experiments and Optimization – Performance Marketing

Testing and measurement is the most valuable point of performance marketing. Because here we can determine what we call “performance” only by testing and measuring. In that case, you should not hesitate to constantly experiment in the digital world, to obtain new data and to optimize in the light of this data.

Work with a Strong and Professional Agency

Performance marketing represents the full visibility of your business in the digital world. Every detail, from social media content strategy to search engine advertising, from SEO operations to commercial films, is evaluated under the framework of performance marketing. Therefore, you need to make an agreement with an institution to carry out these works of your business.

It is important to make sure that the marketing agency you choose is completely transparent about growth and marketing data. Otherwise, you may be spending a really high amount of money on a strategy that does not actually work at all, or you may be gradually losing a position while still offering a high budget to this company. It will be very important for the company to regularly provide you with a progress report and share the results with you by running certain growing experiments. Considering all this, an extremely successful operation can be carried out.

Don’t neglect to be compilant

Keep up with the requirements of the new age and benefit from the latest technologies with a great compliance. The steps you will take with the right content and ad language strategies on the right social media channels will provide you with excellent conversion rates. Remember, it is possible to experiment and achieve better step by step this way. But during these experiments, you have to be smart and set your steps correctly. For example, an outdated profile that is not managed in accordance with the requirements of the new era, does not contain IGTV videos and reels, will not have enough strong statistics in performance marketing metrics. So, in order to make sure that the data is going well as a result of optimizations, you must first make sure that you have a marketing process that adapts to the requirements of the diameter. Otherwise, the process can be much more difficult.

Nowadays, it may make sense to get help and consultancy services from agencies that follow the latest trends in your marketing and advertising processes in order to be compliant. Remember that being a Compilant is invaluable not only for numerical results, but also for your brand identity in the eyes of your customers.

Be ROI-Driven

Remember that the activities you do in the name of marketing and advertising today are a kind of investment for your brand or company. The efficiency you get from this investment means your direct sales rates and your reputation. Today, the best way to measure whether the investment is successful enough or not is to follow the return you get from it. So what does it mean to ROI-driven processes and to organize a marketing process as ROI-driven?

First, let’s tell what ROI means: Return of investment. In other words, we call the return of investment from an investment you make and spend money.

Return of investment
Return of investment

Performance marketing is a method that basically aims to maximize your return of investment and accordingly encourages you to analyze the various steps of marketing. For example, an ad is shown to a total of 100 people and you get 5 clicks in total? Your analysis with performance marketing metrics gives you clues on how to increase this number to 10. Results, by maximizing your click thought rate, you will not only increase your quality score, but also give your ads an excellent increase in ROI rates.

Goals of Performance Marketing

So what are the most important goals of performance marketing? In other words, what methods is performance marketing done?

Increasing website traffic

When you do performance marketing correctly, you can increase your website traffic and turn your audience into your visitors. The easiest way to do this is to increase your digital visibility. Performance marketing strategies tell you what to do to increase your digital visibility.

Repeat visits

A user may have entered your site because they saw an advertisement or accidentally clicked on a link. In this case, this visitor is not considered your “customer”. But if this person visits your site repeatedly more than once, then we are talking about a “customer acquisition”. Customer acquisition takes place through regular visits and purchases. Many details, from the contact of your site to call-to-actions, will be important in turning a visitor into a customer. Under these conditions, you can easily see what your site has achieved and at what points it encounters various shortcomings. Regular analysis and various web site tracking tools will help you in this regard.

Screpy, thanks to its advanced infrastructure, allows you to analyze all the problems on your site and what you need to do for shortcomings.

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