Photo by Jason MichaelWhat is Performance Marketing
Lets define Performance Marketing: the practice of targeted marketing to generate consumer behavior. The behavior may be a purchase, registration, click, forward something to a friend, download a white paper, click a chicklet, etc.. In this vision, the big difference in branding, is that it aims to generate a positive attitude toward the brand, and then moves the attitude/outlook to become a particular behavior.
Performance Internet Marketing, is the most interactive and measurable marketing known today! The Performance component in the phrase is the measurement and then optimization to maximize the actions that the user will take, rooted within a campaign.
Long Term Vision
Performance Marketing is focused on clicks and conversions, all the attention, and performance evaluation deals with not just the immediate effects but long term outcome of a campaign and branding strategy as well. A good campaign is fully focused on the long term. In fact, if what is being promoted are records or leads, when calculating the maximum Cost Per Acquisition [CPA] thinking about the Lifetime Value or value of a customer for the lifetime of the product, service or upgrade path is crucial in evaluating the true value of a given campaign.
There are brands that have performance marketing campaigns with the concept of “always on” (always valid), those that manage to not only measure the outcome of each dollar they invest, but also create a permanent brand presence and achieve indirectly the positioning or what you would understand as the mindset of the user. That’s thinking long term!
The brand-building work
The success of such campaigns rests largely on knowledge and attitude that the audience has towards the brand. How to achieve this? Through scheduled performance optimization and user experience enhancement through every step of the funnel. Brand positioning, is the set of attributes with which the individual associates the target product/service, is the result of communication you do, whatever the medium.
Performance Marketing campaigns are a proposal for valuable content to consumers, giving the user increasing brand recognition and the marketer the methodological analysis of the users response and response time.
Let’s talk about metrics
When measuring conversions, usually attributed to the success of the medium that last sent the user to the site that generated the action we measure. If I do click on a banner of a newspaper, I interact with a brand of computers, and 7 days later recalling that experience decide to buy a netbook searching on Google. The analytics will show and attribute the sale to Google and not the newspaper. This is a problem called conversion attribution. How do you measure what actually triggered the users actions?
Photo by pangalactic gargleblasterI believe that the “last cookie wins” is the least worse of attributing results discovered so far. C3 Metrics is a media tracking system which claims to prevent over payment, corrects Google’s inherent tracking flaw and properly attributes credit beyond the last click. C3 uses what they call an Attribution Gateway. Maybe Engagement Mapping ends up being a proposal that surpasses the last click, as it suggests. It will not be easy to do in a uniform and comparable way among different media, we will know in time if they can implement their Gateway successfully.