Performance marketing platform has become the treasure that the Internet marketing market proudly carries. Over the past years, many clever words have been said, new technologies and theoretical concepts have been introduced. Performance marketing software advertisers are completely confused: what if what they were doing before was not a “performance”? To understand the question, it is necessary to gather experts from the ecommerce marketing platform “for” and “against” camps, give them a microphone and make sure that the dialogue does not turn into a frank fight.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: today there is no single generally accepted understanding of the term ‘performance marketing’. Everyone puts his own concept into this thing: some – a general approach to organizing a marketing mix on the Internet, others – a transition from quantitative to qualitative indicators of efficiency, and others are confused with new features of auction advertising procurement using RTB and programmatic. Under current conditions, it is worthwhile to move from theory to practice.
There are several barriers that hinder the growth of performance marketing.
The opacity of the market. There is still a share of contractors who do not disclose the tools and the specific type of advertising messages. Accordingly, the pricing remains unclear. There are situations when ads in the context of the same brand compete with each other. One is the official one, which is placed through the context agency, and the second is the one, which is placed without the consent of the lead generator. This leads, as a rule, to an increase in the average cost of a click.
Lack of the expertise on the client’s side. Working with an advertising campaign when paying for effective user actions requires a high level of professionalism and well-functioning work on the client side. It is necessary to very accurately describe audience segments, define and adjust campaign goals, accumulate and analyze statistics, compare results with sales, constantly monitor and optimize conversion at each stage of the sales funnel. E-commerce companies are constantly experimenting, learning on their mistakes and trying to progress quickly. But managers of companies in which digital is not yet playing a leading role are more difficult. It is difficult to allocate a sufficient amount of time for self-study for tasks of not the first priority.
Technology. The consequence of the previous paragraph is the lack of development of technology performance marketing. A critical mass of customers has not yet formed the demand to create the most advanced and accurate technologies and market players are not ready to seriously invest, seeing no guarantees that investments will quickly repay. Even the largest sites are just taking the first steps in the auction purchases of advertising but there is still a lot of work to be done for performance marketing.
You do not need all Internet users but only potential buyers. If the advertising platform does not know how to target users with a high probability of each type of target action separately – you pay for users who will never buy anything from you. Improve it, work and earn more!