Below we present 5 performance marketing truths to challenge some commonly accepted ideas in the marketing community.
Maybe you disagree or partially disagree with some. Maybe you already believe in some of them.
Let’s take a look.
1) Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) isn’t everything
As a performance marketer, “lowering the CAC” is your mantra.
To make a business work, the long-term value (LTV) of a customer needs to exceed the CAC.
However, this can have some side effects:
a) Not all customers are created equal: Optimizing for the right customer can increase your CAC, but your LTV will be higher.
What’s better?
A customer that you can acquire for $100 but has an LTV of $120, or a customer that costs $500 to acquire but an LTV of $800?
b) Increasing media spend can eventually increase the CAC. But the upside to this, hopefully, is that it generates more revenue for your business.
2) Don’t make your account and campaign structure everything
If your campaign doesn’t have the basic marketing fundamentals, even the most advanced setup won’t do you any good.
Don’t overcomplicate anything. Work on the fundamentals and go from there.
3) Don’t evaluate your marketing efforts based on last-click attribution
You can’t get an accurate measure of channel performance by looking at your source report.
Last click attribution may not give you the full picture.
For example, your social ads might pique the curiosity of your prospects. So they do more research on Google, either through a branded search ad or organic.
You might think the social ads aren’t performing as well as the Google ads. But in reality, the social ads are doing much better than just based on how prospects behave.
It would be a mistake to take the data literally and allocate more toward branded Google search and spend less on the Facebook, Instagram, or other social ads.
The customer journey is not exactly linear. You won’t be able to evaluate your marketing channels only based on the last touchpoint.
You’re really building an entire ecosystem.
4) Don’t rely on data from a single channel
Google Ads and Facebook Ads attribute conversions to their campaigns based on last interaction within their ecosystem.
They won’t split the conversion value between them if they both played a part in it or have any way of knowing how much “credit” each platform deserves.
And when you raise the budget, both channels will claim the same additional conversion.
You can use incremental testing to work around this problem. Moreover, you can put more budget toward prospecting.
5) View your marketing ecosystem as more than the sum of its parts
Tracking gets harder with the gradual loss of third-party cookies.
Your marketing machine is made up of many moving parts. But the result is greater than the sum of its individual channels.
Accordingly, leaning on blended numbers is a better way to make decisions, especially considering the previous two points made in this article.
Read more: Which ad platforms are more trustworthy and innovative?
