As of 2022, the global digital advertising market is valued at $571.16 billion. Data from Statista
shows that this figure will continue rising and is expected to reach $646 billion by 2024. More
businesses are adopting digital marketing because of how effective it is when compared to
traditional marketing strategies.
Performance marketing is among the most effective digital marketing strategies that marketers and
business owners have adopted in the last couple of years. Effectively implementing this strategy
requires one to use a reliable performance marketing platform.
In this article, we will discuss everything you need to know about performance marketing, including
how to choose the right performance marketing platform, and some of the best platforms to get
started with.
Let’s jump right into it!
What is Performance Marketing?
It is a digital marketing strategy that drives the results. With this strategy, affiliates and
marketing companies are paid only when the desired result is achieved. Some of the common results
considered with this strategy include a completed sale, a lead, a download, a click, and many more.
The desired result usually depends on the kind of product being marketed and what the advertiser
wants to achieve. For example, if you are marketing a mobile app, your desired result would either
be a click or an install. So, if you hire an advertising company to run this campaign, you will pay
them depending on the number of app installs you get.
Marketers use performance marketing platforms to track these results. These platforms keep track of
and analyze a campaign's data points, including leads, clicks, conversions, bounce rates, and many
more. This data can then be used to determine whether there is a need to make changes in how the ad
campaign is being run.
There are several performance marketing platforms today, and the challenge most marketers find is
choosing which one to use. Let’s discuss some of the key factors you have to look at while choosing
a performance marketing platform to use in your next advertising campaign.
1. Pricing
Of course, you need to choose a performance marketing platform that doesn’t
exceed your budget. Take time to look at the different packages that each of these platforms
offers and choose one that won’t strain your bank account. However, don’t compromise other
aspects of the platform in the name of getting the cheapest offer.
You need to first look into the other factors we are about to share and then
choose one that has the right balance between the features you need and its price. Don’t forget
to look at the different pricing plans that the platform offers. Ensure there is a possibility
of upgrading to a more feature-rich plan as your business scales. It is also important to note
that most platforms will offer you a significant discount if you subscribe for longer periods.
2. Free trial or demonstration
You can’t just pay your money without testing what the software can do. Most of
the top-rated performance marketing platforms give their users the option of trying out their
tools before committing to subscribe for a month or a year.
🛈
Offer18 provides a 30-day free trial
where users get the opportunity to explore all the advanced features without any usage
limitations.
So, make sure you test everything about the software during this period. On top
of the trial period, some performance marketing platforms also have a money-back guarantee that
you can take advantage of in case you are not satisfied with their product. So, always choose a
platform that gives you the chance to easily opt-out if their product doesn’t meet your
expectations.
3. Online reviews and ratings
Before you commit to subscribing to any performance marketing platform, it is important to take
time and find out what the current and previous users of the platform have to say about it.
There are several review websites that you can check out to get a clear picture of the
experience other users have with the platforms.
Check out 3 to 5 review sites before making a conclusion because some of these
platforms pay to get good reviews. The number of reviews also matters, so don’t just look at the
average rating. For example, a platform with an average of 4.7 stars and 1,000 reviews would be
a safer option than one with 4.9 stars and 50 reviews. So, look at all the metrics before you
decide.
4. Customer service and support
In the course of using any online platform, there will always be those times when you need help
to figure out something. That is why it is important to choose a performance marketing platform
with reliable customer support. Of course, it is hard to tell whether a platform has reliable
customer support before you use it and engage its support team.
However, most of the review platforms give users the option to rate a platform based on various
parameters, including customer support. So, go through the different review platforms to find
out how the current and previous users of a certain performance marketing platform rate its
customer support.
5. Third-party integration
One of the major advantages of web tools is their ability to share data with other platforms in
order to enhance their functionality. As you choose a performance marketing platform, it is
important to look at the other web tools and platforms that it integrates with. A performance
marketing platform that integrates with most of the current business tools you are using should
be the best option.
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A reliable performance marketing
platform should be able to integrate with most of your marketing tools, including your email
and social media marketing tools, payment gateways, and a lot more.
6. Other notable features
You also need to ensure the platform has other notable features beyond the basics. Some of these
features may include analysis, tracking, and automation capabilities. You should also ensure
that its user interface is user-friendly. These features could have a huge impact on your
overall user experience with the platform.
1.Real-time feedback about the performance of the campaign
With these platforms, you will get real-time data about your ads and then
decide whether there is a need to change something or not. This could save you a lot of money
and time that you would otherwise waste on marketing campaigns that do not yield results. It is
also great for your customer’s first experience with your brand.
Getting feedback about an ad campaign that is not performing well will prompt
you to make changes like replacing the ad image with a more appealing one or using a catchier
caption. In the end, the next potential customers that view or interact with this ad will have a
better experience, which will increase their likelihood of taking action.
2. They make it easy to perform A/B tests
A/B testing is still one of the tested ways to choose the best way to structure
your campaigns for the best results. A reliable performance marketing platform will make it much
faster for you to figure out the best format to present your ads to your target customers since
you will have real-time data from each. So, you should be able to figure out the ad format that
will perform best within a short period of running the ads.
3. Integration with other platforms and software
Performance marketing platforms integrate with other web tools to enhance their
functionality. This makes it much easier to create an ecosystem of business tools that
communicate with each other. When all your business tools are communicating, your marketing,
sales, and customer support teams will no longer have to manually import data from one tool to
another, which will significantly enhance their productivity.
4. They ease goal setting for the next campaigns
Before you run any marketing campaign, the very first step is to set goals for
what you intend to achieve by the end of the campaign. With performance marketing platforms, you
can easily track the results of your campaign. This makes it much easier to set goals for your
next marketing campaigns since you have data to base them on.
5. Makes it easy to assess your marketing efforts
With a performance marketing platform, you will get all the performance metrics
of a given ad campaign, making it easy to know if the campaign was a success or not. If you have
a marketing team, using a performance marketing platform will make it much easier to evaluate
their performance after each marketing campaign.
6. Brings all the useful campaign data to one place
While running a marketing campaign, it is important to have real-time data
about how it is performing on various platforms. With a performance marketing tool, you can view
all this data from a single dashboard, which makes it easier to make decisions on how best to
optimize the campaign on the different platforms.
These tools will also save you the hustle of having to jump from one platform
to another trying to look for the feedback you need to optimize the campaigns. It is also much
easier to view and compare the performance of a specific campaign on the different platforms,
which could be crucial in determining which platforms to prioritize in your future campaigns.
7. They enhance collaboration among teams
Most performance marketing tools have collaboration features that make it easy
for team members to collaborate on marketing campaigns. So, everyone on the team can make their
contribution to the campaign while monitoring the impact it creates in real-time. Supervisors
and managers can also use these tools to track the performance of their team members.
8. Protection against fraudulent acts by affiliates
We can’t deny the fact that a lot of elements from the dark web have
infiltrated the affiliate marketing industry and are trying all ways to get artificially
generated clicks in order to earn affiliate commissions. The good news is that we have some
robust affiliate tools that can detect such activities and flag them for further investigation.
Every business that relies on digital marketing to communicate and interact with
its target audience will at some point need to use performance marketing software. Using performance
marketing tools enables any business to make better marketing decisions going forward since they
already have all the data from the previous campaigns.
These tools are even needed more by businesses that use affiliate marketing as a
strategy to generate more sales. Most performance marketing tools will help you track all the
sources of traffic to your website, making it easy to accurately allocate commissions to your
different affiliates.
The role of performance marketing software gives you all the data you need
regarding how the campaigns you are running on various social platforms are performing. It is your
job to look at this data and use it to make decisions that will improve the campaigns.
There are some performance marketing tools that will also offer you suggestions on
what you can do to further optimize your campaigns and get better results. However, the final
decision to implement these changes lies in your hands.
Another important thing that you need to note is that most of these tools will only
get access to information on the platforms you have given them access to. So, the first thing you
need to do when setting up your performance marketing tool is to give it access to all the platforms
you use to run your various marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Offer18 covers all the basics you will need to get started with performance
marketing. One of the most important things you need to do is take your time to choose a performance
marketing platform that suits the needs of your business. We shared a few of them that you can
consider, but there are several others that you can look into depending on what you intend to
accomplish.
Choosing the right platform will satisfy all of your analytics requirements, and
you can rely on it to make better future-oriented decisions, which will contribute to your company's
overall success.