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.
Performance Marketing Platform
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.
What to Consider While Choosing a Performance Marketing Platform
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 demonstrationYou 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 ratingsBefore 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 supportIn 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 integrationOne 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.
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.
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.
Benefits of Using a Performance Marketing Platform
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 testsA/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 softwarePerformance 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 campaignsBefore 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 effortsWith 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 placeWhile 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 teamsMost 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 affiliatesWe 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.
Who Needs to Use Performance Marketing Software?
Every business that relies on digital marketing to communicate and interact with its target audience will at some point need to use performance tracking 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.
Best Way to Get The Most Out of Any Performance Marketing Software
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 marketing data analytics requirements, and you can rely on it to make better future-oriented decisions, which will contribute to your company's overall success.
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