Performance Marketing: 10 Things I’ve Learned after 10 Years of experience and More than 20m€ spending in e-commerce

The holiday season gives you (sometimes) plenty of time to create and consume content.

I thought this was the right time to share 10 things I learned in 10 years of hands-on experience in performance marketing and after spending more than 20m€ across paid media channels. This experience comes from working for some of the best omnichannel retailers in Greece, in the Sports Fashion and Consumer Electronics industries.

If I had known them when I made my first steps into performance marketing, I would have done many things differently.

Let’s go!

#1 Naming Convention

Without proper naming in account structure for campaigns, ad groups, etc, optimization, reporting, and analysis become a headache. It has always helped me to maintain a consistent naming convention across platforms, such as “S_blabla” for Search campaigns in Google Ads (respectively “D_blabla” for Display campaigns) or “Commercial_” for commercial always-on campaigns in Meta. Keep the naming convention simple and magic will happen.

#2 Sorry, but you don’t (always) get the credits for ROAS

They told me so, but as a “newcomer,” I always defended the team’s work in ROAS optimization, considering that any improvement in the index was purely due to performance marketing optimization actions. Before you celebrate with the agency (or celebrate by yourself), you have to know that ROAS in retail is highly dependent on dozens of other factors such as Pricing (markups), UX/UI (a simple improvement in the checkout can sky-rocket ROAS without doing nothing), Content (filters, sorting, merchandising) and seasonalities (Black Friday or paydays have traditionally better ROAS than other common days). Thus, the modern performance marketer (and not the simple media buyer) has to know how to influence the external factors that have a strong effect on ROAS and after-visit metrics (onsite engagement rate, etc).

#3 Performance marketing is not Google Ads or Meta Ads

Sorry, this is not performance marketing. Performance marketing has nothing to do with someone who spends 8/8 of working hours inside a platform and messes with bids and keywords. Performance marketing is all about going deep and understanding how UX/UI works, commercial seasonalities, competition, technology trends, the industry itself, and all the business pain points. It’s about knowing the product, and its lifecycle (it’s one thing to do performance marketing in the fashion industry and another in consumer electronics). It’s about spotting new, profitable revenue opportunities (eg new revenue streams) and hacks that will move the revenue needle (eg going and planting an offer on a high-traffic bargain-hunting site). How many agencies, consultants, and individuals are doing real performance marketing out there based on all the above factors?

#4 Don’t blindly follow what the “known” representatives (Ads providers & agencies) say

Let’s face it, we’re BigTech’s experiment rats. “Load campaigns with broad keywords, throw everything into Smart Shopping, run Reach and Frequency campaigns,” and “do this — do that” b***it. I have been experiencing the development of Performance Marketing for 10 years, I have always been an early adopter of technologies, but many times this early adoption did me harm — rather than good. Think, test, measure. The agencies have a reason they also recommend the adoption of new things. This is because they are evaluated by the Ads Providers (eg Google), on how their clients adopt the new offerings from them. They also get rebates on spending or other benefits based on this evaluation. I don’t want to be the “bad traditional guy” here, I’m not saying don’t innovate — I’m saying think about implementing.

#5 Master how the environment around advertising works

Performance marketing is a culture, a mindset, and a complex of things. Only a few know how the bidding auction works, how cookies and GDPR work, and how tagging and tracking work. Will these things help you perform better? maybe yes, but maybe no. Even if they don’t help you greatly improve the KPIs you are targeting, it will be a great opportunity to learn something that only 10% of performance marketers know. Think of being an economist in Greece, but not knowing the economic trends and risks at a global level. This knowledge will help you discover new ways of development, prevent risks, and find synergies in technologies and new business opportunities.

#6 Constantly look for new opportunities, data, and insights

The data that exists around the performance marketing ecosystem is infinite. Platforms alone (eg Google Ads, Meta) have hundreds of metrics and dimensions. Tools like SEMrush, SimilarWeb, and ScreamingFrog can offer you so much more. Thousands of data & insights live in your company’s ERP. This ecosystem of data requires a lot of experience and effort to be able to connect data from different sources to make decisions and monitor the competition or the market. Again, get off the platforms and search, search, search.

#7 Spend a minimum of 1 hour every day to read and learn

Our industry is cursed. It evolves every day, it is influenced by everything out there technologically, and it runs at a pace faster than we run as professionals. This creates the need for continuous learning and updating. Open a Feedly account, enter blogs and media sites you want to follow, and spend 1 hour a day reading even the headlines.

#8 The more you know about the competition, the better

I won’t go into it any further, but for better or worse, however romantic we may be, you need to look more useful to your company than another professional does as a performance marketer for your competitor. Knowing (to the extent possible) what is happening on the other side can result in a winning factor in some areas (no, performance marketing is not gonna win you the war, but some battles). But this does not mean that we constantly look at what the competition is doing, because then we will fall into the trap of following instead of innovating.

#9 Learn the platforms as best as possible

The product capabilities of Google Ads, Meta Ads, etc are not accidental. Scripts, Keyword Planner, Campaign Planner, Reporting. There are dozens of features within platforms that are there for a reason. For example, with Google Ads Scripts you can do amazing things, with Meta Planner you can plan campaigns much better and calculate goals more efficiently. Unfortunately, based on research, we only use 15–25% of the tools that are generously given to us (if they are paid, even worse). Those who master the platforms will dominate.

10. Curiosity, mentorship, fear of testing

Curiosity in our industry is a good thing, mentorship (learning from someone else, regardless of what you’re learning) is magical. The calculated lack of fear to test, to try, to fail is fantastic. Ask questions, ask the people around you — it doesn’t matter if they’re in Sales, if they’re in IT if they’re in Finance — and sit down with them and see how they work and what their concerns are. Do a/b testing, try new platforms, and new features. Try doing analyses without being asked, just to see what comes out. Look for courses, ask for advice, and learn without thinking you know it all.

Finally, some quickies:

• SKAG made businesses rich, and profitable and built the “brand name” of many professionals, I don’t understand its aphorism lately, but for me it still works like a charm!
• Ad Quality Score by Karooya (Google Ads Script), I wonder why they provide this “magic tool” for free.
• ROAS does not mean anything without visibility at the margin, the sooner everyone understands this the faster we will move forward as an industry.
• Don’t say yes to anything without testing it, let the founder of Google himself come and tell you.
• If you don’t have a daily report on (at least) Revenue, Cost, and ROAS per paid media channel, you are doing something wrong.
• Everything is interconnected, when you are looking for why something fell or rose, look “around”, you will find it.
• 1st party data, don’t forget them.
• Cart Abandonment, I hope you know how many days the Cookie keeps the products in the cart.
• GA4, do your best to learn how they work. You will save a lot of risks and grumbling in your company.
• Try sitting at the same coffee/food table with IT, Content, and Commercial, you’ll remember me.

Thanks for reading, don't hesitate to drop me a message at my LinkedIn profile even to say a “hi.”