When people ask me what I do for a living, the briefest explanation I can give is that I’m an “internet marketer”. What does that mean exactly? It means that I focus all advertising efforts in the digital online realm rather than through traditional media such as print, TV and radio advertising. But what about the “performance” aspect? Let me explain…
Many people who are not familiar with the performance based marketing model have difficulty understanding the “performance” aspect. In traditional brand marketing, an advertiser hopes to increase awareness of the company’s brand along with the benefits of the product of service offered. Hopefully those efforts results in sales, but these methods are difficult to measure since awareness and perception of benefits are so subjective. The only means available might be measuring total advertising dollars spent vs. total revenue. This is too broad. Unfortunately, with traditional forms of media, the advertiser will continue to be in the dark.
With performance based internet marketing, it is very easy to measure the results of advertising efforts’ impact on sales. With digital advertising, we have the ability to place tracking information on web pages that would only be served to a user once the user has completed some kind of action such as:
- Filling out a lead form.
- Downloading an app.
- Completing a sale.
This tracking information allows performance based marketers to measure, in great detail, the results of advertising dollars spent. It all happens the moment a user clicks on an online advertisement. The clicks is recorded along with the day, time, type of device, ISP, which advertisement, which page the user was on, what keyword or targeting that triggered the ad, etc. With all of this information available to the marketer, it becomes easier to fine tune the ad copy, ad images, and targeting so that the advertising dollars spent produce a positive return on investment.
Many companies who are only familiar with traditional brand awareness are surprised to find out just how large the performance based marketing industry has become. They learn that instead of buying clicks to their website, they can instead only pay for new customers while letting “internet marketers” do the heavy lifting for them. And.. they are happy to do it!
The performance marketing industry opened my eyes to vast groups of highly intelligent people who are driven by a common goals. It has allowed me to travel the world and make new friends with people I would have never had the opportunity to meet otherwise. I am constantly striving to learn more about the latest trends in performance based marketing. New customers are the life blood of any business and providing those customers is what we do.
