Dan Reardon

Ideally, you integrate 3 views: * Incremental revenue that each campaign generates * Halo impact to your revenue from each campaign (you might have to settle for channel level) * Direct Attribution that is the most granular, including creative level

Saturation seems unavoidable, like a law of physics. As your performance advertising reaches the point of saturation in a specific channel, your next marginal conversion becomes more and more expensive. You'll want to diversify your performance marketing channel mix when you detect you're reaching saturation. In fact, you'll make the best investment decisions when you plan for saturation by building out marginal cost curves. Ideally, you begin to identify the levels at which your performance marketing spend delivers diminished returns. You spend at those levels to capture existing demand, and divert other advertising investment away from pure performance marketing into "creating demand" through awareness and brand campaigns.

Comparing your recent results to your historical results is the most actionable benchmarking. Once you start to compare your results to a competitor's, who might be a different size or spending at a very different volume, you won't get a fair comparison. Even less fair when you benchmark between categories/industries. The most valuable move is to focus on benchmarketing against your own past results. To do, you have to make it super easy to access those results. Build a dashboard to look at current and past results: CPMs, CTRs, CPAs. With a dashboard, see trends season-to-season, quarter-to-quarter, and year-over-year. Don't keep your data trapped in disparate platforms and tools, but unlock the value of your own data.

"Set and forget" is the old way of running campaigns. But media planning is dynamic, now that you can track performance. Respond to what's working well and what's not to optimize....you'll drive better ROI and you'll learn about what resonates with customers so you can refine creative and messaging too.

Ideally, you customize your message based on signals on ad platforms--someone who already actively shops in your category, for example, may not need basic education and so the ad can focus on other value props. You can test two approaches. Publish campaigns with different creative to target customers "in category" vs others and let Meta and Google's algorithm find the right customers for you. Build separate campaigns with tailored creative and target audiences more manually in the tools. These campaigns may not scale as well, but this test approach will allow you to understand performance trade offs between relying on ad platform "black boxes" and doing your own careful targeting.

Set your performance marketing goals based on two things: your unit economics & high-level business goals. For example, are you expected to acquire new customers at a profit with their first transaction (challenging!), or at a 12-month break even (CAC equal to the average first 12-month customer life time value)? This is something you should align with finance, so that marketing's efforts are in lock-step with overall company plans. For example, your company might have switched focus to profits now, after a period of espousing high growth. I experienced this at NBCU's Vudu business. That means the goals for your performance marketing will change, and have an impact on your channel mix and overall execution.