Performance marketing is coming in to its own…

Ellie Edwards, MD at QUISMA, says performance marketing offers clients better ways to make their online spend work harder…

Before the chocolate-fuelled fun of Easter you may remember that the IAB and PwC put out research showing that advertising on the internet increased by 14.4% to a new high of £4,784 million in 2011, up £687 million year-on-year.

However, what I thought was particularly interesting was that the figures also showed that the finance sector was the biggest online advertising spender (ahead of fast-moving consumer goods, then retail, followed by entertainment and the media, then technology).

This research – added to the fact that online spend has now overtaken print – shows that clients from sectors that are not traditionally known for being savvy to new forms of advertising, are not just prepared to invest in online advertising, that they now inherently understand the vast array of tools that can affect their ROI.

And these clients are becoming savvier and demanding more transparency and accountability from their advertising – this is, of course, something that online has always been strong in so a move to more performance-based marketing is just a natural progression.

Add to this the economic pressures of a recession that seems to have been going on for years and marketers are now scrutinising the delivery of their marketing channels more closely.

The increase in RTB – both in the number of impressions traded and the players able to do it – also mean that budgets can be moved around more freely. This means agencies need to vastly increase their offer to make sure they keep up with their clients’ demands – and the reason why in the past couple of months three agency groups have launched performance marketing arms to satisfy this need – QUISMA (and our Group M owner) being one of these.

In its simplest form performance marketing means making sure our client’s online marketing drives the best ROI by putting the right ad in front of the right person at the right time.

It basically uses technology (often bespoke) to track and communicate with the consumer across the whole customer journey – including offline, a development that is comparatively new to the UK market and a very specialised skill .

There are many facets of performance marketing, from performance-based display advertising through to affiliate marketing and search. Working with a client you can use tools such as re-targeting and dynamic creative optimisation all in a real time environment, which can better empower you to take the clients budget and distribute it through any of these channels to deliver optimum sales.

With the proliferation of so many marketing tools the industry has become increasingly fragmented. Clients are crying out for multi-channel tracking and reporting, as well as the optimisation of online campaigns in real time alongside understanding and strategically using the complete customer journey. While they understand the stages of the customer journey and that to properly optimise their online advertising they need to look at a huge array of tools, they also need efficient tracking and analytics. To do this across a number of relationships can become complicated and time-consuming, which is where performance marketing comes its own.

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