One digital marketing strategy stands out above the rest for its precision, accountability and results - performance marketing.
Unlike traditional marketing efforts, where success is measured by impressions or brand awareness, performance marketing means businesses only pay for tangible results, like clicks, leads, or sales. For instance, fintech companies often leverage performance marketing to drive app downloads or customer sign-ups, where success is tracked through measurable actions such as completed registrations or funding an account.
This approach combines data-driven insights with targeted strategies, such as search engine optimisation, to create campaigns that deliver real, tangible results.
Whether you’re a business looking to scale, a marketer eager to optimise campaigns, or simply curious to how modern advertising works, we’ll walk you through all you need to know.
Get ready to explore its channels, strategies, and benefits - learning why it’s a game-changer for businesses!
Performance marketing, also known as pay-for-performance advertising, is a digital marketing strategy that zeroes in on measurable results and return on investment (ROI).
Unlike traditional marketing methods, where success is often gauged by reach or impressions, performance marketing ensures that advertisers pay marketing companies or advertising platforms only when specific actions or outcomes are achieved. These actions can include clicks, leads, sales, or conversions, making performance marketing a highly efficient and results-driven approach.
Performance marketing has its roots in traditional direct response strategies, which aim to drive immediate, measurable responses through persuasive messaging and clear calls to action. The term “performance marketing” was coined in the mid-1990s, marking the beginning of a new era in advertising.
Over the years, performance marketing has evolved to encompass a wide range of digital marketing channels, including social media advertising, affiliate marketing, email marketing and search engine marketing (SEM). This evolution has allowed businesses to leverage data and technology to create highly targeted and effective marketing campaigns.
The core difference between brand marketing and performance marketing lies in their objectives.
Performance marketing focuses on measurable business goals. Advertisers pay only when specific actions are completed, and campaigns are continuously optimised to improve performance.
For example, fintech apps like Robinhood may use performance marketing to acquire active traders, emphasising results-driven metrics like funded accounts or trade volume.
In contrast, brand marketing aims to drive key metrics such as brand awareness, convey a brand message, and create a rapport with new customers. While marketing campaigns can still be tracked and measured, the focus is not on immediate actions but on long-term brand recognition and consumer perception.
While affiliate and performance marketing are closely related, they are not the same.
Performance marketing is a broader term that encapsulates any digital marketing strategy where advertisers only pay when a specific action is completed.
Affiliate marketing, on the other hand, is a specific type of performance marketing. It involves affiliates promoting a business’ products or services, earning commission based on the actions that a customer takes, such as making a purchase or filling out a form.
Affiliates typically use channels such as websites, blogs, or social media to promote products or services, and performance marketers pay them for their efforts.
Fintech companies often adopt affiliate marketing by partnering with personal finance blogs or influencers who promote their platforms and earn commissions for every new user sign-up.
The biggest difference between performance marketing and affiliate marketing is that performance marketing campaigns are far more active and iterative, with performance marketers continuing to refine and optimise their approach. Whereas affiliate marketing is often more passive, with affiliates promoting products based on pre-set conditions defined by the business.
Unlike traditional advertising, where success is often gauged by reach or impressions, performance marketing focuses on tangible actions that directly contribute to business goals.
For example, PayPal uses performance marketing to target small businesses by offering referral incentives. Each new business that signs up generates trackable revenue and enhances user acquisition goals.
One of the main benefits of performance marketing is its cost-effectiveness. Businesses only pay when specific actions are completed, ensuring that the marketing budget is efficiently spent. The cost-per-click model minimises waste and maximises ROI by aligning marketing spend with tangible business outcomes.
Additionally, performance marketing efforts are highly measurable and data-driven, allowing businesses to track and analyse metrics in real time. This oversight makes it easier for performance marketers to optimise strategies, refine the target audience, and continue to improve results.
For businesses looking to scale quickly and effectively, performance marketing offers a strategic approach that delivers both immediate and long-term benefits.
By focusing on customer acquisition and conversions, businesses can grow their customer base while staying in control of their marketing budget and efforts.
Performance marketing involves three key players.
Retailers or merchants are businesses looking to promote their products and services through affiliate partners or “publishers.” These businesses outline their campaign goals and seek out affiliate partners to help achieve them. Retailers pay affiliates based on the successful completion of these goals, such as driving sales or acquiring new customers. By investing in performance marketing, retailers can drive significant sales, gain new customers and achieve real-time ROI.
Affiliates or publishers act as the “marketing partners” in performance marketing. They can take various forms, such as coupon websites, product review sites, blogs, and mobile apps. Influencers who promote brands and products through their blog posts, social groups, and social channels are also considered affiliates. These partners use their platforms and influence to enhance the performance of the retailer, driving traffic and conversions through their promotional efforts.
Affiliate networks or third-party tracking platforms provide a centralised hub for information and tools, such as banners, text links, product feeds, promotions, and payouts. These networks and platforms facilitate the relationship between merchants and affiliates, allowing them to create strategic commission structures, issue bonuses, send newsletters, and handle returns. Leading affiliate networks and tracking platforms include Partnerize, Commission Junction, AWIN, Impact, Avantlink, PepperJam, and Rakuten Advertising.
By understanding the roles of these key players, businesses can better navigate the complex landscape of digital marketing and create effective performance marketing campaigns that drive real results.
Advertisers put their advertisements on top-performance marketing channels, and they pay based on how the ad performs.
There are a few different ways to pay when it comes to performance marketing:
Advertisers pay for display advertising, in the form of a banner ad, to be displayed on websites that are relevant to the product or service being promoted.
Display ad campaigns are often paid per impression, click, or acquisition.
Native advertising leverages the natural appearance of a website to promote sponsored content.
Native ads are an effective performance marketing strategy as they allow the sponsored content to blend seamlessly in with organic content on the site.
More often than not, readers won't be able to differentiate between organic and paid content, allowing the brand to be promoted in a way that feels natural.
However, it's important to note that in most countries, publications have a regulatory requirement to disclose that content is sponsored.
Content marketing is all about engaging with the chosen target audience. It is one of the most budget-friendly digital marketing strategies, costing 62% less than outbound marketing efforts and generating three times the amount of leads.
It focuses on informing, educating, and entertaining users, as well as contextualising the brand. This can be in the form of blogs, eBooks, case studies, social media posts and more.
The goal of content marketing is to attract and convert prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers.
Campaign performance is usually measured through engagement rate, shares, and the number of high-quality leads generated.
Social media offers marketers the opportunity to not only reach users and drive them to the site but also share sponsored content organically, extending its reach far beyond the original post.
Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok offer extensive targeting options that allow advertisers to reach a desired audience.
Social media advertising performance can be tracked by engagements, clicks, impressions and conversion rates.
Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to running advertising campaigns to drive traffic from search engines, such as Google Ads. These ad campaigns tend to be structured based on the keywords they are targeting.
In comparison, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a crucial, unpaid strategy that enhances performance marketing by improving keyword rankings and organic traffic.
In terms of performance marketing, the focus is on cost per click, especially for paid ads on search engines.
However, for organic search engine marketing, performance marketers rely heavily on content marketing and search engine optimised landing pages.
Although search engine optimisation isn’t part of paid activity, it’s a core part of performance marketing. SEO performance can be measured based on ranking keywords, organic traffic, and bounce rates.
Affiliate and influencer marketing are two popular performance marketing strategies used to promote products and drive sales.
In fintech, the likes of Revolut have collaborated with finance YouTubers to promote app features, rewarding them based on app downloads or funded accounts.
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model where affiliates earn a commission for driving traffic or sales to a business through their promotional efforts. Affiliates tend to use channels like blogs, websites, or social media to share links to products or services, earning a percentage of each sale through their referral.
Similarly, influencer marketing involves brands partnering with social media influencers who have a large, engaged audience, which are likely to be potential customers. Influencers promote products or services through stories, posts, or videos, often using promotional codes or affiliate links. The success of their digital advertising efforts is measured by metrics such as clicks, impressions, engagements, and conversions.
Both approaches closely align with performance marketing principles, rewarding partners based on measurable outcomes.
Despite not typically being referred to in conjunction with performance marketing, email marketing campaigns can be performance-driven.
Advertising and marketing agencies may test different subject lines, content, and calls-to-action while reviewing predictive analytics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to optimise the email campaign's performance.
PPC is a type of digital advertising whereby the advertiser pays for every click that leads users to its website. This can be done both on social media platforms and search engines.
The most popular pay-per-click advertising platforms are Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and Amazon Ads.
Platforms like Google Ads are often used by fintech companies like Wise to target international money through high-intent keywords such as 'send money abroad'.
ROI is at the heart of performance marketing campaigns, as every action can be meticulously tracked and measured against key performance indicators (KPIs).
Whether it be the number of clicks, page views, or sales, metrics are the key to measuring and enhancing marketing performance.
Advertisers pay based on the number of times their ad is clicked on. This is often used for paid advertising on social media platforms and paid search marketing to drive traffic to a site.
Impressions are the number of times the advertisement is viewed. In this digital strategy, marketers pay for every thousand views of an ad - for example, for every 55,000 people that view an ad, the base rate would be paid 55 times.
With CPS, payment is taken when a sale is made off the back of an ad. This payment model is often used in influencer marketing.
Similar to cost per sale, payment is made when someone signs up for something, such as a mailing list or webinar. The goal of CPL is to generate leads so they can be nurtured, then ultimately drive sales.
CPA is based on customer acquisition cost; advertisers pay once a customer has made a specific action.
In this analytics model, the 'X' can represent whatever the business defines as the desired action (outside of click, lead, or sale). Other performance marketing examples could include downloads, upsells and rewards programmes.
This metric measures the predicted lifetime value of a customer throughout the entirety of their relationship with a business. Through using predictive analytics, the lifetime value can be estimated how much the customer is likely to spend based on their activity and behaviour.
There are currently no signs of digital marketing slowing down. If advertisers and marketers use performance marketing to their advantage, they are likely to reap the rewards.
One of the many benefits of performance marketing is that it is cost-efficient.
When running a performance marketing campaign, the marketer only pays when a tangible action has been achieved - making it far more cost-effective than other marketing activities.
For instance, digital wallets like Venmo can use performance marketing to acquire users through low-cost referral campaigns, paying only for successful app downloads.
With performance marketing, marketing teams can target specific groups based on location, interests and behaviours.
This capability allows the campaigns to be fine-tuned to niche target audiences, ensuring that the right people see the right ads at the right time.
For performance marketers, results are based on customers completing specific, desired actions.
Metrics like conversion rates, click-through rates, and cost per acquisition can be tracked in real time, allowing marketing companies to quickly evaluate and optimise campaigns.
For fintech Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms, these insights are critical to refine user onboarding strategies and improve customer lifetime value.
If a change of strategy is needed, performance marketing campaigns can be quickly adjusted based on advertising data.
Online marketing activities can be scaled up and down based on business needs with minimal effort.
However, there are a few things to consider when it comes to whether a performance market strategy is right for your business goals.
But if a business is looking to introduce themselves to a large pool of people, it would not be the best strategy to choose.
Performance marketing channels are call-to-action (CTA) driven, which means every advertisement asks the user to complete an action.
For businesses looking to build brand equity, performance marketing could dilute the marketing messages and lead to a lack of audience engagement.
Despite being metric-heavy, performance marketers cannot say with certainty how much revenue their ads drove.
This is primarily due to recent changes in privacy policies, restricting advertisers from seeing actions that customers take.
However, some super savvy marketing agencies have been getting around this by using holistic reporting models built on CAC and CLTV to assist in making campaign decisions.
Being an established marketing agency, we thought we'd share some of our tips and tricks to help elevate performance marketing campaigns.
A bad landing page or offer could deter customers from converting or clicking through. It may also deter partners from wanting to work and promote a brand.
Advertisers must ensure that they have an enticing offer to engage customers with, as well as audit the website to ensure there aren't any technical errors present. The entire user experience should be tested from the landing page to the shopping cart.
We'd recommend regularly updating any audit links, offers, content, and landing pages that are underperforming.
An experienced marketer will know that testing and measuring are the keys to a successful digital marketing strategy.
When it comes to performance marketing, experiment with different techniques and optimisation to best optimise click-through rates, conversion rates, and traffic by conducting A/B testing. This will help gauge a better understanding of what is working and what is not.
It's important to ensure that all traffic is coming from reputable sources. If a less-reputable resource advertises a business, consumers may begin to distrust the brand, deterring them from visiting or shopping with them.
Rather than generating a large amount of low-quality traffic, marketers should partner with affiliates that will drive high-quality traffic to the business.
All metrics provide important campaign data for better insights into what's working and what's not.
Testing, tracking, and monitoring the online marketing strategy is extremely important in maximising the outputs of performance campaigns.
A big part of relationship building between brands and publishers is about reaching, engaging, and converting audiences.
To do this successfully, both brands and publishers must stringently follow regulatory guidelines.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and General Data Protection Law (GDPR) have evolving laws and policies in place, meaning marketers and publishers must stay on top of legal requirements to ensure their content and advertisements are aligned.
Performance marketing is truly transforming how businesses achieve measurable, results-driven growth.
By focusing on specific actions - whether that be generating leads, increasing app downloads, or boosting sales - this approach offers unparalleled return on investment, flexibility, and transparency.
It allows marketers to fine-tune campaigns, target precise audiences, and continually optimise strategies for maximum output.
For fintechs seeking to navigate this challenging strategy, Blue Train Marketing delivers tailored solutions across diverse performance marketing channels. From PPC and affiliate marketing to content and social media strategies, our expert marketing team ensures that all campaigns yield tangible results.
Ready to level up your performance marketing? Contact us today to take the first step towards a data-driven, high-performance future.