Performance marketing is not just media buying, but without a deep understanding of how to buy traffic online, you can waste a lot of budget.
Because there is a lot of traffic on the internet, and not all of it is legit or relevant for the app or product you are trying to promote. And even if most of us rely on search and social as predominant sources to gain traction and visibility, it is crucial to run campaigns on different types of media sources to increase reach, scale, and minimise the risk of dependency.
Success starts and depends on how you know your audience.
And since nowadays technology becomes more generic and less expensive the leverage point is to have a good traffic person within the organisation who is able to empathise with your target personas and get your ads in front of the right eye balls.
Checking your campaign stats, and turning off under-performers, figuring out why they didn’t work, and scaling stuff that is working is the basic, but if you really want to connect your app/product with more users and explore the places where it is worth to look for new customers ask yourself: where are these people hanging out?
And if you can’t answer that question use some intelligence. There are plenty of tool that tell you the sources of referring traffic that are being sent to your competitors. This will give you the idea of the places you should reach out to. What are the core 10 Sites?
Check the environment of those websites, and how they monetize their inventory. Then, use a set of creatives that can work in the combination of placement/publisher, use a programmatic DSP to bid on exclusively on these publishers, and finally check the results and double down on the learnings.
It really doesn’t matter how many million of dollars you spent profitably on Google or Facebook advertising if you are not capable to look outside of the search & social backyard. Because at some point those keywords or inventory will become too expensive and competitive to be profitable.