Performance marketing, or how to encourage the recipient to perform a specific action?
Tips
10 July 2025
Modern marketing is an extremely creative industry with some of the brightest creative minds who know how to promote themselves online and beyond. One of the most popular solutions in recent times is performance advertising. Performance marketing - what is it, what are its goals and why should it be implemented? Find out how to be more effective online!
Performance marketing, or performance marketing - what is it?
Performance marketing and performance marketing are interchangeable terms. They refer to a type of advertising that targets specific actions of the audience. It is not intended to widen the circle of people who know the brand, but to call on users to take specific steps. Ads are created so that the internet user clicks on them, goes to a page or registers for a form.
As the name suggests, this type of advertising is all about results. They must be measurable. Appropriate indicators, or KPIs, serve this purpose. On the basis of these, the person who buys advertising in a particular location also pays for it. The cost of such a campaign depends on which objectives are achieved. A performance marketing campaign brings benefits that can easily be seen, e.g. through increased sales of specific products.
What are the main objectives of performance marketing?
Performance marketing strategies have specific objectives. These depend on the specific objectives of the company. The usual one is to increase sales. The advertising is intended to encourage people to go on to purchase the product and thus generate a profit for the online shop. Sometimes it is also about gaining new recipients for a newsletter. Thanks to the personalised messages received regularly in the mailbox, recipients may also be tempted to make a purchase on a particular site.
By doing so, it is possible to find out what type of advertising works best with a company's audience. It is worthwhile to carry out campaigns targeting, for example, a newsletter and a specific purchase, and then to determine, based on the indicators, which solutions are better to use in the future. Regardless of the minor objectives, the aim of such advertising is always to increase the company's revenue. 
Key performance marketing channels
Performance marketing - the tools that can be used to implement it are primarily social media. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or LinkedIn are channels for reaching as many users as possible. Their creators offer advertisers increasingly sophisticated advertising opportunities. This makes it possible to use them to quickly redirect the user to buy the specific product advertised. Such channels are extremely effective because they trigger a sudden urge to buy in the consumer and can easily present the benefits of owning a particular item.
Another channel is email performance marketing, i.e. reaching recipients through the inbox. The message can contain, for example, a banner redirecting to a product card of the suggested goods. It is then possible to check what proportion of customers ordered something after clicking on the ad received by e-mail.
A very effective channel for increasing sales and use of a company's services is affiliation. This involves a company wishing to advertise paying the publishers of various websites on topics related to the company's business. The website owner includes links in his texts that take readers to, for example, the website of an online shop. The texts may encourage people to buy from a particular platform, but this is not always the case. Often, they simply relate to the field of activity of the company in question.
In addition to social media, marketplace-type sites also offer ad buybacks on their sites. Surely you often find that when you type in an interesting search term, sponsored offers appear at the top of the search results. These are the first to be seen by users, and clicking on them enables them to purchase the items in question straight away and is not aimed at spreading brand awareness.
Performance marketing - what advantages does it have?
When marketing campaigns are only aimed at increasing brand recognition or reaching new consumers with an offer, it is impossible to accurately check whether the campaign was successful. This is where e-commerce performance marketing has the biggest advantage. It is possible to monitor how many people have used the company's offer as a result of such advertising. The advertiser knows the level of effectiveness of specific types of activities and it is easier to plan future marketing investments.
Performance indicators show that performance advertising is a more effective model of promotion than image-only advertising. Observing the effects of a campaign on an ongoing basis gives great satisfaction and allows you to make timely changes to the advertising process, e.g. to increase the number of adverts in a specific location (Facebook, Google, etc.).
Performance marketing makes it possible to observe consumer behaviour. Sometimes it happens that, despite the fact that after seeing an advertisement, a potential customer entered the site, they did not finalise the purchase of a given product. If a trend persists, e.g. users leave the site at the stage of choosing a payment or delivery method, it is a sign that something in these elements has discouraged them. The retailer then knows that it should think about, for example, adding more payment methods or other delivery methods.
It also has the advantage that it can be implemented through a wide variety of channels. This makes it easier to reach specific audiences. Individual ad placements can be visited more or less frequently, for example by people in particular age groups. In addition, it is a very cost-effective method, as payment models are tailored to specific campaigns. And what exactly does it involve? 
Accounting for performance marketing campaigns - how to do it?
Due to the fact that in performance marketing you pay for what results your ad delivers, the effectiveness of the ad is heavily relied upon by both sides of the transaction. Billing can take place in a variety of ways, and one of the more popular is definitely CPC, or Cost per Click. In this case, the advertiser pays the website or portal where its promotion is placed for the number of clicks made by users on a banner, graphic or other type of advertisement. The click itself already means that the user has taken an interest in the offer and decided to take a closer look at it on the merchant's website. This is also known as PPC performance marketing, or Pey per Click.
Another popular billing method is Cost per Lead, i.e. paying for the number of customers that the seller has managed to get in touch with. This could be, for example, a group of people who provided their email address when signing up for an advertised newsletter. The third most common method of billing is Cost per Sale, i.e. the advertiser only pays for how many transactions take place and how many goods or services it manages to sell through advertising. The details of each campaign are decided on an individual basis, so it also happens that billing methods are mixed together or are still different. A lot depends on the area of business and the objectives to be achieved.
Effectiveness of performance marketing campaigns - how to measure?
Effectiveness and advertising efficiency - these are quite similar terms, but they denote slightly different issues related to the marketing action. Effectiveness refers to what is assumed at the planning stage of a campaign. It defines the objectives desired by the advertiser and it is through this objective that effectiveness can later be measured. As part of effectiveness planning, you can determine, among other things, the required number of recipients you want to reach.
Effectiveness, on the other hand, is the real results that are obtained as a result of a marketing campaign. The closer they are to the objectives, the higher the effectiveness of the activities carried out. Sometimes it happens that they significantly exceed expectations, which only proves in favour of the advertiser and the conducted action. The measure of effectiveness is the profits for the company, which were obtained in connection with purchases caused by the campaign.
Performance marketing KPIs are the indicators by which the effects produced by campaigns can be monitored. They can be varied. An example is, for example, the number of sales made compared to the number of page views from a particular advertisement. The smaller the difference between the two, the better. Other indicators may be the number of times a site is displayed due to a banner click, the length of a consumer's visit to the site, and the number of user email addresses acquired.
KPIs allow efficiency to be measured, as they examine the relationship between, for example, page views and purchases. Thanks to this, the entrepreneur knows whether his or her activities make sense or whether something needs to be changed. This is the basis and one of the greatest advantages of performance marketing.
If you're wondering whether it's worth promoting your offer to customers through performance marketing, it's time to take advantage of it. The reach with such campaigns is usually very broad, and getting orders or registrations is faster than you expect. Importantly, you pay for real user engagement, i.e. displays, survey completions, newsletter sign-ups or simply sales achievements. Performance marketing is definitely the future of advertisers.
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