The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify)

When: Once you reach $50k/mo in ad spend.

Hire someone in-house to run and optimize campaigns full-time. They should be a data-driven person that can distinguish between signal and noise. They should understand the objective of your campaigns and what it means for your business such that they will know which campaign metrics are relevant and which matter less.

When: Once your campaigns show a consistent need for new and refreshed creatives.

Hire a creative specialist to produce new ideas more rapidly and more aligned with your brand tone. They should have graphic design and video editing skills, good branding sense, and an ability to produce ad copy and creative assets.

When: Once you start needing more sophisticated analyses and deeper insights for your campaigns and overall marketing efforts.

Hire a data scientist with advanced data analysis skills to build custom analytics frameworks. They should support the team with in-depth analytics, manage attribution models, and create reports to support campaign optimizations.

Use a 1% look-alike campaign with a small budget to test a new advertising platform. This will target the top 1% of users that most closely match your current customers based on their behaviors, interests, and demographics.

If this campaign works, consider expanding the audience to the 2-4% look-alikes and later to broader audiences. This helps in gradually scaling your campaigns while maintaining relevance.

Contact your Google, Meta or LinkedIn account manager, provide them with a list of your top competitors, and ask them to give you anonymized benchmarks on metrics like CPC, click-through rate, and conversion rate. This will help you understand where you stand relative to your competitors.