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.

Second hire: Creative Specialist

If you're just starting out with performance marketing, it's faster to work with an ad agency or a consultant because they can quickly set things up and get the ball rolling. This will also help you remain focused on sales, client meetings and other important things.However, bear in mind that agencies often use generic playbooks and don't go deep into data analysis. They might miss key optimization opportunities like ad relevance and conversion tracking. Avoid this by ensuring detailed and frequent performance checks.

Start out with an ad agency

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.

Test new platforms with look-alike audiences

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.

Ask your account manager for benchmark metrics

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.

Third hire: Data Scientist

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.

First hire: Growth Marketing Manager

Performance marketing is marketing that you can measure the performance of. It's used for customer acquisition and it can involve:<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Search ads that show up when users type queries relevant to your business (e.g. Google Search)</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Social media ads that show up in social media feeds, interleaved between content posts (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Affiliate marketing, where other people market your product and you give them a commission on every purchase they generate.</li></ul>

Performance marketing

Timothy Davis has led performance marketing for all of Shopify for the past 2.5 years, and as a consultant has helped companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Eventbrite kickstart and scale their performance marketing teams. In every one of those cases, he got them so performant at paid growth that they significantly scale spend and investment in these channels. In our conversation, we cover:• When and how to start investing in performance marketing• Common mistakes companies make with paid ads• How to build and structure a performance marketing team• How to get your creatives performing better• Strategies for optimizing workflows and team efficiency• How AI will change performance marketing• Much more — Brought to you by: • ⁠BuildBetter⁠—AI for product teams • ⁠OneSchema⁠—Import CSV data 10x faster • ⁠Eppo⁠—Run reliable, impactful experiments — Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/performance-marketing-timothy-davis — Where to find Timothy Davis:  • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothypatrickdavis/ — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Timothy’s background  (02:31) Understanding performance marketing  (06:31) The importance of paid search  (08:39) Identifying growth potential  (09:54) Case studies: Hairstory and Ipsy  (12:22) Experimenting with new platforms  (18:57) Choosing the right platforms  (20:23) LinkedIn for B2B marketing  (27:56) When to start investing in paid growth  (33:33) Common mistakes in performance marketing  (37:41) Working with agencies and consultants  (40:36) Hiring for performance marketing  (47:33) Metrics that matter  (54:43) Competitor analysis and CPC insights  (56:15) Custom reports and data visualization (56:38) Understanding impression and click share  (59:10) True competition metrics  (01:02:14) Attribution and incrementality  (01:08:52) Building a performance marketing team  (01:10:53) Creative and ad copy collaboration  (01:15:48) Managing workload and hiring strategy  (01:20:52) Training and onboarding new hires  (01:24:41) Impact of ATT on performance marketing  (01:25:56) The power of creative in ads  (01:29:47) Using AI in performance marketing  (01:37:16) Lightning round  — Referenced: • Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/ • What Is Performance Marketing?: https://www.shopify.com/blog/performance-marketing • Google AI: https://ai.google/ • Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/ • Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/ • Booking.com: https://www.booking.com/ • Credit Karma: https://www.creditkarma.com/ • Hairstory: https://hairstory.com/ • Google Display Network: https://www.semrush.com/blog/google-display-network/ • SoftLayer Becomes Part of IBM’s SmartCloud: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/deals/softlayer-becomes-part-of-ibm-s-smartcloud • Coca-Cola Freestyle: https://www.coca-colafreestyle.com/ • Monday.com: https://monday.com/ • How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-sell-your-ideas-and-rise-within • Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Canva, Reddit, Grubhub): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/thinking-beyond-frameworks-casey • The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t: https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087 • Courtney Wenneborg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cwenneborg/ • PPC Hero: https://www.ppchero.com/ • Another Deep Dive into Auction Insights, by Jacob Brown: https://www.ppchero.com/another-deep-dive-into-auction-insights/ •Multitouch: https://multitouch.app/ • What is time decay attribution?: https://growthmethod.com/what-is-time-decay-attribution/ • Linear: https://linear.app/ • Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large-Scale Field Experiment: https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/BNT_ECMA_rev.pdf • ADT: https://www.adt.com/ • Shopify Bursts: https://focus.business/blog/shopify-bursts/ • The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter: https://www.amazon.com/First-90-Days-Strategies-Expanded/dp/1422188612 • Kat Nguyen on Shopify: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katngy/ • Dollar Shave Club ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI • The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living: https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Stoic-Meditations-Wisdom-Perseverance/dp/0735211736 • Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Choice-Uncertainty-Luck-Why-Despite/dp/0062120999 • X-Men ’97 on Disney+: https://www.disneyplus.com/series/x-men-97/vc1XIz90ZNH5 • RRR on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81476453 • The Playlist on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81186296 • Welcome to Wrexham on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/welcome-to-wrexham-c6906d50-d06c-40d1-a57c-1885d9dc2fef • The Billion Dollar Code on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81074012 • Magic Mind: https://magicmind.com/ — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. — Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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