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Performance Marketing: Impressions and Clicks Don’t Pay the Bills [Video]

In this new video, StackAdapt Co-Founder, Vitaly Pecherskiy (COO), gets straight to the heart of performance marketing: digital marketers and advertisers are not in the business of selling impressions and clicks. Brands rely on business growth to pay the bills.

“Let’s take the example of Uber. At the end of the day why are you taking Uber? You’re taking Uber to get safely from point A to point B at an affordable price… All you care about, as the buyer, is: are you actually getting safely from point A to point B at a reasonable price.” begins Pecherskiy.

This is not dissimilar from the way brands feel about advertising. Businesses aren’t paying for “metrics” alone. Yet, time and again, this is what they are sold. While KPIs come part and parcel with customer acquisition, true performance marketing comes down to a single goal: meaningful business results in the form of increased revenue.

The eMarketer chart below demonstrates that increased revenue is indeed a top priority for digital marketers (right). Pecherskiy continues:

“If we start seeing more accountability between the first interaction of the buyer and seller all the way down to the measurable outcome, we’re going to see less and less focus on the vanity metrics that are easy to game, and easy to turn into a commodity. So, over time, we’ll see a lot less arbitrage and the companies that will survive that change will inherently focus on driving meaningful business results for the companies they work with.

What defines a “meaningful business result”?

“To me, meaningful results means something that can have a dollar attached to it. The problem with most media right now, it’s all measured in things that are so hard to connect to business growth. An ideal scenario… at StackAdapt for example, I would love to be able to see clearly, how does what we do connect to cash that we collect, that pays for all these shenanigans, like this cup of tea.

At the end of the day, it’s not impressions or clicks that pay for this tea, it’s the cash. It’s the same thing for brands and I think the sooner that marketing and advertising companies realize that they are not in the business of selling impressions or clicks, they are in the business of helping other companies grow, the faster we are going to see change.”

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