Performance & Growth: Stop Treating Media Spend Like a Vending Machine

Performance marketing isn’t “put money in, get leads out.” That mindset is why so many brands pour budget into platforms but can’t confidently tell you which lever actually moved revenue. Performance & Growth, done right, is less about channel tactics and more about building a system: clean data, sharp positioning, validated messaging, and ruthless iteration. 

Start with economics, not ads.
Before you brief “run Meta + Google,” get intimate with margins, allowable CAC, breakeven windows, LTV by cohort, and AOV expansion opportunities. If you don’t know how much you can afford to acquire a customer, you’re not running performance, you’re gambling.

Build creative that learns.
“Best practices” are the floor. Performance creative should be structured to teach you something every week: new angles (problem-first, aspiration-first, proof-first), offer variants, formats (UGC, native testimonial, motion-first), and message stacks. You don’t just scale what works, you learn why it worked, then reproduce it.

Own your data layer.
If your attribution is a mess, your “optimizations” are theatre. Implement server-side tracking, enforce UTM discipline, unify events, and triangulate truth: platform-reported numbers, analytics, and a modeled view. Weekly decisions should be made on a single source of truth, not a negotiation between four dashboards.

Tighten the funnel you already have.
Traffic is the last thing you buy, not the first. Audit your landing pages, site speed, forms, onboarding, email/SMS flows, and post‑purchase triggers. Cutting CPA by 15% is great; increasing conversion rate by 30% is compound.

Growth loops > campaigns.
Campaigns end. Loops compound. Referral incentives, user-generated content that feeds your ads, retention flows that feed LTV, and content that ranks and re-feeds demand, these are the compounding engines most “performance” plans ignore.

Performance isn’t spend. It’s structure.