Performance Marketing 101: The No-BS Guide to Running Ads For Your Business
You’ve probably heard the term "performance marketing" thrown around somewhere if you’ve considered running ads for your business. Maybe it’s a completely new term to you.
Sounds important. Sounds expensive. Sounds... confusing.
Put super simply, performance marketing is just running ads with a clear goal and results you can measure. No gimmicks. No boosted posts. No 'spray and pray' campaigns.
If you currently work with an agency and have ever wondered where your ad budget goes or if you’ve never touched ads for your business, this guide is for you.
We’ll break it all down in plain English so you can finally understand how to make ads work for your brand, whether you're a one-person show or running a growing biz.
Table of Contents
Am I Ready to Run Ads?
The Performance Marketing Process
Platforms Decoded
Budgeting for Success
The Metrics That Matter
Your Creative Is the Campaign—Not the Other Way Around
Getting Inspiration For Your Ad Creative
Making Your Ads
Copywriting For Paid Ads
Your Simple Ad Strategy Playbook
Performance Marketing Myths
If You Want The Heavy Lifting Done For You
Am I Ready to Run Ads?
Before diving into performance marketing, there’s an important question that you should ask yourself.
Am I actually ready?
There’s a couple of key indicators that I use to determine if a potential client is ready to run ads:
Product-Market Fit: Is your product or service a genuine need in the market.
Clear Unique Value Proposition: Is there that special thing that makes you stand out or are you just like everyone else? In my eyes, this is particularly relevant for those in the apparel industry. No shade here. Let’s just call a spade a spade.
Optimised Website: A user-friendly, mobile-responsive website with clear calls-to-action is crucial. A clunky website is going to mean wasting a hell of a lot of budget and pointing fingers at whoever's running your ads saying “why isn’t it working?!”. Use Google Analytics to determine your current session duration (how long people are staying on your site), bounce rate (how quickly people are leaving) and pages per session (how engaged enough someone is to explore other pages on your site) to determine if your website is performing well or may need some tweaks.
Budget Allocation: Can you afford a realistic budget for your advertising efforts? If your product costs $250, don’t expect miracles on a $5 a day budget. More on determining budget later.
Ability to Provide Content: When running ads, you’ll need to be able to consistently create content for you or your agency to test in ads. Be prepared to either be an active-participant in this process or invest in having someone do it for you.
A Social Media Presence: Let’s be real, we’ve all experienced (or have been close to) being scammed. People WILL check your socials to determine if you are a legit company that posts consistently.
The Performance Marketing Process
Here’s a basic understanding of the process that you should go through with either yourself or your agency:
Define Goals: Set clear, measurable and realistic objectives (e.g., 5 leads every month, $2000 in revenue, etc).
Identify Target Audience: Understand who your ideal customers are and what platforms are holding their attention. See Social Media Demographics to Inform Your 2025 Strategy by Sprout Social to help you. Alternatively, use your Google Analytics to determine what platforms are already sending high-value traffic
Select Platforms: Choose channels that align with your audience's preferences.
Craft Compelling Creative: Develop ads that speak directly to your audience's needs and desires.
Launch Campaigns: Implement your ads across chosen platforms.
Monitor & Optimise: This one’s a biggie. Regularly review performance metrics and adjust strategies accordingly. Be sure to tinker and improve but also remember that platforms take time to learn. Don’t jump the gun too early to determine something is unsuccessful.
Scale Successful Campaigns: Increase investment within your best platform and in high-performing campaigns/ads to maximise ROI. Turn off those that are underperforming.
Platforms Decoded: What Meta, Google & TikTok Are Really Good At
You go to different platforms when you’re wanting to engage with different types of content right?
On Facebook, I love to sticky beak my beak in local community pages and search Marketplace for furniture I definitely do not need. On Instagram I watch stories and follow some of my favourite brands and creators and TikTok I spam my friends with copious amounts of memes… we all do it right.
Same goes for when you’re running ads.
Different platforms serve different purposes:
Meta (Facebook & Instagram): Great for creative testing, visual storytelling, user generated content (UGC) and social proof like reviews. I also love Meta when working with service-based clients for local marketing.
Google Ads: Ideal for capturing high-intent searches (think "black running shoes in a size 10"). This works for low-hanging fruit conversions. That being the people who may already be in that mindset to buy or engage with your particular product or service.
TikTok Ads: Effective for brands in the health, wellness and fashion space (just to name a few). Product demos, trend-based content and UGC could work really well here.
YouTube Shorts & Display: Good for brand awareness and long-term visibility.
LinkedIn: Great for B2B brands and high-value lead generation. A word of warning, LinkedIn often comes with higher costs when looking at objectives like leads but, if run correctly, can mean some serious $$$ in revenue.
According to the 2024 DataReportal Digital Australia report, over 82.7% of Australians are active social media users, with Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram leading the pack making platform selection a key driver of performance. (Klaviyo).
Budgeting for Success: How Much Should I Spend and How
Setting aside a budget is an important factor when it comes to running paid ad campaigns. But what often trips people up is the age-old question “how much should I spend?”.
The thing is, it varies between businesses.
So I’ll throw it to you. What is the amount of money that if you lost it all with no sales of leads, there wouldn’t be too much of a financial dent to your business?
To some, it’s $500, others $2000
Start there, then scale.
The important thing is that you’re realistic when it comes to the results that you are looking for. If you’re selling a $500 course, people are going to need a bit of convincing before they jump in and buy it.
Put simply:
The higher the cost of your product/service = the more fleshed out your advertising funnel might be = the more you're going to have to spend on ads.
We work with minimum ad budgets of $1000 a month which gives us a bit of wiggle room to test and optimise platforms, campaigns and ads.
Remember:
Start Small but Modest: Test campaigns to gauge effectiveness with enough budget that is actually going to do something.
Allocate Based on Performance: Invest more in channels and campaigns that yield the best results.
Be Prepared for an Initial Learning Period: Expecting crazy results right out of the gates can happen, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not realistic. Understand that building momentum takes time, optimising the campaigns and consistent investment.
The Metrics That Matter (And The Ones That Just Look Pretty)
Let’s kill the vanity metrics. Straight off the bat.
Vanity metrics are numbers that look impressive on the surface (likes or followers) but don’t actually tell you whether your ads are contributing to real business results. Sure, 10,000 people might have seen your ad but did anyone click, sign up or buy if that was the initial goal?
Here’s a couple that might matter to you:
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): Are you getting more out than you’re putting in?
CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): How much does it cost to get one sale?
AOV (Average Order Value): How much is each customer spending?
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value): Will they come back and buy again?
But here’s the thing, not all metrics are relevant all the time.
In performance marketing, we often structure campaigns around the marketing funnel:
Awareness
Objective: Cast a wide net. Get seen. Introduce your brand to the masses.
Key metrics: Impressions, CPM, reach, video views
Consideration
Objective: Start to get people familiar with you. Get them engaging with you/your content or send them to your site to learn more.
Key metrics: CPLPV (Cost-Per-Landing-Page-View), CTR (Click-Through Rate), time on site, bounce rate
Conversion
Objective: As Gary Vee would say “Jab, jab, right hook”. We’ve made our two jabs in our upper funnel, now we go in for the sell. Our aim is to drive action like purchases or leads.
Key metrics: ROAS or ROI, conversion rate, cost per acquisition
Understanding which metrics to monitor at each stage helps you make smarter decisions, optimise for the right outcomes and feel more aligned to what success for that particular campaign should look like.
That said, the way you structure your campaigns should ultimately align with your business goals and bottom line. For example:
If you're an ecommerce brand focused on sales, it doesn't make sense to pour money into brand awareness campaigns from the get go. Instead, you should prioritise campaigns optimised for purchases.
If you're a local service-based business, you might benefit from a more varied funnel structure: A campaign to drive cheap traffic to your website and then retarget that audience with a lead generation campaign.
There’s no one-size-fits-all funnel structure. It’s all about picking the metrics and setup that supports your goals.
Your Creative Is the Campaign—Not the Other Way Around
Advertising platforms invest stupid amounts of money into the development of their AI algorithms. Reuters reports that “Meta Platforms plans to spend as much as $65 billion this year to expand its AI infrastructure”.
Most people obsess over targeting and sure, pre-iOS 14.5 update (an Apple update that us marketers often whinge about), we had a lot more granular options when it came to targeting.
But now, with massive improvements to technology and a focus on holding users’ attention with interest-based social feeds, creative is king.
One of the biggest levers you can pull in a campaign isn’t necessarily targeting, it’s the angle. Think about where the ad will run and who it's speaking to. A beautiful lifestyle ad that shows the design elements your product packaging in someone’s home might work great for top-of-funnel discovery. But further down the funnel? Maybe what gets them over the line is a punchy review-led ad that screams this product works and everyone loves it.
This is where your unique value proposition matters. What sets your brand apart? Think about the things your customers rave about, the things that make you different and lean into those angles.
There’s also more than one way to make content that converts:
Professional photoshoots and polished videos? Sure.
Lo-fi, iPhone-shot, UGC-style content (aka 'ugly content')? You’d be surprised how well it works.
What matters most is that you have a variety of content types to test. Ads fatigue fast, especially when you're scaling. So you need multiple creatives in the mix.
Getting Inspiration For Your Ad Creatives
Here are some places to start:
Pinterest – For visual moodboarding and inspo
Meta Ads Library – See what competitor brands are currently running
Foreplay.co – A tool that lets you search, save and organise competitor ad creatives
Making Your Ads
To actually create ads:
Canva – Design tool for static and basic video templates
CapCut – Mobile-first editor perfect for Reels, TikToks and short-form video content
UseClip or Creator Flow - Receive high-quality, vetted UGC content from creators
Copywriting For Paid Ads
The visuals may stop the scroll but it could be the words that do the selling. Great copy should:
Hook attention early
Speak directly to your audience’s situation, problems or desires
Include a strong, clear call to action
Whether you’re writing a headline, caption, or text overlay, copy and creative should work hand in hand.
Your ad needs to say something. It needs to resonate. And it needs to do it fast.
Your Simple Ad Strategy Playbook: Test, Learn, Scale, Repeat
Performance marketing isn’t one-and-done.
It’s test → learn → optimise → scale.
What to test first:
Creative variations and audiences
Then:
Double down on what works
Kill what doesn’t
Use learnings to refine the campaign
The goal isn’t perfection from the get go. It’s progress. You’re feeding the machine, one tweak at a time.
Let’s Bust Some Myths
❌ You need a massive budget to get started
✅ You can start small, as long as you’re strategic
❌ Ads don’t work
✅ Ads don’t work when you haven’t cracked the formula for your business. With the right mix of message, audience and creative, they can be pretty powerful things.
❌ I should boost posts
✅ Well if you want me to wipe the tears I cry for you with the cash you’re burning, yes. In all seriousness, this is a BIG No-No. Boosting is not an effective strategy due to its lack of options both in targeting and the campaign itself. Use Ads Manager to control objective, audience and creative testing properly.
❌ Meta is dead
✅ Meta still works incredibly well when done right
❌ You need an agency
✅ I’m going to be real honest with you… you might not. You could absolutely hop on YouTube, binge hours of tutorials and probably figure out how to run some basic ads yourself. Plenty of business owners do. But here’s the thing: what you miss out on is the expert strategy, industry insight and time-saving that comes with working with people who live and breathe this stuff. A good agency should keep you informed with what’s working in your business (hi, that’s us). Our opinion is that “A rising tide lifts all boats” and for us, that means the more we can educate our clients about Performance Marketing, the better we can come together to improve your business as a partnership.
If You Want the Heavy Lifting Done For You
We’re Digital Strangers. We help brands run ads with social-first thinking are content-led & backed by performance strategy
We take care of the creative, the strategy, the testing and the results. We work with ecommerce and service based brands across Australia to:
Increase return on investment through data-backed campaigns
Create creative that actually converts
Build full-funnel ad strategies that move people from discovery to purchase
Optimise campaigns consistently (not monthly) for better performance
Help brands and founders like you feel confident in their marketing
All without the fluff, the gatekeeping or the marketing speak that makes you feel out of the loop of your own business.
Want to chat about whether performance marketing is right for your business?
Whether you're already running ads or just thinking about dipping your toes in, we’re always up for a chat.
