The ultimate guide to performance marketing

Timothy Davis has led performance marketing for all of Shopify for about two and a half years and has consulted for companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Eventbrite to build and scale their paid growth teams. The conversation covers tactical guidance on when to start paid acquisition, running signs-of-life tests across platforms, evaluating campaign performance, attribution and incrementality, and how to build an in-house performance marketing team.

01Key learnings

• Paid acquisition suits most businesses because paid search is user-driven, so start by checking where users already find you and consider scaling those channels.
• Run small signs-of-life tests first, starting with your own customer data for lookalike audiences at a 1% match, before committing a larger budget.
• Don't copy winning creative across platforms; user mindset and behavior differ, so adapt messaging for each platform.
• Look for product-market fit and operational readiness, such as local currency support, before spending heavily on ads, since poor conversion damages brand trust.
• Use platform partner reps to get anonymized competitor benchmarks for metrics like CTR and CPC instead of relying on generic industry numbers.
• Focus on click share and relevance rather than chasing impression share, since serving the right users matters more than appearing at the top of the page.
• Build an operating cadence spreadsheet defining how often each optimization task runs, and use a capacity calculator to decide when to hire.
• Hire for data judgment first, then creative/brand skill, then a dedicated data scientist, and train new hires by giving them early ownership.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.