Performance marketing buys the first order. What earns the second?
Paying for results you can count: clicks, sign-ups, orders. Brilliant at buying a first order, and blind to the second, which is the one you don't have to pay for again.
- 102Performance Marketing
- A type of digital marketing where advertisers pay only when specific actions (like clicks or sales) are completed.
- Strictly means
- Paying per result, like an affiliate paid per sale
- Usually means
- Paid social and paid search, judged on return on ad spend
- Measures well
- The first order, inside the ad platform's own attribution window
- Can't see
- Margin after the discount, and whether the customer ever comes back
Two meanings of performance marketing, and the one in your meetings
Strictly, performance marketing means paying only when something happens: an affiliate paid per sale, a partner paid per lead. In most founders' meetings it means something looser: paid social and paid search, run against a cost per acquisition and a return on ad spend. Never mind that Meta and Google mostly charge for impressions and clicks.
Either way, the appeal's the same. Money goes in, orders come out, and there's a dashboard to prove it. That's also the trap.
What the ad dashboard can't see after the first order
The platform measures the order it can see. It can't see the discount that bought it, the margin left after it, or whether that customer ever pays full price. A campaign can look brilliant on first order return and still be filling your list with people who only buy with a code.
Then there's the double count. Meta claims the order, Google claims the same order, and Klaviyo claims it too, each inside its own window. Add the channels up and you can get more revenue than the shop took. We've written up why we put a second number beside first order ROAS.
The handover from paid click to email address
Nobody can promise you a cheaper click. What you can control is what happens once you've paid for one. Paid media buys the first visit and, with luck, the first order. Email earns the second, and it costs next to nothing per send.
- Ask for the email address on the landing page, as well as at checkout
- Write the ad's source onto the Klaviyo profile at sign-up, from the UTM parameters
- Run a welcome flow and a post-purchase flow that sell the product, not the next code
- Report repeat orders and ninety day value by acquisition channel, beside the platform's own numbers
That last step changes budget meetings. The channel that looks dear on day one is sometimes the one whose customers come back. Much of that gets decided in the post-purchase flow.
Related terms
FAQs
Is performance marketing the same as paid advertising?
Not quite. Performance marketing is all paid, but plenty of paid advertising isn't judged on performance. A billboard is paid for and hard to trace. Performance marketing is the part you can track to a click, a sign-up or an order, so paid social, paid search and affiliates make up most of it.
Why do Meta and Klaviyo both claim the same sale?
Because each one credits an order placed inside its own attribution window after somebody engaged with it. A customer who clicked an ad on Monday and an email on Wednesday, then bought on Thursday, gets counted by both. Neither is lying. Read each one against the shop's total, and never add them together.
How does email fit into a performance marketing budget?
Email is the paid click's second chance. Plenty of paid visitors won't buy on the first visit, and the ones who leave an email address can be sold to again for close to nothing. Put capture on paid landing pages, and judge the budget on what those customers do over months, not days.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
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