Performance marketing has changed. You must be involved in the creative process. You unfortunately cannot avoid this one.

My manager is literally the coolest. He took a bet on me when I was early on. I’d still tell that story later. He allows me experiment and doesn’t stand in my way. Then in no particular order > Agency and authority in and out of the company > Fast access to funds and high confidence from the accounting team, trust me if you work in performance marketing this is a big ass deal. > My team members

If you’re a performance marketer, media buyer, ads manager, ads guy or whatever they call us these days If you want to have an easier time in your career you need to develop a creative strategist bone. I was never that guy, I was always the data cruncher. Now a lot of things have changed. I’m still not super creative but I’ve looked at so much ads data to know exactly what I’m looking for when the design team, UGC or AI produces my creatives. There are specific elements of winning creatives that will always work once you’ve seen the patterns. These cannot be described but the eye to catch them can be trained. This gives you a base to get started on what you want to test, especially when you join a new company or get a new client. Some people have swipe files for this purpose too. Look at a lot of ads as much as you can these helped me write better briefs and run more coherent tests. Ultimately if you cannot run more ads please don’t complain when meta and other channels show you pepper. The more you spend, the more you need to refresh because you’d run into fatigue faster than someone not spending as much. As much as it lies within you, if you’re spending 200k and above a day, 2 weeks should not catch you without introducing new batches of content to test.

If you work in tech and you run ads, you need to read this. Your ads are bringing in users but your dashboard can’t show you transactions, That gap has a fix and it’s not as expensive to get started as it seems. The moment you can draw a straight line from your marketing channels to creative and finally to revenue, you can scale your product easily as a tech marketing manager or founder. Operators tell me these tools are expensive to integrate. The truth is all of them have starter plans that are practically free or cheap to begin with. Once your users start transacting, the tools essentially pay for themselves. You only need four to get started. For mobile apps: 1. A product analytics tool. Mixpanel or Amplitude is a good place to start. These let you see user journeys from signup to drop off. If your event taxonomy is done well, you can see the actions users took at every step and fix bottlenecks. 2. A mobile measurement partner. Appsflyer for me, because the UI is easier to work with. You can try Adjust or Branch, depending on what works for your stack. Appsflyer is a must have for advertisers in tech. It integrates smoothly with every ad channel you will ever need. 3. BigQuery or any other data warehouse. You need to connect it to Appsflyer so it can see transactions and pass them through to the ad platforms. It will also feed the final tool. 4. Visualization. Looker Studio is more than enough to show you how many users are coming through your ads, which ad brought them in, and from what channel. This connection runs through Appsflyer into your Looker Studio. If you work in tech as an operator or founder and you’re curious about how this system can be built or you need your current system audited to solve attribution issues, let’s chat.