Vibe Marketing Feature
I was recently asked for a guest post by Vibe Marketing (Marketing & Tech magazine) about Performance Marketing; below are the headlines (link to the full article below)…
Why are many in Performance Marketing Looking at Shrinking Returns?
For years, performance marketing distanced itself from brand and creative disciplines; positioning itself as a numbers game – analytical, precise, objective. But as automation takes more of the targeting, bidding and placement decisions, creative becomes one of the few levers marketers still directly control alongside how well marketers optimise incrementally, understand customers & deploy evolving AI capabilities, says Paul Morris.
Budgets are rising, platforms are more advanced than ever, and yet outcomes are…. flattening (for many).
But the reality, Paul Morris, Senior Director, EMEA Performance Marketing & Web eCommerce at RS Group plc, points out, is more nuanced. Performance marketing is not collapsing. It is sometimes simply being misread.
The issue lies not in the engines of growth, but in how that growth is being interpreted; and acted upon. Metrics that once offered clarity are now hiding nuance, blending signals & blurring true impact.
Which leads to a more pressing question: if the numbers feel reliable but tell an incomplete story, what exactly is performance measuring today?
The Measurement Problem: When “Performance” Isn’t Real Performance
For years, performance marketing has been built on a promise: measurable growth, attributable results + clear ROI. But that clarity has always rested on a single assumption; that what is being measured reflects reality.
Increasingly, it doesn’t.
“Performance marketing is not suddenly broken,” Morris explains. “The problem is that too much of it is still judged through blended ROAS, platform-reported conversions and averages that hide the likes of marginal ROAS and incrementality.”
That distinction is not academic. It’s structural.
Blended ROAS, from a Data Driven Attribution perspective, tells how everything is performing together.
Platform-reported conversions show what the platform can see.
Averages smooth out volatility.
But none of them isolates what actually changed as a result of incremental spend.
That is where the illusion begins.
When optimisation is guided by aggregated metrics, activity that would have occurred anyway is often rewarded. Investment flows toward what appears efficient, rather than what is genuinely additive. Over time, performance seems stable on the surface, even as its underlying impact quietly diminishes.
This is also where many teams plateau; not because there are no gains left, but because they are no longer looking closely enough at where incremental improvements still exist (READ MORE HERE).