This article has been contributed by Dr. Vikram Kumar, Founder and Managing Director, SRV Media Pvt. Ltd.
The traditional method of using TV commercials and billboards by marketers is morphing into data-driven methods that concentrate on efficiency with significant outcomes. One of the most distinguished approaches in these advancements would be performance marketing, where payers get paid only for click-through rates, conversions, or purchases made. It is a solution for tangible outcomes in today’s competitive landscape of a digital world.
What is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is a type of advertisement that is highly data-driven, in which every rupee spent relates to measurable returns. In performance marketing, unlike the conventional practices that focus on the intent of creating brand awareness, the specific goals revolve around sales, app downloads, or lead generation. The trend has really taken off in India with 20% annual growth rates, according to Statista.
Kantar cites businesses adopting performance marketing with the highest average return on investment being 25% compared to traditional advertising. In its effectiveness, it has proven an indispensable tool for startups as well as giant corporations looking to maximize the best in their marketing campaigns.
Performance Marketing: Main Players and Channels
Performance marketing is the collaboration of key stakeholders involved in executing campaigns. Advertisers refer to businesses that look for measurable results, while publishers-populated platforms are the actual hosts of advertisements. Intermediaries who enable effective management of campaigns include Google Ads and Meta Ads. The choice of platform plays a crucial role in the success of a campaign. Google Ads is perfect for intent-based advertisement as it covers the whole world with a 92% global search engine market share. In the case of visual storytelling plus audience targeting the best tools in today’s date are Facebook and Instagram; hence, they are profoundly used in India, where there are more than 300 million individual Facebook and Instagram users.
LinkedIn Ads target B2B campaigns, allowing targeting by job title and industry. For younger audiences, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels provide engaging short video formats. Programmatic advertising further enhances performance marketing by adding AI-driven automation for bids and placements to optimize efficiency.
Key Metrics of Success
Data is the foundation of performance marketing, and monitoring pertinent indicators is necessary. By calculating the proportion of people who click on an advertisement as opposed to the ones who view it, the CTR shows how relevant and well-made the ad is. The CPA gauges the cost incurred for getting a customer, thus showing whether the campaign is effective or not.
Return on advertising expenditure (ROAS) is the revenue for every rupee spent and conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete desired actions like buying or signing up. Customer lifetime value helps organizations estimate the lifetime value expected from a customer.
Improving performance-based marketing campaigns
To amplify the effectiveness of performance marketing, organizations must pay importance to optimization methods. Audience segmentation helps marketers to create the kind of communications that could work best for a specific audience. A/B testing can decide the most appealing components of various advertisements to a target group. Dynamic retargeting reconnects users who have shown some interest in a particular brand, hence increasing the chances of conversion.
Engagement will improve dramatically through creative and copy optimization with good-quality images and compelling content. On top of that, the landing pages must be mobile-friendly, fast, and conversion-optimized with calls to action. Automating, AI-based targeting, and bidding through Google and Meta tools make it even easier. Real-time tracking of metrics means that adjustment is made promptly to maximize ROI. Confronting Common Challenges Despite its advantages, performance marketing has a few drawbacks. Ad fatigue is a state where the audience disengages from repetitive content, which can be managed through frequent updating of creative assets. Budgetary constraints might force starting small campaigns to test the strategy before scaling it up. Compliance with data privacy laws involves using first-party data and keeping the user informed. The attribution issue, which makes it hard to determine how much contribution is from each touchpoint, can be handled using multi-touch attribution tools. Conclusion Performance marketing is a very potent strategy for delivering measurable growth in today’s digital-first world.
The potential of performance marketing can be unlocked by making the right platform choices, tracking critical metrics, and optimizing campaigns. Agility, a data-driven mindset, and a proactive approach to overcoming obstacles are the keys to success. The strategies adopted lead to the achievement of ROI and meaningful business growth for advertisers in the ever-evolving marketplace.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved bySwaarm.
Accelerating the business growth to reach a new height is the consistent goal of every business. As the most popular business slogan says “Customer is the King”, every business desperately targets their customers to grow. Swaarm is a performance-based tracking platform that empowers digital marketing agencies, advertisers and partners across all geographies to manage, track, analyze, automate and optimize their marketing campaigns at scale.
Read the startup story of Swaarm, its founders, Services, marketing, and growth.
Swaarm is a performance-based tracking platform that empowers digital marketing agencies, advertisers and partners across all GEOs to manage, track, analyze, automate and optimize their marketing campaigns at scale. Its intuitive platform helps partner affiliate networks and agencies of all sizes benefit from the power of automation to grow their business at scale.
Today’s business landscape is dynamic in nature, amidst which the performance marketing ecosystem has been constantly evolving. Against this backdrop, Swaarm continue to work towards building tools that simplify marketers’ day-to-day tasks. One such product is Explorer, which allows marketers to study data in real-time as they need and gain access to critical insights for daily advertising campaign operations faster than any other platform.
To help Swaarm’s clients navigate the changes within the industry and its growing complexity with ease, it offers Privacy Enabled Attribution (PEA Chain)- a powerful tool that empowers marketers to continue capturing campaign and traffic sources throughout the whole advertising network chain in-line with Apple’s privacy regulations. Focusing on product innovations in line with important industry developments, especially those which involve regulatory changes, is its strong point. For example, Swaarm developed the PEA Chain soon after Apple revealed it would be restricting access to the IDFA on iOS 14.
Swaarm – Founders and Team
Alexandru Dumitru and Yogeeta Chainani are the co-founders of Swaarm. They have been working together for over six years.
Yogeeta Chainani – Co-founder of Swaarm
Yogeeta Chainani, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer in her current role drives product innovation, operations and Human Resources. Prior to establishing Swaarm, from 2019 onwards, Yogeeta held the position of the Chief Product Officer at WeQ Global, a leading mobile advertising company. Her other corporate roles include several product leadership roles, at both Ocono and Crobo GmbH (a mobile marketing and user acquisition company). In 2013, she worked as a Quality Assurance Engineer at HERE, a Nokia company. She started her career as an Assistant System Engineer at TCS in Mumbai. Yogeeta holds a Dual Masters in Business Administration and Engineering, Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Berlin.
Mircea Alexandru Dumitru – Co-founder of Swaarm
As the Co-Founder & CTO at Swaarm, Mircea Alexandru Dumitru, focuses on distributed systems that handle billions of events per day and process tens of Terabytes of data. Previously, he was a Data & Delivery Leader Engineer at WeQ Global and a Senior Software Engineer at rasdaman GmbH. Until 2016, he was also a Managing Partner at Flanche Creative Labs. Additionally, Mircea is an open-source contributor and works with the European Space Agency and ECMWF. He holds Bachelors and Integrated PhD degree in Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany.
Yogeeta and Alexandru had a very clear idea about what kind of a company they wanted to build and what they wanted to achieve with their venture. They wanted their company to be an employer of choice, one whichthat empowers its people; the best performance marketing and tracking platform for their clients and wanted to build a sustainable business that will lead innovation within the marketing tech space from day one.
Ultimately, Swaarm aims to provide an empowering and challenging environment where people who are driven to ask the hard questions, solve the toughest challenges, and be a part of a close-knit team can thrive.
Swaarm – The Idea and Startup Story
The biggest challenge for any marketer or a business often revolves around the complexity of advertising management especially when marketers are managing multiple channels and campaigns than ever before. For instance, managing 10,000 campaigns across 10 publishers and 10 sub-publishers would require analysis of million data points which are often spread across various spreadsheets/pivot tables.
To offer clients a truly customer-centric approach, it is important to understand the intricate hurdles marketers face during their daily operations. The co-founders built Swaarm because they had to work with multiple tools, including tracking products, for years – and those tools were all tricky to use. They were never provided the full picture, it was never a simple process, and platforms didn’t innovate to solve specific issues and adapt to a rapidly changing ecosystem. To make matters worse, these tools that failed to provide for their needs were still extremely expensive. This inspired the co-founders of Swaarm to develop the most customer-centric platform that offers solutions to these industry-wide problems.
From day one, Swaarm was created by listening to its client’s needs. They shadowed their clients to identify the pain points of day-to-day operations. This allowed the team to perfect the platform over time with an innovative approach to all features. This has helped Swaarm achieve a critical goal: to provide a solution that enables customers of sizes to automate repetitive tasks and make better decisions in a faster way based on the data insights.
Swaarm’s co-founders understand that growth is critical and that the business can be scaled with the right tools. No two businesses are the same, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t give you everything you need. The platform’s adaptability is its greatest strength, making Swaarm a more powerful solution for all clients.
The founding team observed that many marketers were spending the majority of their time cleaning and analyzing data instead of focusing on important aspects of strategy, planning and creativity. This realization inspired them to build Swaarm – and by helping clients offload the routine, manual chores, they have managed to give them back the time and resources to focus on more business-critical work.
Swaarm – Mission & Vision
Its mission is to provide a technology, which will genuinely help its clients grow their business at scale by making each action faster, simpler and better. The company believes in co-creation and open innovative thinking to achieve customer value.
Since entering the market, Swaarm has earned the trust of clients and their businesses around the world in a very short time. It achieved this by staying true to four core values:
Offering a premium solution at an affordable price thanks to its unique and hyper-efficient infrastructure
Ensuring data reliability with its comprehensive data display
Offering flexibility by constantly developing its products in line with client’s needs
Providing a solution that is easy to use, making actions faster and more efficient
Swaarm – Services and USP
Swaarm Platform
Since inception, it has earned the trust of its clients such as Clearpier, Spyke Media and Apptrust amongst others, and their businesses around the world. Its strength and key differentiations lies in staying true to its four key values-
Ease of use – Swaarm’s extensive reporting features makes them a single source of performance marketing truth. With all the data in one place, they empower marketers to measure, optimize and automate the marketing efforts – all from one dashboard. Its intuitive, easy-to-use platform appeals to developers and marketers alike, and its automation rules makes campaign optimization accessible to everyone.
Affordability – It helps businesses ranging from leading global partners to boutique agencies optimize their campaigns- save time and money. Swaarm’s unique and hyper-efficient tech infrastructure allows them to offer clients a premium platform at a fraction of the cost, unlike other tracking platforms.
Data reliability – The platform empowers businesses to get ahead of the curve with its comprehensive data display, helping them discover patterns, trends, and business opportunities. It also offers the highest level of platform stability in the industry – all while upholding strict global data privacy protection laws to help businesses continuity. Swaarm caters to the needs of both individual marketers who can navigate through tons of data with a few clicks and data savvy enterprises that can use the integrated data science tools to deep dive into the granularities. Swaarm is also the only platform in the market that offers the capability for its clients to adapt its technology to the clients needs. Its customers can modify, filter, and enhance events in real-time using code-snippets in a Turing-complete language.
Swaarm Product
Another powerful feature is the set up of automation rules which automates processes which otherwise would need manual intervention by account managers. By applying such automation rules, customers can free up to 40% of their working time and in return allow their account managers to focus on actual value creating tasks such as business development and relationship management.
Right from onboarding to daily operations, Swaarm offers unparalleled customer support services at the highest standard that compliments the innovative tools and technology to help its clients scale up their business. All of Swaarm’s onboarding sessions are personalized to each of its client’s needs to ensure a smooth set up process.
While headquartered out of Berlin (Germany), Swaarm has teams working out from India, Germany, Denmark and Lithuania. In fact, it caters globally in all time zones since its team is spread in such a manner.
Businesses of all sizes from leading brands to boutique agencies in India including Vytomy, Aragma and ZinkAds as well as international players like Clearpier (Canada), Apptrust (Poland), Spyke Media (Germany), Luns.io (Israel) use Swaarm to simplify & optimize their campaigns and accelerate business growth.
Its co-founders believe that Swaarm is steadily walking on a path to become the default platform of choice for performance marketers. Their aim is to run an open platform that offers superior support to their customers. They plan to do so by consistently channelising their energies towards developing and innovating ways to empower their customers.
Swaarm will gradually expand its footprints in newer regions and keep educating the marketers on how a tracking platform should fuel their business by taking away complex data heavy tasks to make room for more strategic topics.
Swaarm – Recognitions and Achievements
Swaarm was awarded “Best Ease of Use” and “Best Value” by Capterra (2021)– the world’s leading software discovery and review platform
Honored with a 4.9 Star Review Rating on Capterra
App Growth Awards 2021 – Finalist in the category App Analytics Platform
FAQs
When was Swaarm founded?
Swaarm was founded in 2020.
Who is the founder of Swaarm?
Yogeeta Chainani and Alexandru Dumitru are the co-founders of Swaarm.
What are the services offered by Swaarm?
Swaarm offers Performance-based marketing solutions that include tracking, automating, and optimizing marketing decisions to help businesses grow and scale.
The article is contributed by Vatsal Rajgor, Co-Founder & CEO, DigiMaze.
Every brand today wants to establish a strong digital presence and engage with viewers. Given the fact that viewers today are spending more time than ever on social media, there is a very strong business case for brands to use the digital arena as a powerful marketing tool. Even those brands that have a decent digital presence are always aiming to extend their reach and be in contact with their target base.
The important thing to note is that the digital medium is democratic. It offers a level playing field and is extremely effective once the correct strategies are applied. Appropriate and effective digital strategies, when used, are known to impact the behaviours of the consumers and the purchase decisions they finally make. In our day and age, performance marketing is the perfect digital strategy that can enable this.
According to the IAMAI- Kantar ICUBE 2020 report, there will be an increase of 45% in active internet users by 2025, i.e., from 622 million in 2020 to 900 million in 2025. These numbers act as an indication of the scope of the profits that can be reaped by brands that have a strong online presence. Here is where performance marketing comes to the rescue. It’s not just a popular buzzword. Performance marketing is on the rise and it allows marketers to measure and optimize key performance indicators. It points out the areas where the marketing effort is lacking and closes those loopholes to help craft an effective digital marketing strategy.
Performance marketing, powered by data, is inherently goal-driven so brands can measure their ROI. With performance marketing, Once a brand has a clear set of goals that they want its campaign to achieve, can use performance marketing to not just achieve these goals but also measure the probability of success. This is not magic. It’s pure data science. A lot of the decisions made are based on the nuggets of insights from the customer journey and the behaviours displayed by the consumers to create a final plan for the brand.
Performance marketing gives marketers the advantage of collecting and analysing real-time data to curate a framework to target the intended customers and get the desired results. Insights derived from data become critical because they lay the foundation for a brand’s campaign. This marketing approach is a win-win for both the business owner and the publisher as it allows them to focus and build up their campaigns in order to garner a high ROI that is calculable to an accurate degree.
Forms of Performance Marketing
Performance marketing uses various channels to produce the results, and they are:
Native Advertising
Native advertising is a channel of advertising which camouflages itself as regular content. Viewers don’t even get to know that it is a paid form of advertisement. It is usually opted for when one wants to combat the issue of advertisement blocking and banner blindness. As per the reports, 42.7% of the internet users in the world use an ad blocker. In such situations, native advertisements come to the rescue as consumers look at native ads 53% more than display ads and have purchase intent is 18% more for a native ad.
Sponsored Advertising
Sponsored advertising is a type of native advertising. The difference between the two is that sponsored advertising is not an ad but is a piece of content that is usually long-form and is about a brand. It can be an article or a video on a media publisher’s site. Sponsored content aims to engage the audience by either entertaining them or educating them. The content needs to mention that it is sponsored or promoted so that people are aware and don’t think otherwise. Sponsored ads help brands reach new customers, grow their following, and increase their conversion rate among other things.
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is the bread and butter as some brands mainly use this form of advertising over others. In this form of advertising, paid ad campaigns are launched on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others to reach the intended audience. According to the CMO survey, brands will double their budgets for social media advertising by 2023. This is an important form of advertising because, as of January 2022, there were 467 million social media users in India. These numbers show us what kind of reach a brand can have if they were to use this form of marketing.
Search engine marketing is paid marketing, also known as pay-per-click (PPC). This strategy is majorly used to increase the visibility of a website on the search engine results page (SERP). In this, the advertisers only pay for impressions that result in visitors. This is an efficient form as one only pays for the results. The results are quicker with SEM, and it is non-intrusive in nature.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a subset of performance marketing and includes techniques like email marketing, influencer marketing, and many more. In this form of marketing, the affiliate makes a commission when they promote another person’s products or a company’s products. Performance marketing is affiliate marketing with other additions in its mix at a larger scale.
Conclusion
Like any other form of marketing activity, performance marketing also has its pros and cons. Hence, brands need to have flexible targets as a business, because setting rigid goals could hamper outcomes. While performance marketing is undertaken to achieve desired goals and paying only when results are achieved, companies need to have a margin of error. If anything unexpected were to happen, it is all accounted for. Performance marketing can be an effective tool in the arsenal of brands and, if used to its full potential, it can do wonders. It is a cost-efficient marketing strategy, where the performance of a marketing campaign, on any digital platform, can be tracked. Performance marketing is transparent in nature, and this essential feature is not found in other forms of marketing.
For any company, big, mid-sized or small, performance marketing is essential when you look at the digital frontier. It’s here to stay, and if used correctly, it can show results that are calculable, hence is a boon for any brand to make it a part of their digital strategy.
Varun Bhardwaj
