How to balance brand and performance marketing

The way we measure marketing has a huge influence on where budgets go. And because performance marketing is easier to measure, it often receives more investment than it deserves.

You’ve got numbers like return on ad spend (ROAS), cost per acquisition (CPA) and conversions. It all looks clear, and you can draw a straight line from channel to revenue. When results are visible like this, it’s easy to keep doubling down and allocating more budget in that direction.

Brand marketing doesn’t get the same treatment. It’s harder to track, slower to prove and often pushed aside when budgets get tight.

But here’s the problem: this creates a measurement bias that directly shapes how budgets are allocated. When you only invest in what you can easily measure, you risk underinvesting in the channels that drive long-term growth. The more you rely on performance alone, the harder it becomes to keep growing. Costs go up, returns level off and suddenly a digital marketing strategy that used to work no longer does the job.

This isn’t a brand-versus-performance debate. It’s a measurement and investment challenge.

In this article, we break down why performance metrics alone can misrepresent marketing impact, how brand marketing contributes to long-term growth and how modern measurement frameworks help you make smarter budget decisions.

Brand versus performance marketing

The debate around performance marketing versus brand marketing stems from the fact that brand marketing is typically more difficult to measure. This difference in measurability shapes how each is evaluated and how teams make marketing decisions.

For performance marketing, the key performance indicators (KPIs) that give you almost immediate feedback on your campaigns are metrics like ROAS, cost per click (CPC) and your sales conversion rates. These metrics provide fast, directional feedback on what’s driving conversions in the moment.

But for brand marketing, you’re looking at longer-term uplift metrics like awareness, brand sentiment and net promoter score (NPS). While important, these metrics can’t be tied to revenue growth as easily as performance marketing can. They reflect changes in perception and future buying intent, not just immediate results.

This is where the real difference comes in. Performance marketing focuses on capturing existing demand. Brand marketing is what creates that demand in the first place and keeps it afloat.

One drives short-term results. The other compounds over time. Both matter, but they do different jobs.

The challenge isn’t choosing between brand and performance marketing channels. It’s understanding how each contributes to growth and how to evaluate them in a way that reflects their roles across the customer journey.

Why performance metrics alone misrepresent marketing impact

There is an assumption that performance marketing means fast returns, and branding takes time to generate tangible results. But the reality is much more nuanced. This assumption is shaped by what shows up in dashboards, not necessarily what’s driving real growth.

Brand marketing can deliver fast results, too, but unlike the quick peaks of performance marketing, its effects often have a longer burn. The problem is that these effects are harder to capture in standard reporting, so they’re often overlooked.

Performance metrics are more tightly linked to a company's bottom line. As a result, mid-funnel advertising focused on immediate conversions is a natural fit for most businesses. And brand marketing gets put on the back burner.

Part of the issue is that performance data is inherently incomplete. Most platforms capture only a slice of the customer journey, typically the touchpoints closest to conversion. That means earlier interactions like brand campaigns and content marketing often go unaccounted for.

Because performance marketing sits closest to the point of conversion, it’s easier to measure and attribute. But that doesn’t mean it’s responsible for all of the results it appears to generate. In reality, many of those conversions are influenced by earlier brand interactions that don't appear in platform reporting.

However, by balancing both performance channels and brand-building efforts, there’s a lot to gain. You just have to figure out how to meet your short-term goals so you can invest in long-term brand-building. Without that brand-performance balance, you end up optimizing for efficiency today at the expense of growth tomorrow.

You can do this by taking a more holistic approach to measurement. Instead of measuring marketing ROI or ROAS at the ad campaign or channel level, you should measure the overall effectiveness of your marketing with the marketing efficiency ratio (MER) and measurement triangulation. This gives you a more complete view of what’s actually driving performance across the business.

What happens if you focus on performance for too long?

Most companies start by putting all of their energy into performance marketing tactics to get early growth, but if you rely on it too long, your results will eventually start to plateau. What looks like steady performance in-platform often hides the fact that efficiency is already declining.

You can then get stuck on this plateau, chasing higher CPA and sinking ROAS.

What’s required here is a balance between always-on performance marketing and expanded brand strategies that support a longer-term vision. In other words, you need to start creating demand, not just capturing it.

Gone are the days of “slot machine marketing” where you could put $1 into Facebook Ads and reliably get $1.80 back. Rising costs, competition and tracking limitations have changed the game.

While this means your job is that much harder than it was a few years ago, you might be surprised to find that a more balanced approach can bring consistency back to your results and lead to more sustainable growth.

How much should you spend on performance vs. brand marketing?

When it comes to absolutes in balancing your mix, the short answer is a close-to-60/40 split. That’s according to research from Noa Consulting and the Swedish marketers association Sveriges Annonsörer. They showed that the optimal balance was to spend between 40% and 70% on brand-building and the remainder on activation campaigns.

This also aligns with the research from Peter Field and Les Binet in their book The Long and Short of It. They found that a 60-40 split (60% on brand, 40% on direct response or performance marketing campaigns) is the best split.

But as with everything marketing and data-related, this isn’t quite the whole story. While this might be a good baseline to build from, there’s a little more to it.

Allocating your budget for short and long-term growth

When performance is the primary lens, it pushes budgets toward short-term returns, even as those returns weaken. What gets measured gets funded, and performance metrics tend to dominate that conversation.

For aggressive, short-term growth, performance-based marketing will hit the mark, but only for a limited time. It turns existing interest into action, rather than creating that interest in the first place.

For long-term brand equity, a balance between more brand marketing and other marketing will go the extra mile to lift your sales as your performance plateaus. This is where the investment in brand starts to compound, lowering acquisition costs and improving conversion rates over time.

The challenge is that these effects don’t show up clearly in channel-level reporting. That’s why relying on a fixed split, like 60/40, without understanding your own data can be misleading. Instead, you need to better understand how channels actually impact growth and what might happen when you shift your marketing mix.

Using measurement frameworks like MMM and incrementality testing can help you determine how brand and performance contribute to growth in your specific context. That way, budget allocation becomes a strategic decision based on evidence, not a rule of thumb.

What to consider when balancing brand and performance marketing

Striking the right balance between performance and brand marketing depends on things like:

Your company age

You can usually work with performance marketing strategies for a limited time. While you might see an early surge, at some point, you’ll see that adding more spend to your performance marketing campaigns won't drive many incremental sales and could even blow out your ROAS.

This is when you reach the point of diminishing returns and start panicking. In response, one option is to retreat to strategies that worked in the past, even if they may not be effective in the current situation. Another, perhaps more forward-thinking approach, is to step back and reevaluate your strategy, considering a more holistic, comprehensive approach to your marketing efforts.

Your marketing budget

Your budget also plays a role. Smaller budgets tend to favor performance marketing for measurable ROI, while larger budgets allow room for both brand-building and performance tactics.

Your sales cycle length

Long sales cycles (like we often see in B2B) benefit from longer-term brand-building with gentler touchpoints to stay memorable.

Shorter cycles (like e-commerce and digital products) often benefit more from performance marketing to drive quick sales. But this doesn’t mean that a brand campaign isn’t important if you’re on a shorter sales cycle.

Your target audience’s preferences

What does your target audience value more? A company selling eco-friendly water bottles is likely to have an audience that values brand integrity more than low prices.

If your audience values brand loyalty or emotional connections, a good brand marketing strategy is essential, as performance marketing will feel disruptive and even somewhat cold.

On the other hand, price-sensitive customers usually respond better to direct-response, performance-focused ads.

How to use brand marketing to break the plateau

So, you’re already on the plateau. How do you get off?

Embrace a fresh perspective

Brands that successfully overcome growth plateaus often begin by re-evaluating their beliefs on how marketing drives growth.

This can mean unlearning what you know from past practices and adopting fresh approaches. It means bringing an experimental mindset to the table, something that incrementality testing can help with.

Adidas shifted from heavily digital performance campaigns to a balance between performance and easy to brand-building after seeing its brand equity erode. This type of shift requires collective buy-in from leadership and a business culture that understands ethical marketing in the age of AI is becoming more important to consumers than ever.

Understand your untapped audience

While you’re focused on your existing customers, it’s easy to overlook potential customers who don’t currently use your products or services or occasional customers who hold significant growth potential.

For instance, Samsung took to Reddit to convert Apple’s audience away from “the orchard” and to bring fence-sitters “into the fold” when marketing their new foldable phone.

Samsung targeted its non-users in a tongue-in-cheek campaign to lift brand sentiment.

The results speak for themselves: an eight-point increase in brand favorability and a 17-point increase in purchase intent. Imagine following this kind of campaign with a quick one-two-punch conversion campaign.

It’s this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that improves brand lift and conversions over time.

Put your brand values on display

As ethical marketing continues to trend, sharing your brand values helps align you with your ideal audience. Patagonia, for instance, keeps its audience focused on sustainability with its Worn Wear initiative, which is a partnership between Patagonia, eBay and customers to promote the sale and reuse of worn items.

By emphasizing sustainability in this brand marketing campaign, Patagonia deepens loyalty among existing customers and attracts new eco-conscious consumers who value brand integrity and purpose over price.

Create a balanced growth model

A sustainable growth model should balance both your short-term sales goals and long-term brand-building. Gousto, the meal-kit brand, realized they relied too much on paid ads to win business.

The company shifted to a 60% brand, 40% performance marketing mix to create a more sustainable revenue stream, ultimately allowing them to avoid the sales plateau entirely while creating a large pool of freshly primed future customers.

Lowering your performance budget and slowly ramping up your brand approach can help you build a stronger brand presence step-by-step without halting any immediate (successful) sales efforts.

Measurement frameworks to evaluate brand impact

So, how do you calculate the right mix for your brand? Well, finding the right balance won’t be as simple as just throwing a number at the wall and seeing what sticks. You need to dig a little deeper and determine which brand/performance balance will work best. This can take some calculating.

Using advanced (but not difficult) triangulation tools such as marketing mix modeling (MMM), multi-touch attribution (MTA) and incrementality testing is an effective way to determine the best media mix for your brand.

This combination is known as measurement triangulation. Here’s how it works:

Use MMM for high-level spend insights

• Start with MMM to analyze historical spend data across Google Ads, Facebook and YouTube. Identify which channels drive conversions or boost brand awareness.
• For example, Google Ads may deliver high ROAS while YouTube excels at building brand recognition.
• Next, use MTA (multi-touch attribution) to refine these insights. MMM also shows diminishing returns, like Facebook ads losing ROAS beyond a certain spend. Use this to reallocate budgets.
• Shift excess Facebook spend into brand-building on platforms like YouTube or display ads.

The goal is clear: optimize every channel for maximum impact and smarter spending.

Connect the dots with MTA

Now we need to capture the user journey points:

• With MTA, identify the role each touchpoint plays in driving conversions. For example, you might find that YouTube ads initiate journeys while retargeting on Facebook closes them.
• Multi-touch attribution helps you understand the sequential contribution of each channel across the funnel. At the same time, MMM shows you the diminishing point of returns so you can evaluate the level of returns against their importance in the customer journey.
• Use MTA’s channel weights to separate brand-driven touchpoints from direct-response ones.

If MTA shows that users exposed to both YouTube (brand) and Facebook (performance marketing) retargeting ads have higher conversion rates, this shows that combining brand marketing and performance marketing in a specific sequence improves results.

Design incremental holdout tests to measure lift

Next, you’ll want to test brand versus performance measures against each other.

• Choose a test group exposed to both brand (e.g., YouTube) and performance ads (e.g., Facebook retargeting) and a control group receiving only performance ads.
• Measure incremental lift in brand engagement (e.g., brand search traffic) and conversions to understand the combined impact of brand and performance.
• You can then use these tests to evaluate the MTA and MMM data you’ve already captured and test your data conclusions.
• For example, if MTA shows that brand ads lead to downstream conversions, you can validate this with incremental testing by measuring whether brand-exposed users engage more with performance ads later.

The power of triangulation: unified marketing measurement for confident budget allocation

No single measurement model tells the full story.

Marketing mix modeling, MTA and incrementality testing each solve different parts of the measurement problem. On their own, they all have blind spots. Together, they create a far more reliable view of marketing effectiveness.

Marketers and analysts use MMM to understand the long-term impact of media spend and where diminishing returns begin to appear. Multi-touch attribution adds visibility into how channels interact across the customer journey. Incrementality testing validates whether marketing activity is actually driving additional business outcomes.

This combination is known as triangulation.

By combining MMM, MTA and incremental test data, marketers can build a more holistic overview of their brand versus performance mix instead of relying on platform-reported attribution alone.

For example, MMM may suggest a broader 60/40 brand-to-performance split, while MTA and incrementality testing refine where those investments should go. The data may show that YouTube drives stronger top-of-funnel awareness while paid search captures downstream demand more efficiently.

This also allows teams to simulate budget allocation shifts and test different investment scenarios before making major spending decisions. With agentic AI, teams can automate manual steps, like checking data quality and model optimization, freeing up time for even deeper investigation.

Instead of relying on a single source of truth, triangulation combines historical analysis, behavioral data and causal testing to reduce blind spots and improve confidence in budget allocation decisions. This is the foundation of unified marketing measurement: connecting multiple measurement approaches to understand what’s truly driving growth across the full customer journey.

Modern measurement methods help quantify both brand and performance impact

While it might seem like a lot of work initially, taking the time to calculate the ideal split for your brand ensures that you’re not leaving anything to chance or wasting your budget where it doesn’t belong.

Plus, using a Data Hub to aggregate this data for you leaves you room to draw your data conclusions without the mental load.

Run your tests all in one place and find the short-term changes that could bring you long-term gains. Get off the performance plateau once and for all with a single source of truth that works for your marketing.

Better measurement leads to better marketing decisions

When performance metrics are the primary lens, they naturally pull budget toward short-term returns. What looks efficient in the moment gets scaled, while the slower, less visible impact of brand marketing is pushed aside.

That imbalance catches up with you as rising costs, weaker returns and stalled growth.

The difference now is that marketers no longer have to rely on partial signals. With unified measurement, you can start to see how different activities actually contribute to growth across the full customer journey.

Instead of asking which channel gets credit, the question becomes: what’s actually moving the needle?

Funnel’s approach to unified marketing measurement centers on bringing fragmented marketing data into a single trusted foundation so teams can power agentic workflows with clean data and analyze performance more holistically. By combining multiple measurement methodologies, marketers can reduce reporting blind spots, evaluate trade-offs more confidently and make smarter budget allocation decisions across both brand and performance marketing.

FAQs

How long does brand marketing take to work?

Brand marketing usually works over a longer time horizon than performance marketing, but that doesn’t mean results take years to appear. Some effects, like branded search growth, direct traffic and improved conversion rates, can happen relatively quickly. The larger impact tends to compound over time as awareness and market trust grow.

How do you know when you’re overinvesting in performance marketing?

One common signal is rising acquisition costs without proportional revenue growth. You may also notice declining ROAS efficiency, audience saturation, heavier dependence on retargeting or slower overall growth despite increasing spend.

Should brand and performance teams work separately?

Increasingly, no. Many organizations are moving toward integrated measurement and planning because brand and performance influence each other. Separate reporting structures can create competing incentives and fragmented decision-making.

Which channels are best for brand marketing?

Channels commonly associated with brand-building include YouTube, connected TV, podcasts, sponsorships, influencer marketing, out-of-home advertising and upper-funnel social media marketing. The best channel depends on where your target audience spends time and how your category influences buying decisions.