Editor's note: This articled is based on an older post: performance marketing channels to try in 2023. It has been updated to reflect the latest and best options available.
Many digital and performance marketers rely on the same mix of channels to get their messages out. The list includes names you can probably guess off the top of your head: Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
It's never a bad time to think of new approaches and channels to supercharge your growth and rethink your performance marketing strategies? After all, a data-driven marketing strategy doesn't just repeat what is working — it also tests new things.
In this blog post, we'll explore the top 11 performance marketing channels you should be advertising on, or at least experimenting with, in 2024.
Quick recap: what are performance marketing channels?
Performance marketing is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on specific results, rather than things like awareness or brand impressions. Instead, performance marketers are interested in measurable actions like clicks, website visits, leads generated, or sales.
Performance marketing is a great option for businesses that want to:
- Reach a targeted audience
- Drive sales and conversions
- Maximize their return on investment (ROI)
Performance marketing channels are the ways customers can be reached. These can be search engine results, social media, affiliates, email and content. So let’s have a look at this year’s top performance marketing channels.
11 must-try performance marketing channels
To boost your digital marketing strategy this year, sharpen your marketing strategies on the following platforms to increase brand awareness, rank higher in a search engine, and experience the other benefits of performance marketing.
1. TikTok
A digital marketing strategy without TikTok does not make sense in 2024. The App was the most downloaded app of 2022, with over 100 million more downloads (672 million) than the runner-up, Instagram, and its popularity has continued in 2023. TikTok has an extremely engaged audience, with a whopping 91% of TikTok users taking action after watching a TikTok. That's six times higher than other channels! TikTok is really a no-brainer for any social media marketing approach.
TikTok offers a few different avenues for performance marketing:
- Paid ads: TikTok Promote lets advertisers choose a goal — whether it's video views, new followers, or website visits — and tailors how the video is presented to TikTok users based on the goal.
- Ad auctions: These auctions let you bid on TikTok ads to ensure you get the most out of your TikTok performance marketing campaign. If you're looking for more traffic to your website, you will bid for cost per click. The following bids are available:
- Cost per view (CPV)
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Cost per mille/thousand impressions (CPM)
- Optimized cost per mille/thousand impressions (oCPM)
2. TikTok Shop
Launched in September 2023, TikTok Shop is the latest product by TikTok. It is billed as a one-stop e-commerce solutionfor driving brand growth and sales directly from TikTok.
TikTok shop is powered by TikTok's unique discovery engine, which helps brands and sellers to showcase and sell products directly on TikTok through a suite of in-app shopping touchpoints. TikTok Shop allows brands to offer an in-app marketplace, live and short-form video commerce, checkout and shop ads, and an affiliate arm for creators.
3. Reddit
Reddit is a network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies, and passions. In 2024, harness the power of Reddit's millions of tight-knit communities, known as "Subreddits," to penetrate the engaged and highly influenceable market of Redditors. Redditors are nearly 50% more likely to trust a brand because they advertise on Reddit over other social media platforms and websites. As a digital marketing approach, it’s definitely something to try.
Reddit's ad products include:
- Reddit Pixel: Reddit Pixel empowers marketing companies to leverage the insights of engaged Reddit users to optimize campaigns, reach qualified leads, and drive conversions.
- Promoted Carousel: Reddit's Promoted Carousel feature helps brands create a compelling narrative to connect with customers in a Reddit-centric way — through images and GIFs.
- Engagement retargeting: Re-engage with users who have previously seen or taken action on your Reddit ads to build your connection.
4. Snapchat
Many marketers often overlook Snapchat in their social media marketing, but this is a huge mistake. Its number of daily active users is still growing, making it a potentially lucrative performance marketing channel.
There are various ways in which businesses can leverage the power of Snapchat to market their products. These include:
- Snapchat ads which can help you reach your potential customers (Snapchatters) by demographics, interests, devices, and even location.
- AR shopping lenses which enable brands to tag their products within their content so that your users can easily browse, interact, and purchase directly from their catalog.
5. Quora
Quora is a one-of-a-kind Q&A social media platform where users ask questions, get answers, and interact with one another.
Because of this, the platform has a massive engagement, which makes it a performance marketing channel you should test in 2024 to gain access to its 400 million monthly users (source), build authority, and drive high-quality traffic and leads to your website and your products.
Quora offers a self-service ad platform that lets advertisers create customized native ads that target users by interest, geography, and browser.
Quora ads can only be purchased via auction, so you will have to specify a bid value you're willing to pay for each click, similar to Google Ads and Facebook Ads. The best part is that there is no minimum budget for Quora ads; you choose your budget!
6. Twitch
If you're trying to reach a young target audience in your digital marketing, Twitch is the place to be, with the average Twitch user being 16–24 years old and innovators. The gaming platform sees more than 140 million unique monthly visitors, most of whom are impressionable and eager to consume content and act on it.
Twitch offers two advertising programs for performance marketing: banner ads and in-video ads. You can strategically place your ads before a stream, in the middle of a stream, or at the end of a stream based on when the creator you partner with sees the highest number of viewers.
Tip: Video is also great for brand building, allowing you to leverage Twitch for long-term awareness campaigns. But just make sure that your ads are fun!
7. Native advertising with Outbrain
The best ads enhance a user's website experience rather than interrupting it. Native advertising lets you create ads that look like they're part of the website's regular content instead of competing against it for consumers' attention.
Examples of native ads include:
- Article suggestions at the bottom of a blog post
- Twitter or TikTok hashtags
- Instagram or Snapchat story filters
- TikTok trends.
Outbrain helps brands grow their customer base with Outbrain recommendations, helping them connect with one-third of the world's consumers engaging with internet content.
8. Pinterest
People go to Pinterest to look for inspiration for something they already want. Henceforth, eighty-five percent of pinners prefer — and search for — appealing visual content. This is interest's superpower, and it makes the platform uniquely positioned to host all kinds of content, ranging from blog content to photos and videos.
On Pinterest, "Pinners" share their content on Pinterest boards for all their followers to see. This means that your performance marketing content could snowball from user to user to user on Pinterest, a magnificent way to increase brand awareness and reach. Moreover, 83% of Pinterest users have bought something from content they've seen on the platform.
The beauty of it is that since many people go to Pinterest to search for specific home trends, fashion, and beauty they are already interested in, they are typically ready to buy immediately after they find what they're looking for — which makes your job as a marketer that much easier! All you have to do is provide an eye-catching and engaging ad for your products, and voilà, the buyers come rolling in.
Remember, numbers don't lie, and according to Pinterest Ads, marketers who use the channel benefit from reaching 400 million Pinners monthly!
9. Email newsletters
There are bloggers in every niche, from cat lovers to chefs and tech analysts to make-up artists. Many of them have a newsletter you can subscribe to. That also comes with an opportunity for advertising.
You could argue that sponsoring a newsletter is not real performance marketing (since you don't pay per action a user takes), but it can be if you negotiate the right deal with the sender. For example, you could pay a set amount per email opened or user who visited your website or offer an affiliate marketing model, where you only pay the publisher if their email brings you leads.
10. Podcasts
Podcasts have continuously established their dominance as a serious business. Today, more than 62% of American consumers listen to podcasts, and predictions predict the numbers will skyrocket worldwide going forward.
Podcasting is a personal and intimate medium. The number one reason people download and listen to podcasts is because they like the host and have a real connection with them. Therefore, when a host endorses a product, their listeners trust them and consider buying it.
The great part is that if you give a podcast host a promo code for your website to give to their listeners, you can measure exactly how many people found you through that podcast.
This makes podcasts the ideal partners to help brands reach their niche audiences while creating value for listeners (potential customers) by providing entertaining, informative, and/or educational content.
11. Search engine marketing channels
Search engine marketing uses paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (SERPS). Advertisers pay for keywords that consumers enter into search engines when they are looking for a business, product, or service. These ads are known as pay-per-click ads, and similar to performance marketing, you only pay when someone takes an action and clicks on your ad.
While almost everyone knows about Google Ads, there are various other search engine marketing channels whose powers are often overlooked. This year, consider adding these two search engine marketing channels into your performance marketing mix:
Bing Ads
Microsoft's search engine, Bing, accounts for 30%–40% of online search volume — while those numbers may seem pale in comparison to the search engine behemoth Google, it's still a large chunk of online traffic that you should be attempting to capture. What's more, statistics show that Bing users spend 35% more than Google users do, so adding Bing to your search engine marketing strategy is sure to bring visible payouts.
One of the biggest advantages of Bing Advertising is that it's part of the Microsoft Advertising platform. This means your ads won't just run on Bing; they will also appear on AOL, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo, and other partner websites, reaching over 1.5 billion users. Another huge advantage of advertising via Bing is despite having fewer users than Google, it captures 63 million users who can't be captured via Google Ads.
Ecosia
As sustainability continues to become increasingly important today, eco-conscious people are turning to a search engine with a purpose—Ecosia. Ecosia is the perfect green search engine that plants a tree with every search. More than 15 million people, most of whom are between the ages of 20 and 30, use Ecosia as their primary search engine. And while this might seem like a small number, it is not for a small business. The best part is that most 20– to 30-year-olds are innovators and adopters, which makes them the perfect target audience for your products.
Here's how you can get started advertising on Ecosia:
- Set up a Bing Ads account.
- Create an ad campaign and choose your target locations.
- Choose keywords that will trigger your ad.
- Create your ad and define the text and links that will appear in the ad.
- Focus your campaign on Bing's partner network by clicking "Syndicated Partners Only" and unchecking all other options.
- Launch your campaign
- Focus your campaign on Ecosia. (Learn how to do that here )
Start small, and grow
For a medium-sized company, it’s usually best to pick 2-3 channels for your performance marketing. Keep watching the data to see what works, and then incorporate new channels as you gain experience. Soon you’ll be managing a range of channels and can test and tweak as needed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is performance marketing?
Performance marketing is all about the results, the performance. Unlike other traditional digital marketing services, where businesses and marketers pay for marketing services monthly or annually regardless of how the ad performed, performance-based marketing is a better modern form of marketing where companies only charge when their marketing efforts bring forth tangible results.
The most significant benefits of performance marketing include:
- It is trackable and measurable. You can track your campaign performance every step of the way and adjust it accordingly.
- You only pay for results. With performance marketing channels, you only pay for successful campaigns.
- It enables you to extend your advertising reach to new audiences.
- It is a low-risk form of marketing. You only pay for the desired actions your target audience takes and in flexible payment plans.
What are performance media channels?
Performance media channels are marketing channels that allow you to create and publish ads that drive actions, including clicks, sign-ups, and purchases, and then track and measure the actions.
Also read: What is a channel strategy in marketing?
What is performance media buying?
Performance media buying works is the gem to the best performance results from media advertising. It works to identify the media channels that are most relevant to your target audience at the optimal time for the least amount of money. This lets you spend money on the channels that are most effective and likely to convert and spend less on the channels that just aren't landing using the following metrics:
- Cost per click (CPC): Advertisers are billed based on the number of clicks a display ad receives.
- Cost per lead: Cost per lead is the average cost for each new lead an advertising campaign brings in.
- Cost per acquisition: This measures the total cost of a customer completing a specific action, whether clicking on an ad, subscribing to a newsletter, following a social media account, etc.
Is performance marketing the same as SEO?
Some digital marketing strategies include search engine optimization (SEO) in their performance marketing campaign. But although SEO contributes to marketing performance, it’s not a performance marketing channel. SEO helps content rank higher in organic search results, rather than placing an advert. It’s handy to remember that SEO can help reduce your cost per click, as trust is built.
Disclaimer: The featured image for this article was created using generative AI.