Measuring marketing: how performance marketing is transforming consumer brands
Update: This article has been updated August 27, 2025 with an executive summary and an FAQ section to help readers capture the most important information, make it easier to digest and discover more.
Executive Summary
Modern CMOs face increasing pressure to prove the ROI of their marketing spend. Performance marketing offers a direct solution by shifting payment models from potential reach to tangible results, such as a click, lead, or sale. This data-driven approach allows consumer brands to implement sophisticated audience targeting, automate content at scale, and draw a clear line between investment and business value. This article explores how to leverage performance marketing, covering key trends like Retail Media Networks (RMNs) and AI-powered content to drive measurable and sustained growth.
Marketing ROI remains a challenge
Modern CMOs face an uphill climb: navigating a complex and evolving marketing landscape, targeting customers at the right place and time, and constant demand to deliver tangible results.
This comes amidst a sea of MarTech solutions claiming to be the silver bullet to solve it all. Meanwhile, traditional marketing approaches are too constrained by limited segmentation and siloed channels and often fall short.
But what if there was a way to prioritise customer needs, guarantee measurable return on investment, and cut through the Martech noise?
Enter performance marketing, which is seeing significant growth, in particular amongst consumer brands with an eye on ROI.
Developed in collaboration with Adobe, this whitepaper explores the power of data-driven performance marketing, and how it’s fundamentally rewiring how consumer brands are connecting to their audiences.
What is Performance Marketing?
In regular marketing, you pay upfront based on potential audience reach and outcomes. In performance marketing, you pay based on the success of the activity. It’s a simple idea that’s known to consumers worldwide - we’ve all heard of a ‘no win no fee’ claim - but it is transforming the way marketers reach their audiences.
Traditionally, especially if outsourcing advertising to an agency or third party provider, marketing costs would be fixed, and paid up front. Brands are locked into a certain marketing spend each month, even if there are some months where campaigns don’t deliver the desired ROI.
Performance marketing means you only pay once a tangible pre-defined result has been achieved. Think of a campaign in which expenditure is directly and exclusively linked to a user visiting your website, completing a purchase, engaging with your brand on social media, or downloading content.
This defining principle means performance marketing is completely results-driven, by nature low-risk and extremely budget efficient for cash-strapped CMOs looking to economize.
Why is this a game-changer for consumer goods companies?
A global media budgets survey showed 42% of marketers planned to increase their performance marketing this year. As marketers push to do more with less and strategically leverage data and AI to modernize their marketing, performance marketing is becoming a differentiator.
What benefits does it deliver for CMOs on that uphill journey to measurable marketing outcomes?
- Demonstrate a clear correlation between investment and critical metrics such as conversion rates, basket size, and customer lifetime value (CLV). As these metrics increasingly become the basis for expenditure, consumer firms are saving time and resources spent retrospectively tracking campaign success and evaluating whether they delivered high ROI.
- Facilitate sophisticated audience targeting and the ability to seamlessly engage individuals as they transition between segments. Performance marketing is by nature inherently more targeted than traditional approaches. Data-driven insights can unlock more precise placements of ads, more tailored messaging and greater personalization.
- Enable automated content processes for the rapid production of high volumes of personalized content. By analyzing campaign performance metrics, marketers can identify high-performing content formats, messaging, and targeting strategies, which can then be used to fuel automated content creation and distribution systems.
- Unify marketing strategies by integrating all digital channels to deliver seamless, data-informed experiences across physical and digital touchpoints, making it easier to see which tactics are driving the strongest engagement.
- Scalability at affordable prices. By automating content creation and distribution, performance marketing allows businesses to scale their content efforts without sacrificing on efficiency. The automated systems it relies on can process high volumes of content at pace, helping brands flex according to business growth, market demands, geographic focus and audience preferences.
92% of marketers think content is a valuable business asset for driving long-term ROI but statistics show just 53% of decisions are based on data analytics. Performance marketing effectively bridges this gap by underscoring the indispensable role of trusted and unified consumer data in powering next-generation, AI-driven campaigns.
Beyond the basics: key areas explored in the whitepaper
This forward-looking whitepaper helps consumer brands close that data gap and unpick what performance marketing could offer them. We delve into emerging trends and innovative solutions, such as:
- Modernizing your tech stack. Learn about the importance of unified data, interoperable technologies, and scalable content supply chains enabled by AI to deliver real-time, hyper-personalized, and omnichannel customer experiences.
- The rise of Retail Media Networks (RMNs): Discover how RMNs are projected to expand from $46 billion in 2023 to a staggering $109 billion by 2027, offering unparalleled visibility, precise targeting, and hyper-personalized product recommendations—a ‘win-win-win’ for brands, retailers, and consumers.
- Measuring Success: Gain a profound understanding of common pricing mechanisms such as Cost Per Click, Cost Per Sale, Cost Per Lead, and Cost Per Impression, and how to accurately measure true business impact through metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Retention, Engagement Rate, ROI, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Ready to transform your approach with performance marketing?
Our whitepaper, developed in strategic partnership with Adobe, sets out practical solutions to overcome key CMO challenges like budget constraints, activating and leveraging first-party data, justifying marketing spend against objectives and measuring ROI effectively.
It introduces Cognizant's comprehensive suite of performance marketing services, which include:
- MarTech value realization: Optimizing your technology investments to ensure superior efficiency and seriously enhanced customer lifetime value.
- AI-driven content production (Digital Factory): Automating, optimizing, and scaling marketing operations using Generative AI to keep content relevant and high performing.
- Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) channel acceleration: Empowering brands to develop, launch, and effectively operate their own direct to consumer channels, fostering direct consumer feedback loops and building stronger, data-informed relationships with target audiences.
The whitepaper looks at performance marketing in principle - but in practice too. Case studies show performance marketing in action on the ground, setting out for instance how a global toy brand achieved a 180% increase in digital revenue, or how a leading US retailer re-engaged 20% of inactive customers using performance marketing.
Take the next step in your performance marketing journey
Download the expert whitepaper today to get access to exclusive actionable insights, helping you map a performance marketing pathway that works for your brand, and accelerate adoption where it matters. These tools are essential to anticipate consumer shifts before they happen, deliver the relevant assets at the relevant moment, avoid sunk costs and inflexibility and ensure every expenditure maps onto positive outcomes. The result is deeper relationships and sustained growth for consumer brands seeking to maintain a competitive edge in a saturated marketplace.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is performance marketing?
Performance marketing is a results-driven approach where you pay based on the success of the activity, not on potential audience reach. This means expenditure is directly linked to a tangible, pre-defined result like a website visit, a completed purchase, or a content download.
How does performance marketing differ from traditional marketing?
In traditional marketing, costs are typically fixed and paid upfront, locking brands into a spend regardless of the ROI. Performance marketing costs are variable and only paid after a successful action is completed, making it inherently low-risk. Furthermore, its data-driven nature allows for more precise ad placements and greater personalization.
What are the main benefits of performance marketing?
The primary benefit is demonstrating a clear correlation between marketing investment and critical business metrics like conversion rates and customer lifetime value (CLV). Other key benefits include facilitating sophisticated audience targeting , enabling automated content processes for personalization at scale, and unifying marketing strategies across all digital channels.
How does AI help with performance marketing?
AI is used to strategically leverage data to power next-generation campaigns. Specifically, it helps enable an automated content supply chain, using campaign performance metrics to fuel systems that create and distribute high volumes of personalized content rapidly and efficiently.
What role does the technology stack play in performance marketing?
A modern tech stack is essential for delivering real-time, hyper-personalized, and omnichannel customer experiences. The focus is on having unified data and interoperable technologies that power scalable content supply chains. This trusted data is indispensable for powering next-generation, AI-driven campaigns.
What are Retail Media Networks (RMNs)?
Retail Media Networks (RMNs) are a major emerging trend in performance marketing, projected to grow into a $109 billion market by 2027. They are platforms that offer brands unparalleled visibility and precise targeting within a retailer's digital ecosystem, allowing for hyper-personalized product recommendations directly to consumers.
How is success measured in a performance marketing campaign?
Success is measured using a combination of pricing mechanisms tied to specific actions and broader metrics that show true business impact. Common pricing models include Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Sale (CPS), while overall effectiveness is analyzed through metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), ROI, and Net Promoter Score (NPS).