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Performance marketing exists because of a misunderstanding of marketing at most brands. Agencies sell what brands want.
90% of category buyers aren’t in market at any one time. When a category buyer is in market (eg for toothpaste) the ‘conversion’ that happens is mostly pre determined by hundreds of others variables including brand awareness, distinctiveness of the creative, price, availability.
Think of your job as more like managing shelf space. Once someone decides they need toothpaste, your job is to show them where the toothpaste aisle is, and focus on which product is on which shelf in which part of the store and the deals agreed with the supermarket.
The reason you feel stressed constantly is because of low psychological safety – you are accountable for the results, but you can only control a fraction of variables that influence them.
CPC can go up because Google decided to increase its price floor to boost it’s quarterly revenue. You’ll never be able to run analysis to show that, it just happens.
My advice is to focus the brands attention on what you can control – experimentation. Prove that asset A outperforms B, that placement A outperforms B. Even if CPC misses target, you can show that you personally made a choice that influenced the outcome.
