The ultimate guide to performance marketing | Timothy Davis (Shopify)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
Is performance marketing just something every company should be doing?

**Timothy Davis** (0:02)
Hot take, paid is for everyone. If you look at the way each platform is doing, Google, you have to scroll pretty far down to get to an organic listing. Meta, it's almost a pay for play now.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:13)
When you take over for an agency at a company, you crush their performance within a month. I'm curious to what you find they are doing wrong.

**Timothy Davis** (0:20)
Instead of thinking about being on top of the page, and that's kind of like ego marketing, I wanna be number one, I wanna be there all the time. It's about showing to the right person as often as possible.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:31)
Any other tips for people just to experiment with the platform?

**Timothy Davis** (0:33)
Each platform is different. The user behavior is different. Make sure you're not too hard on yourself if it doesn't work. It's okay to fail because we're either winning or we're learning.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:45)
Today my guest is Timothy Davis. Timothy has led performance marketing for all of Shopify for the past two and a half years, and as a consultant has helped companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Eventbrite kickstart and scale the performance marketing teams. In our conversation, we get incredibly tactical on all things to performance marketing and pay growth. When to start investing, how to run signs of life test on each platform, what platforms to investigate and what platforms to bet big on, what types of companies are best suited to invest big on pay growth, whether you should invest pre-product market fit or not, what agencies often get wrong, and what to look for in your investment when you're just getting started. Plus what your first three hires should look like, tips for which platforms are most interesting right now, a peek at Timothy's actual reports that he runs to judge performance if you're watching this on YouTube, and so much more. This episode is for anyone who's trying to figure out how to kickstart or improve their performance marketing investment. And I guarantee you'll get something out of this that'll make your life better.
If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Timothy Davis.
Timothy, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Timothy Davis** (2:04)
Yeah, thanks for having me. Long time coming.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:06)
Yeah, I'm really excited we're finally doing this. I actually posted on Twitter for people to suggest questions for this topic and there's just so much interest in what we're gonna be talking about, which essentially we're gonna be diving deep into all things, pay growth, all things performance marketing. By the way, I have a cold for people in case you wonder why I sound a little weird, but the show must go on.
I wanna start with just setting a little context for folks that aren't super familiar with performance marketing pay growth. When we talk about performance marketing slash paid growth, first of all, are those two terms interchangeable to you? And second of all, what falls under the umbrella of performance marketing slash paid growth?

**Timothy Davis** (2:42)
Paid can be a lot of things. It can be online, it can be offline, it can also even be affiliates. Typically when I talk about performance marketing, it's about online only, but you could argue, it's like offline could be performant, affiliates could be performant, stuff like that.
They can be interchangeable, but I would recommend if you are talking about it to kind of specify which one you're talking about, because when you do say paid, because I'm in the industry, I would just, oh, they do Google search and they do meta and they do things like that. But if you do offline and you just say paid, we may be talking about things, but missing each other on two ships passing in the night. So I think historically, people, when they have said paid growth, have been fully focused on just online.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:30)
Just online, okay.

**Timothy Davis** (3:31)
But I would argue in the last couple of years, you could definitely roll offline into that conversation as well.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:37)
Okay, so performance marketing, when someone hears that term, it's essentially marketing that you can measure the performance up.

**Timothy Davis** (3:43)
Correct, yes. Nail on the head.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:46)
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