Performance Marketing Software: What It Is and When You Need It

Phonexa
12 minute read
Phonexa
12 minute read

Most successful digital marketing and promotion strategies are often performance-driven. When marketers see audience engagement, they can calculate the best working strategies to implement them in the future. They can prolong the line of successful campaigns by running proven strategies and using the best performance marketing software tailored to their needs and tasks.

Thus, many businesses rely on performance marketing tools to keep track of results. However, marketers still struggle to measure performance and ensure accurate attribution.

After stagnation between 2018 and 2021, advertising campaigns’ revenue-based return on investment (ROI) grew by 6% each the following year. In 2022, global advertisers recorded a median ROI of $4.25 for every dollar spent on performance-based promo, making it obvious that promoting brands and specific products with digital marketing performance-based strategies is essential.

Gaining more profit, improving marketing performance, and boosting ROI are challenging tasks for any business. But with an advanced partner and performance marketing solution, you can track the essential KPIs and optimize performance marketing efforts.

Whether you’re a business owner, solopreneur, or rookie affiliate, consider using these tips to find the best performance marketing platform and software for your business.

What Is Marketing Performance, and Why Is It Important?

Businesses can launch promotions online on various platforms and media channels: blogs, social media, emails, etc. All digital channels share one feature — they can track and evaluate user activity. Naturally, measuring performance precisely with traditional promotional tools like magazines, TV advertisements, or billboards is complicated.

But in the digital world, tracking every activity is easy: you can find out how many people see your ad, click on it, view it, or proceed to perform a targeted action. The process of setting up those campaigns, measuring them, and analyzing results is called the marketing performance approach.

More often than not, it’s part of the affiliate content marketing strategy. Marketers can test how even the slightest changes can affect ad performance by using a content performance platform. Afterward, they adjust the campaign to make it even more profitable.

Marketers are always on the lookout for employing the best practices with a high return on investment (ROI). That’s why many of them take time to identify the most suitable marketing tools able to track each online promo interaction and find out how to bring in even more high-intent leads.

What Is Performance Marketing Management?

It’s a promotion practice where businesses pay only for certain performance-based results. They can pay for clicks, leads, sales, or other targeted actions. They use marketing tools to track sales, ROI, essential metrics, and KPIs (key performance indicators).

It’s no secret that digital performance marketing platforms can track numerous metrics. Let’s look at the most common ones you should consider.


A performance-based approach is an effective way to manage advertising costs. When it comes to affiliate marketing, the advertiser only pays the affiliate when their marketing efforts have produced a pre-described result.

If your goal is to generate clicks, you pay only for them. If your performance marketing strategy is to get as many leads as possible, you pick the pay-per-lead approach. The other common strategies are pay-per-sale, pay-per-acquisition, and pay-per-impression.

The main thing here is to find the most crucial metric of performance in marketing for your situation. To do it, you should go through several stages: evaluation, alignment, activation, execution, and optimization.

Each campaign creates a vast amount of data which is impossible to evaluate without assistive tools. The first step in performance marketing strategy is to track performance. After, you should find patterns in data, and Phonexa’s solutions are great at it. They provide valuable insights to help you grow your revenue per lead.

Once you get these results, you launch the campaign, set clear and realistic goals, and, based on the captured performance data, optimize specific campaigns to yield better marketing performance results.

That’s why we recommend you look for performance marketing software with multiple tools in its arsenal. While some of them offer many AI features, it’s too soon to rely entirely on them. When in the consideration stage, take your time to choose the best performance marketing software that can help you achieve the mission without switching between multiple service providers.

How Does Affiliate Performance Marketing Software Work?

Affiliate performance marketing software can move the needle on marketing attribution and revenue for networks, merchants, and affiliates.

Affiliates get paid depending on the user actions they have generated: clicks, calls, subscriptions, sales, etc. Tracking every action and following all the touchpoints and customer journey is a given for savvy brands and affiliate marketers. That’s why modern performance marketing tools are often bundled. They provide the possibility to tap into affiliate tracking, real-time analytics, and conversion rate optimization, so marketers can see even the slightest changes right after they have happened.

On top of that, affiliate marketing software helps with partner management, making the promotion more organized and enabling businesses to see actual results. As for affiliates, they can use performance marketing tracking software to monitor changes and experiment with different promotional strategies.

Ultimately, these solutions help you monitor the aspects of your online campaigns, spot potential hurdles, and eliminate them. For instance, real-time reporting is one of the performance marketing tools designed to replace disparate spreadsheet data and make the most of actionable insights into your active campaigns.

What Are the Benefits of Using Performance Marketing Software?

Undoubtedly,  advanced tracking and other affiliate marketing tools are crucial for networks, brands, advertisers, and performance agencies to succeed. Let’s take a closer look at how marketing performance solutions can benefit all the parties involved.

Precise Segmentation

Companies can segment their audience pointwise, making targeting and promotion easier. Businesses can send more personalized communication guidelines to ambassadors to ensure they get the best possible feedback.

It often saves marketing budgets by ensuring businesses get their goals in a marketing performance campaign. You can diversify your revenue stream by finding audiences that bring you the required performance without spending as much money as usual.

Enhanced Tracking

Affiliate performance marketing software adds dimensions to your lead generation and distribution efforts while monitoring your digital marketing performance and capturing the essential data.

It saves you time in spotting trends before it’s too late and they become obvious. Ultimately, affiliate performance marketing software helps you gather more potential clients and generate successful sales.

Enhanced Lead Management

Performance marketing tools can help you improve your current lead management. These solutions show weak spots of your marketing efforts and how they tie in with each other.

Let’s take a potential website redesign as an example. Suppose you don’t need to implement it instantly and have time to understand user behavior, learn how to capture users’ attention to convert it into clicks, and track actions that cause friction.

On top of that, you can run A/B tests of different versions of the website layout to see how it affects user engagement and lead generation. With the right marketing tools, you can identify the weak spots and improve conversions.

Phonexa’s single operating solution for partner and performance marketing can help you track each aspect of your digital marketing performance — you name it, we’ve got it. Whether it’s website traffic, email marketing, or call management, we’ll provide system guidance and help you troubleshoot.

Successful promotional strategies enhance ROI levels. Optimized campaigns require less management time, and marketers can spend their time on other tasks rather than performance marketing tracking.

Moreover, you can focus on a specific affiliate niche or sub-niches to find users interested in your products and concentrate your promo activities on specific target audience groups. These simple steps can help you boost marketing performance and improve ROI.

Phonexa’s single operating solution for partner and performance marketing has numerous tools to monitor your digital marketing campaigns. It has user behavioral analytics, click and lead tracking solutions, automated accounting, mailing tools, and more.

Our suite of solutions provides you with a vast amount of data empowering you to make educated decisions and reach your goals.

What Are the Challenges of Using Performance Marketing Software?

Despite all advantages, affiliate performance marketing software has its challenges, and you need to experiment to find the perfect performance digital marketing strategy. If you address those challenges correctly, you can overcome them and turn them into advantages.

Data Integration

Content performance platforms can provide insights from all campaign sources: your website, other sites, socials, etc. Integrating data from many platforms can be complex since each has different data formats and compatibility characteristics.

However, it’s possible with Phonexa’s solutions. Phonexa offers numerous integration options, including Google Ads, VICIdial, Pixel, Anura, and ImpressionWise. You can easily connect Phonexa’s solutions and track the digital marketing performance of active campaigns.

ROI Measurement

It’s crucial to understand your ROI if you want to build a successful performance marketing campaign. You can track multiple KPIs to get a deeper understanding of your campaigns and yield better results.

However, not all marketing platforms guarantee accurate attribution. We encourage you to use tools that calculate ROI across numerous channels.

Marketing Experiments

Another vital aspect of any marketing performance campaign is the ability to optimize and adjust it. If you are not 100% sure the chosen approaches might not lead to the desired results, consider A/B testing, call tracking solutions, lead management software, and in-depth user behavior analytics to uncover your real affiliate marketing potential.

Criteria To Consider When You Pick Performance Platforms

Every business has its key characteristics and marketing goals. Therefore, consider a combination of factors before you make the final choice. We’ve compiled a list of criteria to consider when choosing a suitable solution for a performance marketing network.

 
Criteria  Why Is It Important?
Pricing Does the pricing policy suit you?

Does the tool have multiple plans?

Does it have custom pricing where you can pay for additional features separately?

Free plan/trial Does this performance marketing software have a limited free plan?

Is it a time-limited trial or a plan with limited functions?

Features Does this tool have distinctive features that stand it out from other tools?

How do its features help you?

How many functions do you use at work?

Do you need to pay more for extra ones like landing page optimization?

Scalability Can your chosen performance marketing software handle expanding marketing requirements?

Do you need to manage all activities in a single service?

Automation Can you streamline all your campaigns with a chosen tool?

Or maybe you need multiple tools from marketing campaigns to do it?

Look for performance marketing software with automation features that cover all your needs: website visitor tracking, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.

Reviews Does the tool have reviews from real users and trustworthy bloggers?

Does it have any frustrating reviews?

The absence of dissatisfaction reviews should warn you. There should be at least a few 4 and 4.5 stars reviews, where users share their history of usage of the specific tool and why it doesn’t fit them perfectly.

Customer service How does a company assist you when you have troubles with the tool?

How many ways to contact performance marketing software support do you have?

What are the working hours of support agents?

 

Select tools that suit your tech and pricing requirements. If you decide to scale your performance marketing network, ensure they meet your business needs. While changing your working instruments is hard, you should pick performance marketing software that fits your marketing and business goals in the long run.

How Phonexa Can Help You Achieve Digital Marketing Performance Goals

The only way to understand ad campaign performance and tap into all the important aspects is to implement tools that can tie revenue back to channels, campaigns, publishers, and networks through marketing attribution.

Phonexa offers comprehensive performance marketing software, enabling you to monitor every detail of your digital promotion. For instance, LMS Sync is a lead management tool with a built-in predictive modeling feature that helps to take the trial and error out of their marketing efforts.

Lynx, Phonexa’s click tracking software, can improve your performance marketing campaigns by tracking digital sales, measuring impressions, ROI, and CR. Affiliate marketers equipped with this solution can leverage the extensive data it offers on click performance, and rest assured they’ll have access to precise lead attribution, targeting, and journey control.

HitMetrix is a behavior analytics and conversion rate optimization software enabling affiliate marketers and brands to optimize their lead flows and conversions. Its advanced data visualization tool might just be the missing piece of your marketing puzzle, providing essential insights into website performance.

E-Delivery and Opt-Intel are essential email marketing tools. E-Delivery helps you increase mailing engagement by providing multi-channel distribution with detailed behavioral segmentation, in-depth analytics, automated A/B testing, and more. Opt-Intel streamlines business mailings by creating suppression lists, automating data transfers, and extending list-sharing features.

Cloud PBX and Call Logic are essential call management solutions helping you to support agent productivity and monitor each aspect of their work. In-depth call analytics and predictive modeling tools can help you identify blind spots, find the best ways to tackle all the related issues, and guarantee the desired outcomes.

One of the crucial features for affiliate marketers is real-time reporting. With granular analytics, you can find the most profitable solutions and future-proof your performance marketing efforts in any niche, including home services, insurance, and finance.

Implement the Best Performance Marketing Platform & Software

Planning your marketing strategy is just the tip of the iceberg. You might need additional tools to sell or purchase leads and build automated workflows in the long run. In this case, you must ensure that the chosen performance marketing software can measure crucial KPIs, offer seamless integration, and close the loop between leads, calls, clicks, and revenue.

Ultimately, the right performance marketing software should suit your business needs and offer different scalability levels yet be affordable.

Leverage your campaigns with the best performance marketing platform and software from Phonexa. 

Book a free consultation to learn how we can help you unlock new revenue streams and streamline your affiliate marketing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most valuable feature of marketing performance software?

Only the combination of features can make a difference. The right performance marketing software will help you automate your workflows, manage strategic partnerships, improve user experience, and ensure accurate marketing attribution.

Do I need performance marketing software if I run a small online business?

Yes, performance marketing software can help you find the most promising online promotion practices, drive more qualified leads and calls, and hit your revenue targets.

How can performance digital marketing services usage improve ROI?

These services show you how and when to optimize campaigns to bring in more high-intent leads. On top of that, affiliate performance marketing services provide useful insights to boost your campaigns to new levels.

How to choose the best performance marketing software?

You need to pick a tool that suits your needs. If you prefer working with YouTube or Instagram bloggers, look for a service with advanced social media marketing services. If you need to track affiliate performance marketing, select software offering multiple systems that allow you to see the performance of traffic sources, paid media buys, publishers, and affiliates.

Got Questions?

Get in touch! We are available 24/7.

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Phonexa
Phonexa is the leading all-in-one platform for call tracking, lead distribution, email, marketing, and digital marketing. The Phonexa staff is responsible for authorship of Phonexa blog posts.
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