The Thrive Performance Marketing Blog
Learn about all things performance marketing and paid digital with the Thrive blog.How should you use AI for ad design?
TL;DR AI excels at production efficiency, not creative strategy. Use it to accelerate workflows and generate custom assets, but keep humans in charge of brand strategy and emotional connection. You need the perfect background image for your campaign. A modern kitchen with specific lighting and brand colors. Hours of stock photo hunting later, you've found nothing. This is exactly where AI shines: not replacing creativity, but eliminating production bottlenecks.
2 minute read
Most lead scoring sucks (here's how we fixed it)
TL;DR Most B2B companies are doing lead scoring wrong, relying on arbitrary point systems and outdated models that don't reflect actual buyer behavior. Real lead scoring requires clean data infrastructure, empirical validation, and regular updates. More importantly, it should never be prioritized over fundamentals like product-market fit, messaging, and creative. Lead scoring is an optimization layer, not a solution to broken marketing.
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Your ad data can't tell you everything about your audience
TL;DR Ad platform data gives you demographic snapshots and performance metrics, but it can't tell you the whole story about your audience. Marketing personas with overly specific details aren't practical for media buying, even if they help creative teams remember they're marketing to real humans. The real insight? Stop over-segmenting based on small data samples. Creative does the heavy lifting in audience targeting now, and your best-performing segments might actually be the least incremental. Focus on broader reach, use your first-party data wisely, and break down those silos between departments. Everyone needs to share what they know about your audience.
6 minute readAre marketing best practices helpful or lazy?
TL;DR Best practices in digital marketing aren't one-size-fits-all solutions. While foundational principles like testing and brand consistency matter, blindly following "best practices" can trap you in formulaic thinking. The key is understanding when to apply them, when to break them, and recognizing when someone's just trying to sell you something disguised as a best practice.
3 minute readHow to spot bad marketing reports
TL;DR Many marketing reports are fluff disguised as research. The biggest red flag? Headline numbers showing spectacular results without providing methodology, data sources, or context. This is especially true when basic averages are used without indicators of the spread of the data. Averages don't mean typical, especially in marketing where data is rarely normally distributed, or in reports with small or specific samples. Before trusting any report, demand transparency: methodology, sample details, data spread, and discussion of limitations. Use multiple sources to identify patterns, but never substitute benchmarks for your own testing. Stay skeptical, ask better questions, and build strategies on solid ground rather than marketing spin.
4 minute read
Deep diving into e-commerce measurement
TL;DR E-commerce success isn't just about ROAS. Smart marketers look beyond surface metrics to understand customer lifetime value, profitability, and the full customer journey. This means balancing short-term acquisition costs with long-term customer value, especially during high-stakes periods like Black Friday. Performance marketers often get tunnel vision on return on ad spend, but the reality is messier. The most successful e-commerce businesses understand that profitable growth trumps vanity metrics every time.
4 minute readYour 2025 guide to Black Friday/Cyber Monday performance marketing
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7 minute read
What e-commerce marketing leaders should do in their first 90 days
TL;DR New e-commerce marketing leaders face intense pressure to deliver results quickly, but the most successful ones resist the urge to make immediate changes. Instead, they spend their first 90 days listening, learning, and building relationships. The key priorities: understand your market and customers deeply, learn the business economics from finance, evaluate existing teams and partnerships fairly, and establish clear communication systems. Only after this discovery phase should you start making strategic changes.
5 minute readWhat makes a good marketing audit?
TL;DR A proper audit has two components: performance marketing (finding wasted spend and scaling opportunities) and analytics foundation (ensuring your tracking setup is accurate). Focus on immediate wins like pausing zero-conversion keywords, implementing server-side tracking, and setting up automated alerts. Expect 5-15% variance between platforms—anything higher signals broken tracking. Document everything, audit quarterly, and prioritize fixes by ROI impact.
4 minute read