The Thrive Performance Marketing Blog
Learn about all things performance marketing and paid digital with the Thrive blog.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.
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Your 2025 guide to Black Friday/Cyber Monday performance marketing
TL;DR
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
Beyond attribution: understanding the incremental impact of your marketing
Originally published September 2023, updated July 2025 for relevancy TL;DR The world of marketing measurement is complex and traditional attribution methods often fail to share the whole story. We believe that incrementality is a more reliable determiner of revenue outcomes than many attribution models. Incrementality is all about measuring the real impact of our ads – the stuff that wouldn't have happened without them. We measure incrementality in two ways: experiments and testing media mix modeling To get started, we suggest running small experiments and begin building an understanding of how different media channels contribute to top-line revenue.
9 minute read
What is AI doing to SEO and paid media performance?
TL;DR: AI is changing SEO and PPC, not killing them. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and Generative Intelligence Optimization (GIO) are key. SEO and PPC teams must work together. Use PPC insights to inform SEO (landing pages, schema, mobile design, keywords, negatives, site structure, content). Unified strategies reduce waste and improve results.
7 minute read
Ad targeting: is it really that precise?
Ad targeting is one of the biggest selling points of digital marketing, but how accurate is it really? In this episode, we challenge the assumption that ad targeting is as precise as marketers believe. We discuss the pitfalls of audience segmentation, the over-reliance on machine learning, and the growing importance of creative in a world where targeting is becoming less effective.
3 minute readAnswering your biggest performance marketing questions
Performance marketing is constantly evolving, and we know you have questions. In this special Q&A episode, we took your questions about performance marketing, from AI’s impact to reporting best practices and answered them in this wide-spanning conversation.
3 minute readMarketing for early stage start-ups
Founders series: lessons in resilience and marketing for early-stage startups What happens when a seasoned marketer and investor reflects on lessons learned from building businesses and working in venture capital? In this special founder’s series episode of The Hypothesis with Thrive’s founder, Jonathan Becker, Kirby Winfield of Ascend shares candid insights into his entrepreneurial journey, the challenges of early-stage startups, and the importance of balancing grit with experimentation. We also dive into the nuances of effective marketing and how infrastructure plays a pivotal role in shaping the future of technology.
2 minute read