Why All Marketers Should (Sometimes) Be Wrong with Alex Montas

Performance marketing is the science of turning attention into predictable revenue. But is that all? Alex Montas joins Stewart Hillhouse to explore the nuances of performance marketing.

Who's The Guest?

👤 Name: Alex Montas

💪 What They Do: Alex is the VP of Growth at Branded Entertainment Network

🌐 Alex on the web: Twitter | LinkedIn

🧠 Best Advice: Apply the Scientific Method to your marketing. Set a hypothesis, run your test, then let the data speak for itself. Don't change too many variables at once or you won't know what affected it.

Episode Takeaways

A short summary of the most actionable takeaways and best advice of the episode.

What Is Performance Marketing?

According to Alex, performance marketing is anything that's measurable and that eventually leads to some sort of conversion.

In theory, that also means that the changes you make will directly effect the performance as well.

What Is Traffic Arbitrage?

Arbitrage is a financial term that describes buying and selling securities across different markets. You're able to make money (or an arbitrage opportunity) when different markets value that security differently at a given time.

So how can we use that idea when it comes to perfomance marketing? First we need to understand that not every viewer on your content is valued the same.

Say you want 100,000 people to go to a piece of content that you designed to convert readers into trials of your software. The New York Times agrees to run the piece for $100,000 (so $1 per reader).

So, the arbitrage opportunity is for The NYT to get 100,000 people to the page by spending less than $100,000. They can do this by emailing thir newsletter, running a spot on one of their podcasts, or pushing it to the front page for a few hours.

That is a traffic arbitrage and media companies of all sizes are making big bucks that way.

💥 Top Of Mind Takeaway: If you're able to build an audience, not only are you able to push your own traffic towards your assets, but you can also get paid to do it for others.

The Scientific Method: Time To Bust Out Your High School Science Textbook

Remember the Scientific Method from high school science class? If not, here's a refresher:

1. Write a hypothesis for what you expect to happen when you run your experiment
2. Document your experiment so that it can be replicated.
3. Record your findings.
4. Change one variable in your experiment.
5. Repeat.

This is the same framework that all good Performance Marketers will use in their experiments. Whenever they run a new landing page, they only adjust one variable at a time until they find a traffic combination that gets the results they desire.

Pro Tip: Don't change too many variables at once (ex. traffic source, design, call to action). If you do, you won't be able to accurately know what attributed the desired results.

What makes a good performance marketer is the ability to create and test good hypothesis

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