The most effective performance marketing campaigns focus on the action segments of the sales funnel. The goal is to reach users who are in the consideration and purchase stages, where conversions lead to sales, downloads, or other desired activities.
Top performance marketing channels include Google, Facebook, native advertising, display ad platforms, and other social networks. Affiliate marketing and mobile marketing are also considered performance marketing channels. One key differentiator in performance marketing, compared to other forms of digital marketing, is that the platform or publisher doesn’t get paid unless your content converts. Compared to full-funnel marketing, performance marketing often provides a straight and direct route to profitability and growth.
7 Marketing Channels to Achieve Campaign Success
When it comes to performance marketing channels, some stand out from the pack. “Google and Facebook are the top two, no questions asked,” says Eyal Shnaides, growth marketing director at Taboola. However, he points out that there is a race for third, with performance advertising platform Realize and several social media networks as viable choices. “There’s a big gap between Google and Facebook as being very solid in the top two,” he says. “Almost everyone that comes to TikTok ads already has their campaigns on Facebook and Google.”
That doesn’t mean these networks are the most effective, though: It takes experimentation, research, and multiple touchpoints to reach your target audience. “It’s very rare to have a short funnel where people watch one ad, click on the ad, and click straight to purchasing,” Shnaides points out. The advantage to a platform like Realize, then, is that it reaches 600 million daily users across the open web. “The inventory of potential users is very wide,” he says.
Reach 600 million daily users across the open web. Realize.
Let’s explore the most popular performance marketing channels and the pros and cons of each.
| Channel | Pros | Cons |
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| Native Advertising |
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| Display Ads |
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| Other Social Media Channels |
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| Affiliate Marketing |
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| Mobile Advertising |
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As the leader in search, with nearly 90% of the market share for search as of March 2025, Google also leads the way as the top performance marketing channel. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, stands to generate more than $200 billion in net digital ad revenue in 2025, and Google ads have an average click-through rate (CTR) of more than 5%.
Acquisitions come from web user searches. People may seek solutions to a problem, specific products, or general information, such as, “Where’s the best pizza in New York?”
Brands can rank for the answers to these searches through search engine optimization, or through ads placed on the Google Adwords network. Paid search is often called search engine marketing (SEM). Ads can appear as text at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) or as text or display ads on various websites that use Adwords as a revenue stream.
Native Advertising
Native advertising looks like editorial content on a website, providing valuable and relevant information to readers. While native advertising will have a disclaimer that it’s a paid ad, it tends to blend in with other content on the platform, and although ad blockers may eliminate visibility of display ads for many users, native advertising often slips through to reach browsers. If it delivers the right information to a well-targeted audience, users will welcome it.
In the global advertising market, native advertising holds up to 25% of the market share. It’s worth roughly $103.2 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach more than $733 billion in the next 10 years.
Native advertising formats vary based on the platform where the ad appears, but the common thread is that the best native advertising offers readers or viewers the content they need to make an informed decision.
Display Ads
Display ads can appear on any website, typically in a banner format or as a vertical ad down the side of the page. Display ads may include video, graphics, text, motion, and, increasingly, interactive formats to attract and engage viewers. The current global display ad market stands at roughly $150 billion in 2025. That figure encompasses mobile and web ads, as well as social media and search.
Thanks to advancements in AI-driven targeting, real-time bidding, and cross-platform integration, display advertising offers significant advantages for performance marketing at scale. Modern display ads utilize machine learning to deliver hyper-personalized content that’s based on user behavior, rather than just traditional demographics, which hugely improves both click-through and conversion rates. With the rise of cookieless tracking technologies and privacy-first ad solutions, marketers can also feel confident about reaching their desired audience without falling foul of data compliance regulations.
Facebook held roughly 18% of the world’s digital ad revenue share in 2023. The platform enables brands to place native ads that appear in user’s streams or to boost posts, giving organic content a broader, targeted reach. Facebook’s sophisticated retargeting can increase impressions and boost brand loyalty.
With 3.35 billion daily users across Meta platforms (which also includes Instagram) and low start-up costs of $5 per day for ads, many performance marketers view Facebook as a safe bet, but that’s not always the case: The cost-per-mille (CPM, i.e., cost per thousand views) for Facebook averages nearly $15 in October 2025.
Ad fatigue, targeting the wrong audience, and creative that doesn’t “stop the scroll” can all be factors in a failed campaign. “Facebook is still a good channel for building an audience, but if you’re a small business looking for fast growth and results, $5 a day on Facebook will get you nowhere,” Rima Mattok, demand generation director at Taboola, previously stated when discussing Facebook Ads.
Other Social Media Channels
While Meta (Facebook and Insta) capture the lion’s share of social media marketing and advertising, the other platforms are worth considering if research shows that’s where your audience hangs out. Twitter/X gets more than 4.5 billion monthly visitors and is noted by Semrush to be the 10th-ranked site worldwide.
LinkedIn got 1.72 billion visits in March 2025, also per Semrush. For B2B companies, LinkedIn can complement other campaigns effectively. The platform offers options for promoted posts, sponsored messages, and PPC ads on desktop. However, the growing number of spammers on LinkedIn remains a problem and sponsored messages can easily be ignored.
TikTok has 135 million users in the U.S. alone, and 1.59 billion global users. Features like the TikTok Shop, LIVE shopping ads, user-generated campaigns, and in-feed ads provide native advertising options designed to appeal to TikTok’s on-the-go younger audience (one in four TikTok users are under 25).
Successful social media campaigns require identifying where your target audiences spend their time online, determining which ad formats will cut through the noise, and creating content that resonates.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can take place across any of the performance marketing platforms listed above. In affiliate marketing, advertisers don’t pay unless the placements convert to measurable goals — typically, sales or downloads. The global affiliate marketing platform market size reached $17.42 billion in 2024. Affiliate marketing encompasses written content with links, native ads, social media posts (paid and organic), and any other channels affiliates opt to promote through.
Mobile Advertising
Mobile advertising can span any of the platforms above, with roughly 98% of global users accessing the web through mobile phones in 2024. Mobile advertising encompasses SMS ads, in-app ads, ads on social media platforms, and paid search through mobile devices. Mobile is an effective way to reach bottom-of-the-funnel users, since 76% of adults in the U.S. have made purchases through their smartphone.
How to Determine Which Performance Marketing Channels Work Best
As with any campaign, finding the performance marketing channel that works best for your audience requires some advance research and trial and error. Performance marketing allows you to test platforms affordably, at least. “The feedback loop between when you start to spend and when you realize it’s working is a lot shorter,” Shnaides says.
Once you dial in on what works, you’ll want to double down on those efforts. “You don’t know where the ceiling is when you go to a new platform,” says Shnaides, which is one aspect that makes performance marketing so exciting — and effective.
Follow these steps to start your quest for choosing the right channels:
- Determine your KPIs: Before you enter any campaign, determine your key performance indicators. In most cases, performance marketing KPIs will be purchases or clicks, and how much it costs to achieve those conversions (“Cost-per is the most important question,” Shnaides notes). Determine what you’re measuring before you begin so you’ll know when a campaign is successful.
- Find your target audience: Next, do diligent research to determine where you’re most likely to find your target audience.
- Start testing platforms and creative: At some point, you have to dive in with your best creative on the platforms you think will convert.
- Double down: “Every good performance marketing campaign gets to a point where something is working,” Shnaides says. This is when you increase the budget until you either saturate the market or cease to see results. At some point, Shnaides says, the campaign may start to convert less effectively. “This is the point I’m going to try to find different methods. It could be trying to optimize and change my setup on my current platforms, or search for other platforms.”
Key Takeaways
Performance marketing campaigns can reach prospects through a wide range of channels, spanning from social media and search to native ads. Campaigns that focus on the action stages of the funnel (consideration and purchase) are likely to deliver results faster and at a lower cost. However, it’s crucial to choose the right channels to reach your target audience when they are ready to buy. Platforms that use AI-powered real-time analytics can deliver results faster.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is performance marketing the same as SEO?
Performance marketing is not the same as SEO (search engine optimization). Performance marketing relies on paid advertising to deliver messages to users in the action stage of the sales funnel, while SEO is an organic marketing strategy designed to help websites rank first on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Is email a performance marketing channel?
Email is a performance marketing channel because it allows marketers to deliver messages to their target audience and measure results based on clicks, downloads, or sales. However, it’s different from other performance marketing channels because it does not rely on a third-party platform like social media or a publishing network.
What is a marketing channel strategy?
A marketing channel strategy uses analytics to determine the most effective places to reach customers both online and offline. A solid marketing channel strategy should evaluate who you are trying to reach, where you’ll find them, and what resources to allocate to each channel.
