Performance marketing has entered a new phase, one where time rather than tactics separates brands that scale efficiently from those that stall. To discuss how advertisers can best allocate their time, energy, and internal resources in this shifting landscape, we sat down with Nadim Batista-Kuttab of Xevio, one of the world’s largest native advertisers. Nadim’s team manages millions in daily open web spend, giving them a unique vantage point into what actually drives growth, stability, and long-term profitability at scale.
Today, the marketers who win are the ones who invest their time where it creates leverage. Platforms like Realize automate much of that mechanical labor, freeing performance teams to focus on creative iteration, funnel optimization, and lifetime-value growth. This shift has fundamentally redefined what “performance marketing work” should look like, and why the highest ROI comes from redirecting time away from platform manipulation and toward improving the user experience.
The Shift in Focus: From Platform Settings to User Experience
Ten years ago, scaling advertising required a relentless commitment to manual intervention. Marketers would toggle bids on individual sites dozens, sometimes hundreds, of times per day. Every hour brought new CPCs to adjust, new publisher patterns to evaluate, new pacing issues to resolve. Growth required constant watch, while stability required constant pressure. As Nadim describes it, “I was micromanaging bids on a site level hourly — thousands of adjustments a day just to squeeze out a couple percent more performance.”
Since then, platforms like Realize have evolved from demand-side engines into predictive systems capable of handling auction-level decisions in real time. Automated bidding strategies like max conversion and target CPA dynamically determine optimal CPCs, freeing advertisers from tactical execution. Tools like Realize add an additional layer of intelligence by providing predictive signals, performance risk indicators, and automated policy clarity, reducing the time advertisers once spent manually troubleshooting campaign issues.
“With max conversion and target CPA, you don’t have to set a CPC anymore,” says Nadim. This shift has significant implications: When AI automates the mechanical tasks such as bidding, pacing, and allocation, marketers gain the freedom to focus on the areas that provide compounding gains like the creative asset and the post-click journey. These are areas no algorithm can own entirely, because they rely on a brand’s voice, product value, psychological understanding of the user, and the ability to build persuasive digital experiences.
The Two Core Leverage Principles
As AI takes over low-value tasks, time becomes a strategic asset. The modern performance marketer must now invest their hours where the highest leverage sits: the advertiser’s own ecosystem.
From Nadim’s perspective, the most leverage is going to be ad performance and post-click performance. Everything else, like bidding rules, micro-segment targeting, and publisher-level adjustments, should be deprioritized in favor of what directly shapes user behavior. Yes, AI can adjust bids, but it can’t improve your creative resonance. It can allocate budget, but it can’t rewrite your landing page. It can predict performance, but it can’t create emotional connection.
Ad Performance and CTR
The first leverage point is the ad itself — in other words, your creative. Every headline, image, and layout decision logically compounds downstream. A fractional improvement in CTR may not just increase traffic — it lowers effective CPC, increases audience reach, and improves the platform’s ability to learn faster. This is why Xevio never stops testing, even when performance is strong. Performance advertising is a creative-led ecosystem, which means that the algorithm may deliver traffic, but the click comes down to the ad.
Nadim shares a simple but powerful operational rule when it comes to testing: “If you’re below five ads on top, always upload more — even iterations of winners.” Why? Because a 0.1% increase in CTR at scale can meaningfully shift the economics of the entire campaign. This is also where Realize provides additional value: Its creative-level attribution signals and predicted performance insights help identify which ads have breakout potential earlier, allowing operators to spend more time iterating on winning themes and less time sifting through raw data.
When marketers allocate time here through testing more formats, challenging their assumptions and introducing new emotional angles, they unlock efficiencies the algorithm alone can’t create.
Post-Click Performance
The second leverage point, and often the most underestimated, is everything that happens after the click. This is where the deepest, longest-lasting ROI gains occur. Pre-click optimizations deliver incremental improvements, while post-click optimizations reshape the outcome of the entire model.
When Xevio invests time into post-click performance, they focus on:
- Content quality and depth.
- User intent alignment.
- Landing page clarity.
- Frictionless form or checkout design.
- Higher AOV opportunities.
- Long-term LTV improvements.
A small improvement in conversion rate can be more impactful than a similar improvement in CTR. As Nadim puts it, “We invest time where we have the most leverage — ad performance and post-click performance.”
Improving post-click experience decreases CPA, increases LTV, and strengthens the algorithm’s ability to find high-value users. When Realize predicts which traffic segments are more likely to convert or flags potential drop-off patterns, it helps advertisers focus their time on the parts of the funnel most likely to generate returns. When marketers spend their time rewriting headlines, restructuring product pages, improving form flow, or rethinking the user journey, the downstream impact compounds across every future campaign.
Optimizing the Post-Click Funnel for LTV
Performance marketing used to be evaluated primarily on acquisition metrics: CPA, ROAS, CPC. But, in a world where AI bidding compresses short-term differences, long-term value (LTV) becomes the true differentiator. The post-click funnel is where LTV is created.
Unlike traditional media, performance advertising on the open web provides extensive data on user behavior. You don’t have to guess whether landing-page changes improve profitability — instead, you can measure the effects in real time.
With advertisers like Xevio seeing over two minutes of average time on page from Taboola content placements, optimizing this long-form engagement becomes one of the most valuable investments a performance team can make.
Landing Page and Content
Great landing pages do three things — provide clarity, create narrative momentum, and support decision-making.
Open web audiences differ from social audiences because they arrive with the intent to consume content. They’re ready to read, evaluate, and think, not mindlessly scroll. This creates an opportunity to engage at a deeper level than traditional paid media channels.
The goal is to maximize the long dwell time this delivers by structuring content that highlights value early, anticipates questions, demonstrates authority, reduces uncertainty, and makes conversion feel natural. Realize’s analytics help identify which content patterns correlate with higher possible conversion potential. By providing greater visibility into user behavior, it helps advertisers understand where to expand or refine their content flow.
Lead Forms and Product Pages
Forms and product pages represent the final step to conversion, and small improvements here can have a large impact, because at this point, potential revenue can turn into actual, tangible revenue.
Performance teams should test areas such as:
- Form length: Short vs. long, single step vs. multi-step.
- CTA copy: Value-driven vs. action-driven.
- Checkout layout: Streamlined vs. information-rich.
- Page hierarchy: Benefits first vs. features first.
- Trust indicators: Badges, reviews, guarantees.
Ultimately, any improvements made come down to:
Revenue = ( Traffic × Conversion Rate ) × Average Order Value
The marketer’s job is to increase the multiplier effect of conversion rate and AOV. When those numbers shift upward, they increase the ROAS of the entire campaign. Realize contributes here by identifying which traffic segments produce stronger back-end performance, enabling advertisers to align creative, landing pages, and product experiences with the audiences most likely to convert at high value.
The Importance of External Support and Knowledge
Performance marketing may be more automated today, but it is not simpler. The platforms evolve quickly, policies shift, and competitive dynamics vary drastically by market. Nadim’s guidance for brands scaling from six to nine figures is direct: “It’s going to be a little bit biased, but get help. We’ve seen a lot of brands come and go because they didn’t have the right tools or the right people or the right knowledge.”
A Faster Learning Curve
Experienced account managers and specialized agencies see patterns that individual advertisers may never encounter. They understand the saturation point of a location and the realistic daily spend potential. They can also identify the early signs of data degradation, how quickly ad fatigue emerges, and when performance changes are caused by creative vs. competition vs. inventory shifts.
The difference between spending $500 per day and $5,000 per day often comes down to whether you scale too quickly in a small geographic market, or misinterpret a temporary signal as structural decline. When you work with experts, the learning curve that creates many of these issues is significantly reduced.
Validation
Performance marketing is full of false positives, like ads that look strong early but collapse at scale, landing pages that convert well but suppress LTV, and audiences that click but don’t buy.
Nadim points out that Taboola account managers can access predictive data on CPC, CPM, CTR, and spend ceilings. They can tell you how far a campaign can scale before diminishing returns set in. “Talk to your account manager to see what scale potential they have for a campaign,” he advises.
This isn’t just operational advice, but risk mitigation: Brands avoid hundreds of thousands in wasted spend by verifying their assumptions before scaling aggressively. Realize helps here too, offering earlier detection of performance anomalies and clearer visibility into how policy or inventory constraints might affect campaigns.
Key Takeaways
Performance marketing is no longer defined by the advertiser who makes the most bid adjustments and is instead defined by the advertiser who allocates their time to the highest-leverage activities.
This is where Realize helps support creative teams, by eliminating guesswork, improving predictive understanding, and reducing the need for manual platform diagnostics. Success is not determined by who spends the most, but by who spends the most intentionally, making time the ultimate performance lever.
If you want to understand where your time is best invested, consult your Taboola account manager. They can help you evaluate your growth ceiling, validate your strategic approach, and ensure you’re putting your effort in the places that generate the highest long-term return.
