Founders, Are You Budgeting for Performance-Marketing Infrastructure?
As a founder, you’ve launched a minimum lovable product and are ready to scale with paid ads. You begin exploring your first campaigns and decide to run a $5k test on Google Ads.
You notice a spike in app downloads the same day your campaign launches. Encouraged, you add another $5k to test Meta ads. But now, with two active growth channels, you are unsure where your new users are coming from, or which channel deserves more investment.
As you layer more channels into your marketing mix, the impact of each gets harder to track and trace back. Here’s the truth: performance marketing is no longer just media buying, it’s become highly technical. What used to be a nice-to-have is now essential infrastructure, even for startups.
This infrastructures costs time, money, and talent, and these costs should not be included in your budget reserved for performance marketing.
The Real Infrastructure Behind Performance Marketing
1. Tracking Services - without these you are flying blind.
Products/Services
Mobile Measurement Partners (MMPs) such as Appsflyer and Branch
Server-side tracking
Google Analytics 360
Implementing the above generally requires developer time and ongoing QA.
2. Creative Production - biggest lever of performance.
Channels need a diverse set of creatives - while UGC performs best of TikTok and Instagram Reels, you need standard static creatives for Feed and Display placements.
Creating assets is an ongoing cost, even if you relying on AI tools to reduce costs and scale production. Tools like Figma and Adobe Creative Cloud are generally used by in-house teams and cost monthly/yearly subscriptions.
3. Marketing Tech Stack
Reporting tools like Supermetrics, data visualization tools like Looker, Tableau, Amplitude make it possible to report, visualize and collaborate.
While each may be a monthly subscription, the cost tend to add up over time.
4. Competitive and Market Research
Competitive intelligence via platforms like data.ai, Sensor Tower or SimilarWeb are important to understand key information like Share of Voice, competitor keyword strategy. But, there come with enterprise-level price tags.
5. Headcount and Specialization
Performance marketing teams have expanded to include engineers, data scientists, copywriters and even legal and compliance.
The team behind the ads often cost far more than the ads themselves.
6. Upskilling and Education
Channels change rules and upgrade their products constantly, with Meta launching Thread Ads only recently, a Perofrmance Marketer has to constantly be aware of changes to attribution, set up and best practices.
Conferences, training programs and certifications can be expensive, but are necessary.
Why These Costs Don’t Belong in Your Media Budget
Here’s the kicker: if you lump all of the above spend into your performance marketing budget, you won’t have much left for actual ad spend.
In my experience both at smaller companies and at larger firms, we measured ROI (return on investment) and CPA (cost per acquisition) using just the media budget. The additional infrastructure classifies as overhead or strategic investment. Adding those costs to your ROI calculations muddies the data and will undermine your decision making.
The best practice? Protect your ad spend. Evaluate channel performance based on this number alone.
Cut Costs Without Sacrificing Strategy
AI tools are making is much easier to reduce these overhead costs. Tools like icon.com are making it easier to create creatives at scale. Copywriting tools like Jasper can help you get search ads off the ground faster.
Outsource selectively - UGC ad creation can be streamlined when working with agencies like Insense.
Regular audits prune unused tools and keep spending lean.
Performance marketing is no longer a one person run operation solely focused on buying media. It is a full-stack operation creating long term value for your organization. Separate your enablement cost from true media costs to help you make better optimization decisions, but still be aware of your true investment.
