The ultimate guide to paid growth | Timothy Davis (Shopify)

Is performance marketing just something every company should be doing?

Hot take, paid is for everyone. If you look at the way each platform is doing, Google, you have to scroll pretty far down to get to an organic listing. Meta, it's almost a pay-for-play now.

When you take over for an agency at a company, you crush their performance within a month, I'm curious to what you find they are doing wrong.

(instrumental music) Instead of thinking about being on top of the page, and that's kind of like ego marketing, "I want to be number one, I want to be there all the time," it's about showing to the right person as often as possible.

Any other tips for people just to experiment with the platform?

Each platform is different. The user behavior is different. Make sure you're not too hard on yourself if it doesn't work. It's okay to fail, because we're either winning or we're learning.

(instrumental music) Today my guest is Timothy Davis. Timothy has led performance marketing for all of Shopify for the past two and a half years, and as a consultant, has helped companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Eventbrite kickstart and scale their performance marketing teams. In our conversation, we get incredibly tactical on all things performance marketing and paid growth, when to start investing, how to run signs of life test on each platform, what platforms to investigate and what platforms to bet big on, what types of companies are best suited to invest big on paid growth, whether you should invest pre-product market fit or not, what agencies often get wrong, and what to look for in your investment when you're just getting started, plus what your first three hires should look like, tips for which platforms are most interesting right now, a peek at Timothy's actual reports that he runs to judge performance if you're watching this on YouTube, and so much more. This episode is for anyone who's trying to figure out how to kickstart or improve their performance marketing investment, and I guarantee you'll get something out of this that'll make your life better. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Timothy Davis. Timothy, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. A long time coming.

Yeah. I'm really excited we're finally doing this. I actually posted on Twitter for people to suggest questions for this topic, and there's just so much interest in what we're gonna be talking about, which essentially we're gonna be diving deep into all things paid growth, all things performance marketing. Uh, by the way, I have a cold, for people with, in case you wonder why I sound a little weird, but the sh- show must go on. I want to start with just setting a little context for folks that aren't super familiar with performance marketing, paid growth. When we talk about performance marketing/paid growth, first of all, are those two terms interchangeable to you? And second of all, what falls under the umbrella of performance marketing/paid growth?