2025 is shaping up to be the year of “performance,” but as technology advances, so does advertisers’ understanding of what that word really means.
What used to be a simple equation of clicks and conversions has evolved into a much more refined approach that aligns specific KPIs unique to each advertiser.
With 42% of advertisers planning to increase their spend on performance advertising this year, according to WFA and Ebiquity’s “2025 Media Budgets Survey,” the focus is shifting to what truly drives success for each brand.
A brand advertiser might define performance as an increase in awareness or purchase intent while a retailer focuses on sales or foot traffic.
Generic proxy metrics no longer cut it. To truly measure performance, advertisers are embracing more sophisticated approaches—media mix modeling, multitouch attribution, and incremental lift that tells them something useful.
Why advertisers are hitting the wall
The push for advanced performance measurement comes down to one thing: Many advertisers are hitting a plateau. And when growth stalls, the first step to correct it is understanding why.
There are several industry trends causing this stagnation:
- Undifferentiated audience data: Everyone’s drinking from the same data well. When you rely on the same third-party data sources as your competitors, your ability to reach new, untapped audiences becomes severely limited.
- Overly restrictive brand safety: Those blunt keyword blocklists are killing your reach. They eliminate too much quality content, reducing scale or pushing spend to lower-quality placements.
- Ineffective contextual targeting: Broad, keyword-based strategies are too imprecise to deliver the targeting you actually need.
At the same time, measurement capabilities have dramatically improved.
The digitization of advertising is a game-changer. Take CTV, for example—it’s giving advertisers significantly more measurability than linear TV ever could.
Now, advertisers have a degree of clarity into campaign performance that wasn’t possible before.
If they’re hitting the same audience over and over or running into scale limitations, an advertiser can now pinpoint the problem—and demand better solutions.
No more guesswork.
Read more at AdWeek.com about incremental strategies and technology that delivers
