Performance marketers, will we lose our jobs?

Given the latest developments in Ai and Performance Max campaigns in Google Ads, it's natural to wonder about the future of performance marketing and whether performance marketers will continue to play a role in it.

Spoiler alert: we won't lose our jobs! 😌

But, our work will change drastically. We need to go back to basics, and realise that ultimately we are buyers, not technicians.

Now the question is: what exactly are we buying?

Media slots? Ads? Keywords? Traffic? Users? Sure, some of that too.

➡ But what we're actually buying is data.

How many times we've heard the line: "Google and Meta make profit selling users' data"?

Users' data is what they sell, users' data is what we buy. And data is the fuel of Ai, which in turn is the future of performance marketing.

So, what does this mean in practice?

We won't be able to target specific audiences any more (death of cookies, privacy changes etc). But, ad tech vendors are getting better at showing us how the broad audience that engages with our ads look like.

Recently, I was impressed with the TikTok Ads reporting, to give an example.

Thanks to ads, we can gather advanced interests and demographic data, search behaviour, comments and sentiment, from users that we didn't know before.

We can then compare data of users who engage with our ads, with that of users who purchase on our sites or apps. These findings are crucial for planning the next marketing strategy, the next set of creatives, UX improvements, or even new products and business models.

Conversion tracking is key to this process, and it's becoming increasingly complex.

Future performance marketers will need to ensure spotless conversion tracking to buy high-quality user data, which they can then use to improve and grow their products.

Do you agree?