Performance Marketing
In short
Performance marketing is advertising whose success is measured and paid for per result – per click, per enquiry, per deal – rather than per impression. What separates it from classic advertising is not the channel but attributability: every franc spent has to be traceable to an outcome, otherwise there is no performance to speak of.
The prerequisite that is usually missing
Measurement. Without clean conversion tracking, performance marketing is simply advertising under a different name – you buy clicks and never learn whether they were worth anything.
The second is volume. A cost-per-enquiry figure only means something once enough cases accumulate. At three enquiries a month you are measuring chance and calling it a result.
What it is not
Not a substitute for demand. Paid advertising finds people who are already searching and brings the decision forward. Where nobody is searching, no budget creates a search.
And not the opposite of SEO. Both serve the same intent in the same place; the difference is that ads start immediately and stop when you stop paying, while organic visibility builds slowly and stays.
The Swiss specific
Price claims in advertising fall under unfair-competition law: incorrect or misleading statements about prices and services are unlawful (Art. 3 para. 1 lit. b UCA, SR 241). With CHF amounts it must be unambiguous whether VAT is included – ambiguity there is itself the misleading statement.
Then there is market size. Swiss search volumes are a fraction of German ones. Planning campaigns on German benchmarks means budgeting against volume that does not exist here.
How we handle it
We do not switch anything on before the conversion signal works. A budget without measurement produces an invoice, not an insight.
In practice: Google Ads for people with concrete intent, social media ads for the stage before, and the metric agreed beforehand – not once the numbers are in.
A term in your quote that nobody explained?
In a strategy call we translate the offer in front of you – even when it did not come from us.