How Do Brand and Performance Marketing Work Together?

Is the Brand vs. Performance Marketing Debate a False Choice?

Yes. Brand and performance marketing are two halves of the same engine — strong brand makes performance ads cheaper because the audience already knows who you are, and performance gives brand a feedback loop that pure brand work never gets. Noah Cisneros, Growth Marketing Manager at Bill.com, argues that separating brand and performance into different teams, budgets, and strategies is one of the most common and expensive mistakes in marketing. The debate itself is the problem. When brand and performance compete for the same budget, both lose.

How Does Brand Marketing Make Performance Ads Cheaper?

Brand awareness lowers CPMs and improves conversion rates on performance campaigns because people are more likely to click and buy from a name they recognize. Noah’s observation is that performance marketers who complain about rising CPMs are often running ads to audiences with zero brand awareness. The ad has to do two jobs — introduce the brand and close the sale — and that’s expensive. When brand campaigns run upstream, they create familiarity and trust so that performance campaigns only have to do one job: convert intent that already exists. The math is straightforward: if brand investment reduces your performance CPM by even 15%, the brand spend pays for itself.

How Should You Structure Campaigns So Brand and Performance Reinforce Each Other?

Brand campaigns should optimize for reach, recall, and trust. Performance campaigns should capture the intent that brand work created. The two should share audiences, creative insights, and measurement frameworks. Noah’s recommended structure isn’t two separate teams running two separate strategies. It’s one team with two modes: campaigns that plant seeds (brand) and campaigns that harvest (performance). The brand campaigns tell a story, build recognition, and establish credibility. The performance campaigns retarget those same audiences with direct-response offers. The shared audience data is what makes them compound — each dollar in brand lifts the return on every dollar in performance.

What Is the Right Budget Split Between Brand and Performance?

There is no universal ratio, but most companies spend too much on performance relative to brand — especially companies running performance ads to cold audiences with no brand foundation. Noah’s diagnostic is simple: if your performance campaigns are reaching people who have never heard of you, you’re running brand ads with a performance objective, and that’s the most expensive version of both. His recommendation is to look at what percentage of performance spend goes to cold audiences versus retargeting. If cold audience spend is above 60%, that’s a signal to shift budget toward dedicated brand campaigns that would make the cold outreach more efficient.

How Do You Measure Brand and Performance Working Together?

Track brand lift metrics (aided recall, search volume for brand terms, direct traffic growth) alongside performance metrics, and look for correlation over 30-90 day windows. Noah’s measurement framework rejects the idea that brand is unmeasurable. It’s measurable — just on a longer time horizon than performance. The leading indicators are branded search volume, direct site traffic, and social mention sentiment. When these rise after a brand campaign, and performance metrics improve in the following weeks, you’re seeing the compounding effect. The mistake is measuring brand on the same daily or weekly cadence as performance and concluding it doesn’t work.