Elené Cooke: What performance marketing sees – and what it doesn’t

The blind spot attribution doesn’t talk about

Attribution is how marketers track which ads, channels or messages led to a sale – it’s the mechanism that connects spend to outcome. And it’s good at one thing: tracking the moment a customer converts. What it’s far less equipped to capture is everything that happens in the campaign funnel before that moment: the awareness that spared curiosity, the video that built familiarity, the retargeted ad that nudged someone from considering to converting.

This is the part of the customer journey that actually requires the most deliberate work, and it’s largely invisible to most measurement tools.

“There’s a whole world of performance marketing that I think is still unknown,” says Elené Cooke, Lumico COO. “People are hyper-focused on what a brand looks and sounds like, but not enough on how we’re building audiences, how we’re segmenting them, how we’re making sure the right message is being served to the right people – and how we’re retaining them.”

The South African retail reality

This challenge is especially apparent for FMCG brands operating in the South African market. Most of these brands don’t sell directly to consumers, their products move through retailers. That means the final conversion, the actual purchase, often happens at a point the brand cannot see.

It’s something Lumico sees consistently across its FMCG client base, working with brands like Optimizor, Catmor, and Ultra Pet. A campaign might run on social, build genuine interest, drive someone into a retail store, and result in a sale. But because that transaction sits with the retailer, the brand may never be able to connect the media spend directly to the outcome. The demand was created, the attribution just couldn’t see it.

But this isn’t a failure of strategy, it’s a structural reality of how the market works. And it means that performance marketing, in this context, cannot only be judged by whether it closes the loop – because the loop is often not available to close.

The only campaign-level signals we have

When final conversion data is out of reach, engagement metrics become the primary campaign-level signals available. Video views, watch time, click-through rates, audience growth, engagement rates – these are often the only indicators a brand has of whether a campaign is building interest and moving people closer to action.

They’re imperfect measurements, and they often don’t tell the full story. “But if engagement is often the only signal we have, we need to become much better at reading and using it,” says Cooke.

In a market where attribution has structural blind spots, the real skill is understanding what they indicate, what they don’t, and how to use them to make smarter decisions about creative, targeting and spend.

What performance marketing is actually for

“Performance marketing is the blend between the hard analytical part and the behavioural side of marketing,” says Cooke. “It’s the targeting, the ability to build granular customer journeys that you can use for budgeting, insights, evaluation and strategy."

Proving ROI does not sit at the centre of that description. It’s about building better journeys, understanding audiences more precisely, getting the right message to the right person at the right moment, and then using what you learn to refine that process continuously.

This is why no single channel tells the full story. Paid search captures demand that already exists, social builds demand that doesn’t yet, display maintains presence during consideration. Each channel offers a partial view, which is why performance thinking requires looking across all of them to assess a more complete picture.

The 70/30 point

“When you look at a media budget, so much gets assigned to creative,” says Elené. “You might spend millions producing an ad but very little making sure the right people actually see it. Your creative might be 30%, but performance should be 70% – making sure that message is distributed to the most relevant audience, at the right time, according to strategy.”

When you can’t always see the final conversion, this balance matters even more. If you can’t close the attribution loop, you need to be absolutely certain you’re reaching the right audience, serving the right message, and building the kind of engagement that moves people through a journey you can only partially measure.

Some of the most important performance work happens in the parts of the funnel attribution can't fully see. The brands that understand this stop chasing proof of ROI as a primary goal, and start building the audience intelligence, segmentation discipline and measurement rigour that gives them better signals to work with.