The Fundamentals: Goals and Measurement
Why clarity on goals and metrics is the foundation of performance marketing
“The most basic advice is to be clear on your goal and how you will measure if you have achieved it. Note, goals are not metrics - metrics describe goals.”— Alex Schultz, Click Here(source)This distinction matters more than it first appears, especially in web3.
When goals are vague or inconsistent across a team, measurement becomes performative rather than informative. Different people optimize for different outcomes, and results become impossible to interpret.
Part of moving a marketing team toward performance-oriented thinking starts here. If you are reading this as a founder, CEO, CMO, or marketer, ask yourself — and your team — a simple question: what is the goal of this campaign? If the answers differ, alignment needs to happen before a single dollar is spent.
- Increase protocol revenue by 30% this quarter
- Acquire 1,000 new weekly active users
- Grow TVL (Total Value Locked) by $10M
- Drive 500 first-time swaps per week
Once a goal is defined, the next step is understanding whether the conditions exist to pursue it meaningfully. This often starts with the funnel: are enough relevant people even aware the product exists? If they are, what prevents them from taking action today?
If awareness is the primary bottleneck, the immediate question is whether there is something meaningful for users to convert into. Performance-oriented approaches tend to work best once a product has some degree of product–market fit and a usable onboarding experience.
This does not mean performance marketing only applies late-stage. It means that its usefulness depends on whether incremental change can be measured and acted upon. Without that, optimization becomes guesswork, and results are hard to separate from noise.
At its core, performance marketing is about making outcomes legible enough to inform decisions — not about guaranteeing perfect execution, but about understanding what moves the needle and why.