Skate to Where the Puck is Going: 2 Practical Strategies for Performance Marketers.

Yup, it’s a worn-out, sport-centric, and potentially gender-biased euphemism (you should feel lucky that I didn’t squeeze AI into the headline). The most common understanding of what Gretzky was suggesting is, "To be successful, one must identify where the pieces on the board are, anticipate an open space with no competition, and get yourself there and be prepared to score."?

On second thought, maybe a less tortured meaning is “Be where they ain’t. Do what they ain’t.” In striving to gain an edge over competitors,? performance marketers continually flail around, blindly tweaking our campaigns in a feudal effort to outperform the other guys. Our sad reality is that performance marketing is an arms race that ensures any advantage we win is short-lived and ever more expensive.

With this happy thought in mind, here are two simple concepts that have dominated my recent consultations with fellow performance marketers.?

Audience Suppression

Audience suppression is an often-overlooked strategy that allows performance marketers to exclude irrelevant or redundant audiences from their ad campaigns. By preventing ads from being shown to users who are unlikely to convert—such as recent buyers or disengaged customers—marketers can reduce wasted ad spend and apply the savings to engaging customers who will convert. When done correctly, audience suppression enhances the entire customer experience.

Three Benefits of Audience Suppression

1. Suppress Frequent Buyers from Paid Search Ads: One common mistake is targeting customers who have already purchased a product through paid search ads. These “lazy clickers” may visit your site by searching for your brand name, but serving them acquisition ads wastes budget.
2. Suppress Recent Buyers from Product-Specific Ads: Customers who have recently purchased a product don’t need to see ads for the same product immediately after. Without suppression, these ads can lead to customer frustration and wasted budget.?
3. Suppress Existing Customers from Lookalike Audiences: Lookalike audiences help marketers scale reach by engaging new customers who resemble existing buyers. However, without proper suppression, existing customers can get included in these audiences, leading to redundant ad targeting.?

The Evolution of Audience Suppression

Historically, audience suppression has been a manual and labor-intensive process. Marketers had to compile exclusion lists based on customer data, such as email addresses or device IDs, and manually apply them to their campaigns. This approach was time-consuming and prone to errors, making it difficult to scale and maintain accuracy.

Pixel-based suppression emerged as an early solution to this challenge. By placing conversion pixels on websites, marketers could track users who had already completed a specific action (e.g., a purchase) and prevent them from seeing related ads. While this approach offers some improvements over manual suppression, it is also limited. Pixels required ongoing technical maintenance, and their effectiveness diminished with the advent of privacy regulations and the deprecation of third-party cookies.

The real game-changer for audience suppression has come via Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and real-time data democracy. CDPs empower marketers to automate creating and updating suppression lists, ensuring that campaigns always align with current customer behavior. These platforms integrate directly with advertising channels such as Google Ads and Facebook, enabling marketers to exclude irrelevant audiences dynamically in real-time.?

But, take it from a guy who used to sell them and struggled to win renewals. The dirty little secret about CDPs is that they are extremely expensive, require organizational alignment of all stakeholders, take forever to fully implement, and require dedicated resources to manage them and their data streams. That’s why, despite their historic adoption rate, many CDP buyers cannot derive immediate value, leading to dissatisfaction and eventual abandonment.?

For many performance marketers, a less expensive and less complicated point solution for managing audience suppression is the way to go. I’m impressed with the simplicity of solutions like WasteNot . Their codeless platform empowers non-technical marketers to centrally manage their suppression strategies by easily connecting all their data sources and ad platforms in minutes. With WasteNot, you can set up simple or complex suppression rules and apply them to any ad platform, campaign, or ad group.?

Engage Where Your Competition Isn’t

Call me a heretic, but paid search and social media advertising have become so expensive and saturated that I'm looking for better places to spend my budget. High-performing keywords are dominated by larger competitors with bigger budgets, making it difficult for smaller, less established brands to compete. At the same time, AI is completely transforming consumer search behavior; traditional paid search ads will likely face increased competition from new discovery and research methods.?

Don’t get me wrong, paid search and social media can effectively activate in-market consumers. But who hasn’t had their soul crushed by the search campaign that roars to life, driving converting clicks to your site, only to sputter when the cost of the best-performing keywords soars in price? Oh, think of how you’d rule if no one else were bidding against you!

Barging Your Way into the Livingroom

Connected TV (CTV) is one of the most promising alternatives to traditional paid media channels. As more consumers cut the cable, opting for streaming services to satiate their curiosity with the Menendez brothers, CTV provides an opportunity to reach audiences with video ads in a less crowded and more cost-effective environment. CTV combines the reach of traditional TV with the precision targeting of digital advertising, allowing marketers to engage consumers with personalized ads based on their viewing behavior.

Platforms like NeonPixel.co specialize in helping brands manage CTV performance campaigns, providing real-time insights and dynamic ad placement to optimize ad spend. By leveraging AI and automation, NeonPixel ensures that CTV ads are delivered to the right audience at the right time, maximizing engagement and conversion rates.

Maybe Try Bing?

Performance marketers might do well by incorporating Bing Search into the mix. Compared with Google Ads, Bing boasts a lower cost-per-click, providing a more affordable option, particularly for businesses with smaller budgets. And with less competition on Bing, marketers can win better ad placements without the steep bidding wars typically seen on Google. Additionally, Bing's integration with OpenAI’s AI technology is helping evolve search behaviors, offering more conversational and interactive experiences. This AI-powered search is likely to attract new, engaged audiences. Bing user demographics skew older and wealthier, making it ideal for targeting a more affluent audience.

As an experiment, I used AI to write the following conclusion:

?In this rapidly evolving world of performance marketing, staying ahead is more than just outspending your competition. It’s about being smart, precise, and—dare I say—strategic. As we discussed, the age-old arms race for ad spend superiority is unsustainable. You tweak, optimize, bid higher—and for what? A brief moment of victory before the costs soar and competitors catch up. The key isn’t in beating them head-on but sidestepping the race entirely.

Audience suppression offers one solution. By trimming the fat—those who’ve already bought or aren’t likely to engage—you maximize budget efficiency and leave room to focus on high-potential leads. The beauty is that with the right tool, like WasteNot, you don’t need a complex, costly system. Why exhaust resources when a sleek, simple solution will do?

Then, consider emerging channels like Connected TV (CTV) and Bing. Why fight for crowded spaces when you can engage with consumers where competition is thin? CTV allows you to beam into people’s living rooms, bypassing the saturation of traditional channels, while Bing’s lower CPC and AI-enhanced search provide untapped potential at a fraction of Google’s costs.

In the end, performance marketing isn’t just about winning the battle—it's about finding new fronts to fight on, carving out space where the competition isn’t. Those who can do that will be the ones truly ready for the next stage of marketing evolution.ey to his success: observing where the pieces on the board were, anticipating an open space with no competition, and getting himself there, prepared to score.?