Timothy Davis
Timothy Davis has led performance marketing for all of Shopify for the past 2.5 years, and as a consultant has helped companies like Pinterest, LinkedIn, Redfin, and Eventbrite kickstart and scale their performance marketing teams. In every one of those cases, he got them so performant at paid growth that they significantly scale spend and investment in these channels.
AI & Technology Skills
Recognize that AI in performance marketing is often already embedded in platform-native automation like smart bidding and algorithmic recommendations.
"You guys have been using AI for years now. Smart Bidding is AI. All of the recommendations within Google Ads is AI. Ad copy recommendations is AI, and that's always been in the platform."
Growth Skills
Paid marketing should be avoided until the product is operationally ready to convert users to prevent long-term brand damage.
"The biggest issue wasn't necessarily that users weren't interested in our product and weren't purchasing it, it was because we didn't have a product market fit mainly from an operation standpoint... I..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Prioritize a candidate's ability to distinguish meaningful data signals from background noise over platform-specific technical knowledge.
"I can teach anyone how to do Google ads. I can teach anyone how to do Meta ads. That is not the hard part. It is the data part that is the hard part because there is so much noise going on in those ac..."
Accelerate the onboarding process by providing clear operational cadences and assigning high-stakes ownership immediately.
"I want to try and make that 45 days, if not 30... giving them responsibility early on for something... 'Here's everything we did last additions. This is the results. These are your responsibilities, t..."
Product Management Skills
Use Auction Insights and 'true competition metrics' to distinguish between accidental keyword overlaps and intentional competitor conquesting.
"Using this type of lens is an effective way to identify genuine threats... not just necessarily just everyone, generic people... identifying genuine threats, not that just, this data can be used to ga..."
Use a quantitative capacity calculator to justify new hires only when team members are consistently 'in the red' after optimizing their schedules.
"We have this calculator that we look at that says, 'How much time are you spending in meetings?'... All right, next quarter, it's red again. All right, now maybe we need to start having the conversati..."