Less Is More – Why It’s Important To Optimize Google AdWords

Have you ever heard of the “Pareto Principle”? You might also know it as the 80/20 rule.

The “rule” implies that in many instances 80% of events is caused by 20% of sources. In business this means that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients, and in economics you’ll commonly see 80% of wealth distributed amongst 20% of the population. In SEO, you’ll see 80% of organic search traffic going to the top 20% of search results.

The list goes on.

Keeping this principle in mind, you might see some trends in your paid marketing (PPC) campaigns, where the majority of your leads are coming from a fifth of your keywords.

Maximizing Your Results

When it’s time to “scale up” your campaigns, it doesn’t mean you should add more audiences or increase your exposure – it’s about maximizing the results from what’s already working.

In PPC, this means looking into ways to improve your top keywords (the “20%” source of 80% of your sales).

This means looking into various factors – are your ads showing at the top of search results? Are they showing throughout the day? Where are your competitor’s ads located? What do they say?

Some people might view paid marketing as a way to get cheap clicks to the site – in this case, “Cost Per Click” would be the most important variable. “If you get 2 clicks for the cost of one click, that’s better, right?” Wrong.

Keeping the Pareto Principle in mind, we take out “traffic” as the most important variable, and instead focus on the metric that matters the most – sales conversions. There’s no point in driving twice as much traffic to the site, if 80% of sales is coming from a source you already recognize as a “20%” cause of traffic.

Have A Singular Focus

Try this for a couple of days. Siphon budget away from the campaigns that aren’t working as well as your top 20%, and use that money to drive a singular increase in performance for that specific campaign.

New ads, higher bids, revamped landing page – do everything it takes to increase the performance of your best campaigns to make it better.

Give it a couple of days – then let us know if you’ve noticed a difference. Congratulations! You’ve optimized your marketing campaign, aligned with the Pareto Principle. Need some help in setting up the changes? Contact our marketing agency in Vancouver to get some pointers. No stress! We always have chocolate 🙂