The 80-20 Rule (aka The Pareto Principle) – All Things PPC Podcast Ep12

Ultimately, what’s on the to do list, the two levers that can make the biggest difference to what you get done is

Hello everyone. And welcome to this episode of the PPC Geeks podcast, all things PPC. Today, I’m going to talk to you about. One of the most critical elements of not only successful PPC campaigns, but successful digital marketing campaigns and a successful and productive life as well. And that is something near and dear to my heart, the 80 20 principle, sometimes known as the Pareto or Pareto principle.

So important to me that I even named my previous company after it. What is the 80 20 principle and why do I want to talk about it today? You’ve probably heard about the 80 20 principle in some kind of context before, but it all stems back from an Italian economist whose surname was Pareto. And he, let’s just call it Pareto, Pareto, Pareto, let’s call it Pareto today.

Um, He noticed that in his garden, 20 percent of the peapods produced 80 percent of the peas and saw this law all over the place. Obviously it’s not exactly 80, 20, but the principle is the same. And when you are aware of this, you will see it everywhere. You’ll already be. You know, experiencing this in your life and you already probably heard of this concept, but are you truly using it to optimize your PPC campaigns in the best way, your to do list as a marketing or e commerce manager, and what to focus on on your weekend?

With the 80 20 principle, 20 percent of the inputs will give you 80 percent of the outputs, and that can be positive or negative. So it can also mean that potentially, and we have seen this when looking at accounts, 20 percent of the keywords might give you 80 percent of the results. Okay. So 80 percent of what you’re doing is, is wasted.

We’ve seen it the other way around. 20 percent of the keywords are spending 80 percent of your money and not giving you anything. Or it’s the same with how you focus on your SEO or your landing pages or the social media, or the worst thing when people spread themselves too thin across too many platforms, when actually just one works, but they were.

Feel like they have to be everywhere. And that’s why I wanted to focus on this today in the scattered world that we are in with so much coming at us constantly, always splitting, spinning plates. There just isn’t enough time to do everything. And. You need a strategy to get it all done to choose what you should focus on at every level.

What are the key areas as a digital marketing manager you should focus on? What are the key channels within those channels? What are the key projects or activities you should be focusing on within those projects and activities? Which tasks are really going to Move the needle. I hate that term, but it works.

What’s going to make the difference. Look at your to do list, get your to do list app out, look, get, look at your phone, look at the list you’ve got written down, however you keep your to do list. How many things on that list are truly important? How many, if you look back at that list in a year’s time, would make a difference to the results you got in that year?

And this is what you need to address and look at when looking at your PPC. So why is focus and so critical in digital marketing? It just doesn’t, you just don’t have enough time available. If there’s something we hear all the time and increasingly digital marketing managers, business owners, they just have too much to do.

They have too much expectations placed on them. They’re expected to do email channels, SEO, update the blog, put this post out. Can you get us some more reviews? All kinds of things. But what. Really matters what when you look at those reports, what’s making the difference for you. So it’s crucial to focus on the right things, work those through and then get to a point where they’re giving you what you need.

So you can then move forward. So how How do we look at this? Well, the best thing is to use your brain because really you probably know what makes the difference. And the worst thing is often the hardest things to do are the things that truly make the difference. It’s having those difficult conversations.

It’s putting together pitch that will get you the budget you need. It’s making sure. That actually you focus on finding a developer to speed up your website, rather than just messing around with the logo size. There’s so many things that you’ll know. So when I’d encourage you just to start by writing down everything you need to do for the next month.

Okay. Don’t filter it. Just put down. All the things you think you need to be getting done for your, for your work. You do this for your life as well, put them all down and then just list them all out. And there’s a famous story of Warren Buffett. Um, he, he asked someone, you know, Right. I’ll list the 25 things you want to do with your life.

Okay. And then he says, now circle, there’s different versions of this story, but circle the top 10. Okay. Now delete all the others. You haven’t got time for those and now focus on the five. Look at the, what are the top five out of those? Okay. Delete the rest and then say, okay. Pick two and delete everything else.

And you can only focus on those two. So you need to need to be able to pick up front, which of the tasks or projects, which are really going to make a difference in a year, what’s going to have helped you hit your goals. And that focus is so critical. And we kid ourselves that we need to do all these things.

We need to be all these places, but really when you go into your analytics, look, where does your traffic come from? Is it better to improve your best channels or. Build up new channels. Are you truly maximizing the potential of 20 percent of your channels? Or are you leaving, you know, you think, Oh, uh, everyone’s on TikTok.

I need to be on TikTok. Yeah. But is your impression share maxed out on Google ads? Are, you know, is it optimized? Have you got good landing pages? There’s probably things you should be focusing on. So what are the core areas in PPC and digital marketing and marketing in general that, that, you know, get you most of the results?

Well, let’s, this is a PPC podcast. So let’s talk about that first. Okay. There’s some key things that we, you know, if they’re not right, there’s no point in talking about other things. So we get loads of people saying, Oh, do we need to update our website? Should we be split testing landing pages? Um, well, we need to change or tweak this one keyword.

And it’s like, actually let’s, let’s get the fundamentals right. Is your tracking correct? 95 percent plus of the accounts we look at, and we look at a lot with people considering working with us. Have some kind of tracking issue. Even if the person running the account or the business owner or the digital marketing manager thinks it’s all right, when you get into the detail, you find that there are things missing.

They’re set to the wrong attribution model. They’re tracking in the wrong place. They’re not attached to the right campaigns. There are so many things that mean that they’re just never going to get those results. And that is one. Tweak might take a little bit of time, but we’ll have massive impacts on how your performance fares over, over the longterm.

Cause once you’re tracking is right, you start to understand what works, what doesn’t, and then you can go from there. So tracking plays a critical role in your PPC success. And that is definitely one of those little things that makes a massive outsized difference to what it is. Another element, the re we feel really you should focus on on PPC is budget control.

So it still shocks me when I hear of people working with agencies or freelancers or their in house teams, and people aren’t able to stick to budgets. Now there’s two ways you can’t stick to budgets. One, you can overspend, which is in many businesses is very bad. If you overspend, there might not be enough money.

Another way is when. People are underspending and that needs mechanisms in place to understand why that is and the volume elements of getting enough leads or sales that can be throttled by not sending enough budget. So making sure that you have budget control in place is what’s the way to do that? Is it learning about how to do portfolio strategies?

Yes. Uh, is it setting your budgets right and having that discussion? Yes, or is it actually what’s really going to make a difference is making sure you’ve got that strategy and making sure you have the KPIs in place to measure then. With the right tracking, how the budget’s working. So you really get need to get to that root cause, the root issue of what’s going to make a difference.

So that’s definitely another important area to focus on. Another thing that people don’t like saying is, and it’s hard as an agency to admit this, but. You know, not everything works for PPC and not all products or services are worth promoting by PPC or indeed good enough quality to make the money business, uh, the business money.

You could get the most traffic. You could be focusing on the right things. It could all be tracked perfectly, but if. Those leads that you’re sending, people aren’t picking up the phones. And we know this, if we’re tracking calls, then you’re never going to make a difference. So that’s some laser focused area to get into and understand what’s working and what’s not.

And if you’re not able to get the position of your business and what you’re good for and what you’re able to do across, then all the other ticks. Some tricks and hacks and so called silver bullets and never going to make things work for you. So really focus on those core things. And if we pick the core things here, it’s, are you tracking?

Do you have a KPI to work for and a strategy to achieve that KPI? And do you have a good, There’s a proposition to put out to the market that is clearly defined, sets out why you are unique. Those things, if you spend 80 percent of your time on those, that will give most of the results. Most people would spend less than 20 percent of the time on them.

So it’s definitely worth looking at. It’s like with content strategy. There’s an old adage now. I mean, people’s attention spans are so short that there’s an adage now that people only read the title. There’s been all kinds of studies where people just read a title and share it on social media and don’t read the content of an article.

So actually, as a content writer, there’s a big argument. The, the best content writers spend 80% of their time on the title of the article, and the other 20% on, on the actual article itself. Now, in most, you know, nor 500 Word blog post, I mean the, the, the title of the, the article will be less than 20%. The, the principles there.

So. By spending most of the time on what has the biggest impact on the number of shares or clicks, et cetera, that’s how you get to the best results. It’s where you put your time. Time is finite. Everyone has the same amount of time. So where are you going to allocate that time to get the best results for you and what you need?

So how do we go about. Properly analyzing this. Let’s assume you’ve got the tracking in place and, and, and that kind of thing. What you really need to do is then say, okay, if I’m a general digital marketer, you need to take an honest look at all your channels. Get all the stats out. Hopefully you’re tracking it all properly into analytics or your preferred analytics tool and say, okay.

Where is, is most of my value coming from here? And is there room to accelerate that? And that’s the lens that you need to look at your reports through. You need to say, okay, which of these channels are delivering 80 percent of my results? And I guarantee. The one channel, maybe two channels, but one channel is probably delivering at least most or the majority of results.

And for most businesses we speak to, that’s either PPC, usually Google ads, or in some businesses, it might be Facebook, Meta, or it’s organic SEO. Now there’s the percentages won’t be exactly the same. That’s fine. But it’s like, which, which area clearly, Do you need to focus on? And there’s obviously that saying, uh, if you’ve got all your eggs in one basket, then, then that’s a risk.

If you just purely focusing on SEO or purely focusing on PPC, there is another argument, if all your ads are in one basket, then just really make sure you look after that basket. There’s. There’s probably more to be done in your PPC campaigns if you’re not maximizing your budgets than there is that spinning up a new channel that may or may not work.

So really you need to think here, you need to apply the 80 20 principle to the reports and the analysis you’re doing. You don’t want to Reports coming out of your ears that you can’t determine. You need to start narrowing down and focusing which one, two, three key metrics, the main money for the business.

Do you really need to be focusing on, and then can you use those as just your key thing? Okay. So it might be number of leads. Yeah, it might be. Yeah, cost believe it matters, but maybe you need volume number. At least you might be a SAS company. It might be how many demos have we done this week? That is the find one metric, find one thing that is the most important.

And if you solve that one thing, the rest of the business becomes easy. So if you had enough leads, the next problem might be the two. Costly the leads. Okay. That’s fine. We can deal with that. If you don’t have enough leads, you’ve got no business in the first place. It’s the same with your product sets on any commerce.

You’re probably finding that 20 percent of the products make 80 percent of the sales or roughly around those areas. So what can you do to have that inform you? So this is why working out how to keep it simple and focus in the business of marketing that you’re doing is so key to not just stress yourself out on all those things you have to do.

You can’t do everything. So you need to say to yourself, okay, these are the things that are really important. Going to make a difference. And they’re not always the easy things to do. Often they aren’t the easy things to do. They’re usually the hard things, but life is easier on the other side of doing hard things.

Let’s look at some more specific examples of PPC, because this is a PPC podcast, not a motivational one or productivity podcast. So what are some areas do you think that In PPC and digital marketing often consume too much time with little return. Well, if you’re a B2B business, a lot of social media is a waste of time.

I’m just going to say it. There are, of course, there are counter examples, but ultimately, if someone’s looking to hire someone to Uh, fix that boiler and an emergency, or if they’ve smashed their teeth and they need an emergency, they’re not looking at the dentist or boiler repair. That’s got a great social media following.

No, they’re typing that into Google and getting the first one. So that is where the bulk of your businesses. Yes. Um, a managing director goes, Oh, I really like our competitors, social media. This is not what matters. What matters is what gets you those results. And you need to analyze that. So that’s definitely something in marketing that doesn’t You what you need to do?

I also think that and this isn’t quite where we’re a lot of people disagree on, which I’m cool with. Um, too many businesses, especially small businesses in the UK spread themselves too thin. They feel like they need to be on all the platforms all the time. They want to be on Google ads. Meta, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit, Pinterest, Microsoft ads, if they think about that.

When ultimately that is just spreading, spreading your budget, spreading yourself too thin of too many things to manage too many people to interact with different platforms and how they work when actually one or two, probably one of those channels is probably the main way you’re going to get most of your business for the moment.

So you should just focus on that. Another thing that people focus on because it’s sometimes nice to do, which makes no difference is, is the look and feel of the website. I’m not saying that having a good fast website is not important, but depending on where your budget is and where your leads come from, then tweaking the website, changing the color of button, having a bigger logo, but again, a new website, cause you think it should be fresher.

It’s going to make no difference if you’re not doing the basics, right? The tracking, you’re not spending. All your budget, you’re not pushing the volume you could already get. So again, it’s not to say that those other elements aren’t important. Of course they are. We all wish we had infinite time, infinite resource to do all those things.

That’s not the world we live in as digital marketers. So you need to focus down on where you can get the best results. And this is something that we’re seeing coming up a lot more in the audits we do. That ultimately you can pick and choose in an account. All kinds of signals determine whether an account is well run.

So we, and we do, and we look at quality scores, impression share, uh, how we add sell what the ad groups like the search query reports done, but often it’s, it’s one or two particular areas for that business in that market that need focusing in on. To improve the results, and there’s, there’s too much in, in this industry going in and doing what I call the clicky clicky in an account.

And this is where you go in and you have a look around and you go, well, I can fix that. I can fix that. This isn’t set up, et cetera, without taking that step back and focusing on what’s the. The one or two things we’re trying to achieve here. What’s the strategy and to get that, what’s the key decisions that you need to make to get those done and in the place that you need them to be.

And that is what focus is all about. It’s getting those things sorted. So I’ll give you an example. We work with a, uh, a specialist plant hire company, but they only can deliver in a certain area because, um, Once it goes out of area, it’s not worth the transport cost to have things done. Now, this particular client, who’s a long term client, when they first came to us, they were spending 60 percent of their budget on display ads all over the country, but they only deliver within a 60 mile radius of there.

And it wasn’t a small budget. So they’re spending a lot just because there was a vanity metric in that business of being seen everywhere. And there’s, then they’re getting calls from all over the country and they can’t service them. Great strategy if, if they have more depots, but they didn’t. So what was the focus there?

Is it optimizing those adverts to make them, you know, look better, better images, have more reach. All that kind of stuff, or is it actually the display advert? So they don’t get the same intention. Was it to focus in on what truly moves the needle for them, which is the right keywords displayed in the right area, sent to the right ads for the right people at the right time with the right landing pages to get the right leads that are ready now to make purchases and become long term customers.

Of that business, we reduced their ad spend by over 60 percent just by cutting off the display ads that weren’t working. We’ve got other strategies around that now, but I’m just giving you a simple example. And by then focusing on those areas that actually make a difference, that was just all wasted showing it in wrong areas of the company.

And then we’ll increase their leads by 40%. In the first six months, would that reduce budget by focusing it more on what works and what doesn’t? So that’s an extreme example. That’s a genuine case study from our business. And you should never, you should always take with a pinch of salt when, when people tell you about these, but ultimately they were focusing on the wrong things.

They just wanted. Pretty display ads. They wanted to be seen all over the internet. They wanted to see that impression share number go up. They just wanted to see loads and loads and loads of impressions. But when we say, okay, that’s fine, but what’s the core of your business? Oh, well, it’s delivering this equipment in this area only.

Okay. Let’s focus on that then and maximize that before we expand out and your expansion is likely to be actually in other areas, not marketing. It’s opening another depot. We’ve got another, we’ve got a whole system that works for promoting things. Let’s, let’s get it in the right place. And that’s just one example of so many I could give you.

And really it comes down to how can you decide what you need to focus on. And that is. Having a tough decision with yourself or your employee, your team or your managers about actually, why are we doing all these things when this is going to make the difference? And it’s always easier to back this up with data, okay, which is why we’re so critical on data.

You can say, oh, social media got us one lead last year and PPC got us 10, 000. So should we just focus on PPC, for example? Might not be that extreme, but this is the things you need to do. No one has enough time in the day to do everything. So you have to focus. And this is sometimes if you’re a digital marketing manager, this is about managing up in the right way.

And sometimes maybe you need to use the 80, 20 principle to let any percent of the issues go and just, you know, say, I’m just going to do that. 20 percent of that. I’ll spend 20 percent of my time on that just to appease them, get them to 80 percent happy. Okay. But know that what you’re focusing on is the right thing.

And this is such a great productivity principle for any job role and your personal life. Ultimately what’s on the to do list, the two levers that can make the biggest difference to what you get done is the Pareto principle, the 80 20 principle, and knowing what Parkinson’s law is. Parkinson’s law says work expands to fill time available.

So just give. You know, if you ask someone to do a report in two weeks, then it will take them two weeks. But if you say, I need that report tomorrow, they’ll do it for tomorrow. Putting in these parameters and focus constraints will make a difference. And the most powerful thing you can do is when you combine the focus of the 80 20 principle, focusing on the right things, the 20 percent of things that give 80 percent of the results and overlay that with implementing The understanding Parkinson’s law, putting in deadlines, getting the right things done.

You will be a force to be reckoned with in your marketing. And that’s just one example, but take these principles and apply them to everything you do for the next 30 days. Just when you’re looking at your to do list, or when you’re saying which customers give you the biggest pain and which are the ones that energize you.

You know, what exercise do you enjoy doing at home? What versus what’s going to make the difference, you know, in your diet? What makes sure 80 percent of the time you’re eating good quality, healthy, whole foods and let yourself have a break for 20 percent of the time. This can fundamentally change things.

So whether you’ve heard of the 80 20 principle or not, and whether you’ve listened this long with my monologue, know this, focus is what Matters on what gets things done in a busy world where you don’t have enough time to do everything because you can’t do everything. You need to prioritize. We have a prioritization problem in the modern world.

People are working on the wrong things and not getting where they need to go. And this is no more true than any area than digital marketing and PPC. You have to focus on the right things, get the fundamentals, right. And you will have 80 percent of your problems. Solved. So there we go. Remember H 20 principle, Parkinson’s law, and use this as a lens to view the world, to get more powerful results.

So thank you for listening and, um, hearing my wax lyrical on the power of the Pareto principle. If you need any help understanding those 20 percent of things that making 80 percent of the difference in your digital marketing, then please get in touch. We would love to speak to you and we’re happy to, we are PPC specialists, so we’re happy to do an audit of your account.

We can show you those things. We can show you the 80 percent that’s caught wasting you money. The 20 percent that’s making the difference. We can show you where to focus and we can give you a strategy which shows you the top things you should be doing. to improve your results in a prioritized order. If you found this podcast useful, please like, subscribe, comment, all that good stuff.

You can find us on all platforms, obviously listening on one. Um, but subscribe and please, if you like it, leave a review, let us know what you think or get in touch with us at geeks at ppcgeeks. co. uk. Thanks for listening. Um, I look forward to speaking to you next time. Cheers.