The Pareto principle and PPC

When managing a series of large client accounts it is extremely important not to get drawn in to look at every individual element of Adwords, Panama or Adcenter. Many of the large clients have campaigns running on all three platforms and really it is unfeasible to manage right down to every individual keyword.

From a high level point of view the best way of making improvements is by looking at where the spend is highest over a monthly period. From there it is possible to make changes on the high cost or non converting keywords. Moving towards a more technical approach it is possible to look at implementing the Pareto principle at campaign level first, then ad group and keyword level.

The Pareto principle suggests that 80% of effects come from 20% of cause. So translated in PPC terms, that means 80% of cost or revenue comes from only 20% of the campaigns, ad groups, keywords or ad text. When you have decided on where to start with the optimization there are several actions to take such as, pausing keywords, increasing or decreasing keyword CPCs and playing around with keyword matching types.

Following on from this try ad text comparisons and use the tools freely available within Google like the Search Query Reports. These are invaluable for discovering new keywords and possible negative keywords.

Essentially what this blog is saying is look at the areas where there is the most potential for opportunity and improvement.

Adam
PPC Consultant