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Time is money. There are few types of businesses that understand and embody this adage as much as a casino. While casinos promote themselves as a place of luck and chance, for the owners, it is anything but.
Time and discipline are the cornerstones that drive a successful casino business. It’s all about math, percentages, and data, not about gambling, chance, and ‘anything can happen.’
These are some of the same essential elements that produce successful PPC marketing. Thus, a trip to the casino can actually be a learning experience for PPC managers!
This discussion will look at what a night out in Vegas says about developing better PPC campaigns and an overall stronger marketing strategy.
People try their luck at casinos to win big. Every once in a while, you may hear a friend or colleague report that they “hit it big” at the casino. In reality, good casinos never actually lose any money because they have mathematics on their side. It’s not about luck for the casino, but data and statistics.
This is why there is the saying: “the house always wins.” It is because casinos have a statistical advantage that, in the long-run, always pays out. As Mari Puzo writes in his famed novel, Fools Die, “Percentages never lie …you can lose faith in everything, religion and God, women and love, good and evil, war and peace. You name it. But, the percentage will always stand fast.”
The percentage that Puzo is talking about is the “edge” that casinos make their money on.
Casino owners and managers are not gambling with their money, not even a little. These businesses and their success are founded in mathematical principles that guarantee positive returns and profit.
The primary principle that forms the basis of the casino business is the law of large numbers, also known as the law of averages. This is a probability theorem that says if you repeat the same experiment over and over again, the actual results get closer to the expected results.
For example, with a coin flip, the expected results are 50-50 between tails and heads. But, if you actually flip a coin, the results may not be 50-50, at least not at first. In 10 flips, you may have a 6-4 split. That doesn’t reflect the 50% odds, right?
However, after you repeat the coin flip 1,000 more times, the results get closer to the expected 50-50 odds. The more flips you make, the closer the actual results come to this expectation.
Casinos rely on the law of large numbers to determine what will happen the more games a person plays. A player may go on a hot streak or even win big, but, as more time goes on and the individual keeps gambling, the actual results will get closer to what the casino expects – revenue.
Again, the casino is not gambling. It is using percentages and probability.
Using the law of large numbers, casinos understand that, given enough opportunities, they can reasonably expect a specific result to occur. This result needs to be in their favor to ensure positive, healthy revenues. This is known as the casino’s edge or the house advantage.
The casino’s edge is the long-term percentage of money wagered that will be kept by the casino. If the house advantage is 5%, i.e. the casino is 5% more likely to win and thereby going to make 5% more of the money wagered.
In other words, if $1,000,000 is bet by the gamers, the casino will keep $50,000 as revenue and return $950,000 back to the gamers.
For this reason, gamers are always faced with an immediate uphill battle at the casino. And, in the end, this will be a statistically losing battle for the gamers. The bigger the house advantage, the steeper the climb and, ultimately, the faster the gamers will lose their money.
Every casino game is designed to provide the house with some level of an advantage. Some games have a stronger edge than others. Double-zero roulette, for example, has a 5.3% edge. It’s one of the worst games that players can choose if they want to win.
On the other end of the spectrum, games like blackjack and craps have a smaller house advantage and are thereby more friendly to the player’s wallet.
The percentages don’t lie, but they do require time. If a player sits down at a roulette table and, against all the odds, wins on the first spin, the casino is at a loss. To get this revenue back and obtain their house edge, the casino needs to encourage the player to stay at the table and continue gambling.
While there’s plenty of math and probability involved in the games themselves, there is a whole other side to the casino business that is the science of preserving the house edge by keeping players playing.
The lights, the staff, the inexpensive food, and drinks are all adding to the experience of the casino, but these are actually carefully planned tactics designed to ensure that players stay long enough for the casino to grow their advantage and achieve positive returns.
Even slot machines are carefully programmed so that the lights, sounds, and payouts are compelling enough to keep casino guests in the seat and pulling the lever again and again. This “science” is all data-driven.
The house advantage can’t be too high; otherwise, players lose their money too quickly. As a business, this seems like a perfect scenario, but not so. When a player loses their money after just a few games, it creates a negative experience. Not only will they stop playing for the night, but they also are not likely to return again soon.
This is where discipline enters the equation. The gamer needs to have a reasonable expectation of winning, which also means the casino retains the possibility of losing. In the short-term, the house loses a lot. Casino operators need the discipline not to hit the panic button when the chips are down.
It’s about keeping customers entertained and still playing, even across multiple visits to the casino. Once they stop playing, the revenue stops and the casino can no longer convert short-term losses into long-term wins.
Your boss or clients probably aren’t going to be happy if you tell them you’re taking a trip to the casino for research on how to improve their PPC accounts. (Then again, maybe it’s worth a try!) Luckily, you can learn everything you need to know about building a house edge on the PPC marketplace right here.
Casino operators live and breathe data. There is not a successful casino owner that doesn’t know the house advantage on a game of double-zero roulette, or how long a player needs to keep playing after winning on a single number for the house to obtain their edge.
Remember, casinos thrive on percentages. There is no gut-feeling of intuition involved. They leave that kind of stuff to the gamblers.
Data also needs to drive your PPC strategy. Why is data so important for PPC? You can’t select keywords, assign bids, or target audiences based exclusively on feeling. If you want to maximize your returns and optimize your budget to the fullest, then you need data to make smart, informed decisions about how to navigate the ever-changing PPC space.
Competition, user behaviors, and platform standards are just some of the major changes that directly affect your PPC efforts. Even your own campaigns create a ripple effect that may impact other areas of your account. Data is essential for tracking these changes and understanding how and why they happened. With these insights, you’ll know how to respond to such shifts.
The good news is that your PPC account is rich with valuable data and actionable insights that will act as the roadmap to better performance and greater success. You have everything you need to produce a data-driven PPC strategy.
The challenge is knowing which metrics to listen to and what those figures are telling you. Without the right tools, data analysis can be extremely tedious and resource-intensive.
Casino owners have to walk a thin line between entertaining guests and taking their money. A trip to the casino needs to be fun, even when you leave with less money than you came with. When the casino takes your money quickly, it’s only a short-term win for the house.
This isn’t ideal for the casino because the player leaves feeling discouraged. It doesn’t create an amazing and entertaining experience that brings people back again and again. Thus, the casino needs to be disciplined and generate revenue at a pace that doesn’t hurt the expectation or experience of players.
PPC managers also need to take discipline and time very seriously. It may seem obvious that a long-term strategy will eventually trump short-term success. Still, it’s a point that a lot of PPC managers get wrong because not everyone is patient and disciplined enough to wait for an exponential, long-term strategy to pay off.
Instead, these managers make fast changes with the hopes of securing quick wins and short-term success. These speedy moves are great when you want to please a new client or keep a stakeholder off your back. However, they don’t actually grow your campaign.
Why? Aside from the fact that short-term wins are short-lived, they also can easily be copied by your competitors. Any edge gained is just as quickly overcome by other parties in the market. The only strategy that cannot be copied is a long-term one.
In this respect, time is a challenge, but also one of your biggest allies in successful PPC. Once you’ve committed the time, you can’t be touched by the efforts of your competitors.
Despite the adage that the house always wins, any casino owner will tell you that sometimes they lose. Sometimes, a player leaves on a hot streak and the casino is out thousands of dollars.
The same can happen with your PPC campaigns. Not every path you take or keyword you target is going to produce positive returns. Even with data informing your decisions, there are going to be some missteps that cause damaging results within your PPC campaigns.
The goal, however, is to win more than you lose. When you can continuously pile up tallies in the win column, then you won’t even notice those small steps backward. One loss will quickly be replaced by fix or six positive changes.
The challenge for PPC managers again boils down to discipline. A downturn in performance can be very troubling. Often, a novice PPC manager will see this negative turn as a red alert and they hit the panic button, thinking this will “save” their campaigns.
In truth, this can be a more harmful practice than helpful. Like the casino waiting for the house advantage, your PPC strategies also need time to grow and mature. So, when tactics are needlessly shuffled around to curb a downturn, it impedes the potential for long-term growth to occur.
Not only do your strategies require time to mature, but so does your data. If you’re monitoring your critical PPC metrics daily, a small dip in performance can be troubling, but it’s not a reason to panic – not yet.
PPC managers need the discipline to wait and see if a PPC loss is a result of a more significant trend, or if it is just a one-off occurrence. Most of the time, it will be the latter. This wait-and-see mentality is also necessary for creating exponential growth.
While the exponential trend line has the most successful trajectory, it starts slower than the incremental mindset. The expectation gap between the two lines, where people (mainly your clients or stakeholders) get impatient for results, is just as potentially damaging as making a panicked decision.
This is the idea of expected versus actual results. If your PPC goal is to generate 30 conversions in the quarter, you may start to worry when, after the first month, only 5 people convert. This is because your expectation is that 10 people will convert each month, thereby reaching your mark of 30.
With exponential growth, however, time is a factor for the actual results to reach the expected mark. Those 5 conversions in the first month may lead to 12 in the second month, then 20 in the last month of the quarter. Suddenly, you’ve exceeded your goal, despite a slow start that didn’t match your initial expectations.
By accepting that these steps back and slow periods are inevitable, it’s much easier to ignore the dips and maximize the number of positive changes, thereby unlocking exponential growth.
Casinos make their money based on percentages governed by the law of large numbers. There is no denying it. These are what dictate the house edge, which is the central, critical factor of success and revenue generation.
The same can be said of your Google Ads account. Some metrics are essential to your PPC goals and your overall growth. The same can be said of your keywords, ad groups, and campaigns. You have a few top-tier terms that produce the majority of your returns and thereby contribute the most to your house advantage.
However, there are also several peripheral factors, metrics, campaigns, you name it, which also contribute. While they aren’t as critical as those heavy hitters, they are still useful and contribute to the success of your strategies.
This distinction between critical and peripheral factors is known as the Pareto Principle. Vilfredo Pareto discovered that roughly 80% of the land in Italy was controlled by only 20% of the population.
This 80-20 ratio applies to many other facets, including PPC. On most accounts, roughly 80% of your returns are generated by only the top 20% of your keywords.
The power of these vital few components causes some PPC managers to neglect the useful many that also contribute to campaign success. If you really want to build a house advantage, you need to target both the vital few and the useful many.
That’s the difference between a successful PPC account and a mediocre one. Your average manager just cares about the vital few, but successful ones build their edge across peripheral and central gains.
The successful group of managers is disciplined. These individuals know that the critical success factors that promise the best returns today are not going to be so potent in the future. That is because, eventually, your vital few tasks change.
Casinos follow a specific set of rules with regards to playing and even hospitality. The handbook on running a successful casino is centuries old. These are time-honored procedures that have been proven successful by volumes of data and years of testing. Rarely are new chapters added to the casino guidebook.
In previous sections, the concept of staying the course was introduced. An integral part of this practice is repetition. Once you start to understand how to build your advantage and your PPC strategy begins to grow, you need to then repeat these activities and continuously put effort towards improving.
PPC marketing is a proactive business, not a reactive one.
Don’t wait for a dip in performance to start working towards gaining an edge. That’s the mentality of a short-term, incremental-thinking marketer. You should already and always be accumulating your advantage through continuous improvements.
Rome was not built in a day, nor was Caesar’s Palace and neither will your PPC strategy. Success doesn’t happen overnight, but slowly and over time.
Thus, monitoring and managing your PPC accounts needs to be a daily activity. You don’t have to make significant, monumental changes every time. Otherwise, it’s just too much work. Instead, you want to commit to making small steps forward.
Some managers try to improve by just 1% each day. These tiny positive changes may seem insignificant on their own, but they grow over time and build upon one another. For example, these marketers that improve 1% each day don’t increase by 365% at the end of the year. That’s an incremental mindset.
Because these small, 1% improvements build on one another, the growth is actually 3,788% by the end of the year. Now that’s a jackpot!
By now, many PPC professionals reading this are thinking, “Data I’ve got, the discipline I’ve got, but time? Absolutely not.” It’s a sentiment shared by many PPC account owners and an obstacle that is ever-present in marketing and management.
Whether you are analyzing data, identifying new opportunities, tracking changes, making daily improvements or just performing simple management activities, it all takes more time than you have in a day.
So, how does a PPC manager find the time to build their house advantage and raise their campaigns to the next level? PPC Signal is the answer.
PPC Signal is a SaaS tool that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically monitor your Google Ads data for changes that are substantial enough to warrant attention. These changes can be categorized as shifts, trends or outliers.
A shift occurs when a series of consecutive data points fall above or below the norm.
A trend is a series of consecutive data points that are increasing or decreasing.
Outliers are single data points that fall way above or below the standard deviation line. They are noteworthy and worth investigating. However, they are usually one-off occurrences.
These notable changes are presented to PPC managers as alerts. Each alert is labeled as either a risk or an opportunity. PPC managers have complete freedom to choose the noteworthy changes that they want to investigate.
Some signals are simple and easy to address, while others involve many different dimensions of data and are far more complex and intensive.
That said, no matter what types of alerts you choose to follow, PPC Signal solves many of the problems that get in the way of building a house advantage on Google Ads.
By receiving a steady stream of risk and opportunity alerts, PPC managers can maximize their positive changes and mitigate potential losses. When it comes to building an accumulative advantage, this is a wonderful feature that allows you to perform those continuous steps forward that will quickly replace any negative turns along the way.
And, these wins and losses are backed by data, which means you aren’t making any improvements or avoiding risks that aren’t supported by percentages and insights. No gut-feelings here!
Avoiding risks that are backed by data is a much safer strategy than hitting the panic button every time a small downturn occurs. PPC Signal frames these risk-based alerts on the historical performance of your PPC campaigns.
In other words, PPC Signal isn’t sending you a risk alert because a keyword is underperforming today. Instead, the sophisticated AI engine looks at your PPC track record and detects abnormalities or trends that are noteworthy because they differ from the historical activity of your account.
The same is true of the opportunity alerts that PPC Signal provides. These are not unfounded suggestions on how you might be able to improve your campaigns. Each opportunity is created based on your own PPC data, which means the alerts are designed to produce results for your Google Ads account.
While not every opportunity or risk is guaranteed to create a positive change, the data-driven nature of these alerts ensures that you have more wins than losses.
Time is one of the constant problems for PPC managers because there is so much to do and not enough time in the day to do it all. You don’t even have enough time to get to half of the PPC-related activities that you hope to resolve.
For this reason, automation is a big buzzword in the PPC world. PPC Signal aims to take the pressure off managers by automating some of the most time-consuming activities related to managing accounts and understanding data.
Without PPC Signal, marketers have to spend an exhausting amount of time analyzing their data and finding the winning and losing opportunities hidden within that ever-changing stream of numbers.
Not to mention, manually analyzing your data leaves room for human error. You may discover a correlation between two dimensions of data that is not as solid and concrete as you think. Or, there may be discrepancies in the data that produces inaccurate results.
When decisions are made based on bad data, it’s even more damaging than making short-term moves based on feelings and intuition. This is because data-informed decisions are made with more confidence than a feeling- or opinion-based moves. After all, data often feels reliable and infallible to marketers.
PPC Signal limits the room for human error and brings accurate, data-informed, and tested insights and opportunities right to your screen. Not only does this save tremendous amounts of time, but it also means that PPC managers can focus on more critical tasks, like enacting these changes and improving their campaigns.
Automation is treated with both open arms and hesitation. On the one hand, marketers are thrilled with this idea of not only having more time to commit to the tasks that matter, but also not having to sink hours of their time into the parts of the PPC process that are extremely cumbersome and, frankly, boring.
But, there is also a fear associated with automation because marketers don’t like the idea of leaving their strategies on auto-pilot. This is why many expert PPC marketers are skeptical of Google’s AI-based features, like Smart Bidding, dynamic search ads, and others.
With PPC Signal, there is no reason to be apprehensive. Marketers don’t relinquish any control over their strategies. Instead, PPC Signal offers a way for managers to utilize AI to make better human decisions. In this respect, PPC Signal allows managers to become data-informed, but still human-driven.
When a PPC manager receives a list of alerts from PPC Signal, it is entirely their choice which alerts to pursue first. You can even filter this list by a campaign, type, time, complexity, and other parameters.
If a suggested opportunity or risk doesn’t fit with your campaign goals, you can simply ignore it and spend your time following the alert leads that do mesh with the direction of your PPC strategy.
Artificial intelligence tools shouldn’t cause marketers anxiety or concern about what steps or tactics are being made by the AI engine. Instead, they should empower marketers by allowing them to take those steps with less work and better accuracy.
PPC Signal automates the time-consuming and beginning steps of making positive changes to a PPC campaign. This includes collecting and analyzing data, identifying potential opportunities, testing those insights for accuracy, etc. Marketers have much more time to focus on actually enacting changes, rather than continuously finding and testing possible ways to improve their efforts.
By having to spend almost zero time locating growth opportunities, marketers enjoy two massive advantages that you don’t want to ignore.
The first benefit is a never-ending list of potential improvements to be made to your PPC campaigns. Remember the rinse-repeat step mentioned earlier? Well, PPC Signal’s always-available list of opportunities to explore and risks to avoid makes continuous improvement incredibly easy.
As you begin clearing your alerts and enacting those 1% improvements, the continuous change attitude will become part of your culture. And, when you start to see the multiplying growth of all of these small changes, it will only become more addicting to resolve risks and capitalize on opportunities.
Then, the second advantage takes effect, which is that PPC marketers can control the speed of their growing edge. Since you can commit all of your time and attention towards enacting changes, rather than identifying them, your house edge grows much faster than marketers without this tool.
This means that PPC Signal, as a solution, is extremely scalable. As your growth begins to snowball and you have more budget and other resources, you can increase the number of daily alerts that you address. Or, choose to follow more complex trends that require more attention but offer a greater reward.
Scalability is a significant problem when businesses enter the steep, exponential curve. If you don’t have tools that can carry you through the explosion of your growth, it is easy to falter during this exciting time.
In any casino gift shop, you can find a book on a basic blackjack strategy. They even sell pocket editions that you can use at the table. As a player, sticking to this strategy will reduce the casino’s edge from 2% to 0.5%.
The book teaches how a player should act based on the cards they’ve been dealt with and what they can see on the table. PPC Signal is a lot like this strategy book. No matter how your campaigns change or what cards you are dealt with, PPC Signal offers suggestions on what moves to make next based on data from your past strategies.
Each alert you resolve will edge your PPC account forward. Before you know it, these small improvements will begin to grow upon one another. Over time, this growing effect will be a powerful force that builds such a strong house advantage that competitors will become a non-factor.
You don’t have to step into a casino to win big with PPC Signal.
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