This blog will walk you through the guide on how to create Pareto chart in Excel and benefits of 80/20 rule. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was one of the most charismatic and shrewd military planners in global warfare history.
At the height of his power, he controlled a vast chunk of west Europe. Surprisingly, Napoleon used a relatively smaller army to conquer countries, such as the German empire.
He used the 80/20 rule very efficiently to maximize losses on his enemies using minimal resources.
We doubt whether Napoleon knew about the 80/20 rule.
Essentially, he deceived his enemies into meeting him at the battleground of his choosing. He then committed 80% of his soldiers at the battle.
The remaining 20% of his army, which can be equated to a modern-day Special Forces platoon, was tasked with attacking the enemy’s flanks. It’s the 20% of Napoleon’s army that decided battles across Europe.
Why?
This 20% inflicted heavy damages at the heart of the enemy by attacking the command centers and supply lines. It’s no brainer that the destruction of leadership and supply lines can cripple any enemy irrespective of the size.
PPC management is not different from the battles that Napoleon fought across the mountains and plains of Europe. It’s marred with unpredictable changes, which can cripple your clients’ ad campaigns.
Imagine troubleshooting the 20% metrics and dimensions that spell doom to your clients’ ad campaigns.
How much time would you save?
Think of the magnitude of the returns you’ll generate for your clients effortlessly. Essentially, you would have the edge over the unpredictable shifts conspiring to bring your clients’ ROI down.
Carla gathered campaign data and visualized it using the 80/20 charts.
Below are some of the questions she used as a guideline:
Carla used the insights she got from visualizing data using 80/20 to optimize her clients’ ad campaigns accordingly. She did find out that some of her keyword groups were misaligned with target users’ intent.
She adjusted offers and keyword groups to align with those of her top-20% target audience. Furthermore, she added more negative keywords to maintain relevant niche targeting.
Although her analysis confirmed that her campaigns’ most significant problem was keyword misalignment, Carla did not ignore other metrics and dimensions. She remembered the common fallacy cited in the article—if 20% of inputs are most important, then the other 80% must be unimportant—and did not want to make that mistake.
By applying the 80-20 rule to troubleshoot her clients’ ad campaigns, Carla understood her audience better and targeted her top-20% of her clients’ leads more purposefully. She optimized her ad campaigns based on what she learned, and she was able to achieve her clients’ objectives.
What’s the 80/20 Rule?
The 80-20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is an axiom, which asserts that 80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event.
In business, a goal of the 80-20 rule is to identify inputs that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority. For instance, once paid search ad managers identify factors critical to their clients’ successes, they should give those factors the most focus.
The 80-20 rule is a guideline, not a hard mathematical law.
In the rule, it is a coincidence that 80% and 20% equal 100%.
Inputs and outputs simply represent different units, so the percentage of inputs and outputs does not need to equal 100%. Although the 80-20 rule is frequently used in enterprise-size businesses and economics, you can apply the concept to any field—such as wealth distribution, personal finance, spending habits, and most importantly, search engine marketing (SEM).
At its core, the 80-20 rule is about identifying an entity’s best resources and using them efficiently to create maximum value.
For example, you should try to identify which parts of your clients’ ad campaigns will help achieve your goals and focus on those first. This does not imply, however, that you should ignore the other parts of the campaigns.
The 80-20 rule is misinterpreted often.
Sometimes the misunderstanding is the result of a logical fallacy—namely, that if 20% of inputs are most important, then the other 80% must not be essential.
At other times, the confusion stems from the coincidental 100% sum.
Carla manages Google Ad campaigns for 15 different clients. She (Carla) happens to have read this blog post about the Pareto rule.
Carla begins to think about how she might apply the 80-20 rule to manage her clients’ ad campaigns, displaying mixed results.
She thought:
“I’ve spent a great deal of my time, technical ability, and expertise to attract the customers I already have. Yet for all of this expended energy, I am missing most of my clients’ goals.”
She knew that even if her agency had a history of registering mouth-watering returns for clients, it’s worth virtually nothing if her ad campaigns continued missing her objectives.
Carla deduced that perhaps a considerable chunk of her problems was probably influenced by a handful of the metrics and dimensions.
Essentially, if she knew the 20% of the metrics and dimensions were causing 80% of her troubles, she could target them effectively with minimal time, effort, and other resources.
Almost nobody realizes that 80/20 is an endlessly repeating pattern: (80/20)². The full power of 80/20 comes from finding 80/20 within 80/20 within 80/20.
For example, 80% of your clients’ sales revenue comes from 20% of their target audience.
If you ignore the bottom 80%, 80/20 will still be true of the top 20% that’s left. That means 64% of your results come from 4%. Then you can 80/20 the top 4% and guess what, 50% of your results come from 1% of what you do.
We are sure you’ve seen the beautiful and easy-to-read 80/20 charts that we’ve used throughout the blog post.
The charts have been generated by a data visualization tool that comes as an Add-in for Excel and Google Sheets. The intuitive and intelligent data visualization tool is exceptionally quick in the delivery of charts.
ChartExpo comes jam-packed with custom charts purposely for paid search marketing management.
The Pareto (80/20) chart is among the 50 other chart templates you can use creatively to visualize various aspects of your clients’ ad campaigns, such as:
Stick with me for just a while longer to learn the simple and easy steps to use this impressive data visualization tool.
Excel is one of the most used spreadsheet apps by growing pay-per-click (PPC) ad agencies. Below are easy-to-follow steps about how you can install ChartExpo add-in for Excel.
To Get Started with ChartExpo for Excel Add-In, follow the Simple and Easy Steps Below.
Register for ChartExpo Trial NOW to enjoy a 7-days Free Trial
Remember to follow instructions.
Fill in your respective metrics and dimensions on the user-friendly interface (UI). Some charts may require more than one dimension and metric.
ChartExpo has an export option to facilitate seamless and EASY transfer and sharing of your charts with your clients and team.
These charts like the one above are generated using globally accepted and simple formats, namely portable network graphics (PNG) and Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG)
Just adhere to the requirements of the ChartExpo to get treated with highly intuitive, relevant, and easy-to-read charts. The 80/20 analysis requires one dimension and metric to visualize your ad campaign data.
Read below the top money-saving benefits:
A huge chunk of PPC managers spend a lot of time on keyword analysis and still get disappointing results.
Stick a little bit longer to learn why.
Keyword analytics is a crucial aspect of paid search marketing, which promises a high return on investment (ROI) if done right.
Besides, it’s an ass-kicking challenge to conduct a thorough keyword analysis and determine the keywords you should be focusing on, especially for a massive list of keywords.
By applying the 80–20 rule, monitoring keyword performance can become a much simpler task. You’ll be able to focus on the most productive keyword groups driving impressions and clicks.
Essentially, 20% of your SEO and keyword targeting actions are the most profitable.
Take a look at the image below.
It’s a Pareto chart. A sample data has been visualized using the 80/20 doctrine. Note how the chart has categorized the keyword groups into two batches: least significant keywords and most significant keywords.
Ideally, you should save your time, effort, and ad budget by focusing on the keyword group dubbed: most significant keywords.
The Pareto Chart above is pretty self-explanatory. The top-most section of the chart’s y-axis is made up of 20% keywords. These are the keywords you should commit to, a significant portion of your resources (time, skills, and human resources).
How do You Read an 80/20 Chart?
Before I explain how you can use the chart, you need to grasp some core components.
You can use either of the attributed metrics (e.g., clicks, cost, wasted spend, etc.) from your Google Ads account.
Your clients’ target market is not identical in attributes. There’re demographic and psychographic traits that set users apart, such as income bracket, interests and hobbies, and age bracket, among others.
If you believe in the 80/20 axiom, then it’s 20% of your leads that drive 80% of your desired goals.
‘One-ad-message-fit-all’ is NOT the strategy you want to pursue to reach out only to the users that matter to you.
You need a personalized ad message that hits the bull eye for guaranteed conversion. Imagine if you could segment your clients’ niche market into high and low-spending customers. It would be easy for you to maximize your PPC customers’ ROIs by targeting high spenders with highly custom and persuasive offers.
The 80/20 charts are compelling in visualizing large volumes of data to provide you with accurate insights into the highest-grossing customer segment for effective targeting.
You could employ a price segmentation strategy to further shore up PPC ad agency’s profits by segmenting your customers based on their spending.
Price discrimination is charging your clients different rates based on their respective income brackets.
You can use Pareto charts to visualize the composition of your search engine marketing (SEM) customers to re-adjust your rates (commission).
Assume you’ve identified the 20% of clients contributing 80% of your revenue. Because you’ll be diverting a significant portion of your resources (skill and time) to the 20% highest-grossing segment, it makes perfect sense to tailor-make your rates for them.
When you use the 80/20 principle to analyze your costs, you’ll see that 20% of your cost categories add up to 80% of your costs. If you can determine what’s in that 20%, you know what to target.
Your next steps should be to focus on those areas.
For example, let’s say you’ve used the 80/20 rule to identify the keyword mistakes as one of your top cost areas.
You see that cost and think, “Ok, I’m going to reduce costs by doing a user intent-driven keyword analysis.” However, to use this principle effectively, you need not stop there.
You should use another Pareto analysis to examine the different mistakes and calculate how much each type costs.
The 80/20 charts are well-positioned to provide you with relative answers to the questions below:
You’ll find that 80% of your mistakes are being caused by 20% of the problems, so the issues in that 20% are the ones to target.
The good news is: there won’t be many problems to tackle before you start to see progress.
Using the 80/20 Principle, out of 10 different types of mistakes identified in your clients’ pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns, you’ll only need to focus on 2 types, the other 8 being all the small mistakes that only add up to 20%.
To use the 80/20 rule for cost savings, let’s look at 2 Pareto Rule examples where you may be able to identify problems and reduce costs in your clients’ ad campaigns.
This is the most common observation of the Pareto Principle. It’s effortlessly easy to find out whether or not it holds true for your business.
If you find that the bulk of your PPC clients’ profits come from around 20% of their target customers, then ensure you’re working hard to retain those customers and treating them well.
Many PPC ad agencies spend a lot of time developing keywords, forming a keyword strategy, and applying those keywords across their clients’ campaigns.
Here’s the surprising thing about keywords: In most cases, 80% of your traffic and visitors come from a mere 20% of your keywords.
The Pareto Chart above shows in-depth insights that no PPC manager can afford to ignore.
There’s a strong likelihood that the targeted locations should be considered very critically. It’s 100% logical to reallocate ad budget to such locations where interaction is much more and can generate maximum ROIs
The 80/20 axiom is highly relevant in today’s PPC management, although the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte used it to conquer the world.
The principle is based on the premise that only 20% of the inputs drive 80% of the output. Shrewd businesses in other sectors use the doctrine to uncover the attributes and processes that drive maximum positive impact.
Remember, time is luxury pay-per-click strategists cannot afford to squander. Some of the reasons why PPC managers should use Pareto charts for Excel to visualize their campaign data includes:
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
Related articles