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When a sculptor creates a masterpiece, it is achieved by endlessly chipping away the smallest of material, rounding the sharpest of edges and polishing the beauty underneath.
If the sculptor were to commit only to broad strokes and heavy strikes of the chisel, the stone would crack in unexpected ways and the masterpiece would undoubtedly be ruined.
A true masterpiece can only be created as a result of many small, incremental changes.
Of course, you are not a sculptor; you are a pay-per-click (PPC) marketer. But, you can learn a lot from this example of incremental change. It’s a lesson that you can utilize in your PPC efforts, particularly in how you manage your campaigns.
Too many marketers try and manage PPC campaigns with broad strokes, but big changes may only yield short-term benefits and come with significant risks. And, they often aren’t necessary.
Instead, successful PPC management, like a masterpiece sculpture, requires small, continuous and positive changes. Over time, these small changes produce an accumulative advantage.
Also known as the principle of aggregate marginal gains, the 1% improvement rule is essentially the understanding that small gains (as little as a 1% change) will ultimately add up to massive improvement over time.
By breaking large projects, such as PPC management, into its smallest components, it becomes easier to identify opportunities to make slight improvements.
These slight improvements add up quickly. In fact, they add up exponentially. If you strive to improve 1% every day for a whole year, your accumulative advantage would equal a 3,778% increase.
Not bad, right?
Naturally, it’s hard to keep a constant upwards trend and there may be days when that 1% change is in the opposite direction.
The good news is that positive changes have a much more significant impact than negative ones. An off day won’t ruin all your hard work!
The origin of aggregate marginal gains is often attributed to the Kaizen method of Japan. Kaizen translates to “change for good” and originated in Japan in the post-World War II era as a means to improve production methods.
Toyota was an early adopter of the method. The company organized groups of workers that met daily to identify, analyze and solve current issues in the production cycle.
Later, Masaaki Imai founded the Kaizen Institute Consulting Group, which brought this method of small improvements to businesses across more industries.
There are ten principles of Kaizen that can be applied to improving PPC campaigns. These principles are:
While this idea of continuous, 1% improvements can be attributed to the Kaizen method, it was the British Cycling team at the Beijing Olympics that gave it a new life.
It is the ultimate example of how aggregate marginal gains can lead to success.
To give some background, before the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, British Cycling had enjoyed a solitary gold medal win in 76 years. In the world of cycling, Great Britain was a nonfactor. They were not even a blip on the radar of serious cycling teams.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, they skyrocketed out of obscurity to the top of the podium. Britain claimed 7 out of 10 gold medals in cycling at Beijing 2008 Olympics.
Four years later, they repeated their victories in London (2012). Then, they did it again in Rio (2016). And, the success wasn’t limited to the Olympics. British Cycling also began claiming almost yearly wins at the Tour De France.
How’d they do it?
The success was large because of a new team direction headed by David Brailsford.
Brailsford was a fan of Kaizen and wanted to apply the principles of continuous improvement to the British Cycling team. The goal of shooting for the top of the podium was simply too improbable to plan for.
What the team could achieve, however, were small, accumulative improvements. Earning a modest 1% increase in performance was a manageable objective that could be achieved daily. The goal wasn’t to strive for perfection or winning but to focus on progress.
The team worked together (Kaizen principle #6) to break down cycling into tiny, small tasks. They collected these tasks into three categories: strategy, human performance, and environment.
For strategy, they analyzed aerodynamics in a wind tunnel to find ways to reduce drag. Human performance tasks included proper dieting, food preparation, and even better handwashing to reduce the risk of illness. Finally, environment improvements were made to the mechanics bay, team transport, etc.
Some of these improvements may seem small and insignificant on their own. Collectively, however, they create an accumulative advantage. It is this advantage that leads Britain to podium success.
When possible, Brailsford and his team injected data to measure progress and analyze what steps yielded the most significant improvements.
The journey for progress became infectious. Everyone on the team began searching and discovering opportunities for marginal gains to be made.
But, it wasn’t all easy riding. British Cycling faced some serious defeats. They quickly realized that focusing on these fringe improvements was great, but it didn’t mean squat if the critical success factors weren’t addressed first.
They needed a core foundation.
This realization that Brailsford and the British Cycling team experienced was the Pareto Principle.
We’ll keep the history brief on this one. Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle in 1941. He named it the Pareto Principle after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. In 1896, Pareto had written that 80% of the land in Italy belonged to only 20% of the population.
Juran discovered that this 80-20 connection had many applications in business management.
The Pareto Principle is essentially the idea that 80% of results come from only 20% of activities. In other words, not all the tasks you perform will return the same level of results.
For example, in PPC, 80% of your returns will come from 20% of your keywords. Some keywords, and some tasks, are more valuable than others.
What the British Cycling team didn’t realize, at least at first, was the need to focus on the vital few, over the useful many.
The challenge, in any application of the Pareto principle, is being able to identify the essential few that will produce the biggest gains. Once these core, critical success factors are resolved, then the useful many can carry the marginal gains forward.
Juran first coined the concept of the vital few and trivial many. Later, he revised the statement to be the vital few and the useful many, which suggests that you don’t want to ignore the 80% of trivial tasks entirely.
But, you do want to square away the vital few tasks in the 20% first, as these lead to the best possible results.
Now that you understand the history of continuous improvement and the various principles that are involved, you can begin applying this learning to your PPC strategies.
PPC management is an ongoing and tedious process that can feel daunting at times. There are so many changes occurring and pieces moving in different directions.
It can feel impossible to take it all in at once, much like it felt impossible for British Cycling to reach the top of the Olympic podium.
Campaign settings, keywords, negative keywords, traffic metrics, targeting options, landing pages, A/B testing, conversions, attributions, the list goes on with the number of many components that make up your PPC strategies.
Each one of these components plays an important role. Depending on the current status of your campaigns, some tasks require priority. How do you determine where to begin?
Before you begin digging into your campaigns and dissecting the various components to find opportunities for marginal gains, it’s first important to review your PPC goals.
By reviewing these goals, you’ll refresh your sense of purpose when utilizing PPC marketing. In other words, you’ll remind yourself why you’re doing all this for in the first place!
Your goal needs to be the center of attention when deciding which tasks to focus on first and how to split your strategies into different components.
Naturally, you want all of your PPC metrics to be at peak performance, but the highest marginal gains will come when you prioritize with this goal in mind.
Applying what you learned from the 80-20 principle, your first task is to find the most critical success factors that need to be addressed first.
These are typically account- or campaign-level issues that need to be resolved promptly, before they cause too much damage.
Are there any problems that you can identify immediately, just from looking at your Google Ads dashboard? For example, you may have a high number of clicks, but few conversions, resulting in a below-average conversion rate.
Or, your Quality Score has been slowly declining and you need to get to the bottom of this gradual loss of performance.
Fixing these vital issues is necessary to establish the foundation of successful PPC. They’ll provide the most significant and quickest performance gains.
If your PPC account was your home, you’d fix the most detrimental problems first, right? That light bulb that sometimes flickers in the backyard can wait until you’ve repaired the leak in the kitchen.
This is precisely how you want to approach making incremental improvements to your PPC account.
Most PPC campaigns won’t have a smoking gun. As a PPC marketer, you’ve long dealt with any major issues within your campaigns and your metrics are all relatively solid.
What then?
Once you’ve ensured that there are no major, underlying issues with your campaign, then it becomes about identifying opportunities for peripheral and tangential marginal gains.
This means going beyond your daily PPC routine of tweaking the obvious. Now, you need to dig deeper and find the littlest of components that may produce a 1% incremental gain.
When the British Cycling team adopted the Kaizen method in their daily training, they looked at every little, tiny piece of their strategies.
It wasn’t just about training harder and better; it was about improving everything across the board, even down to handwashing techniques and the dusting routine of the mechanics’ area.
Everything matters. This is incredibly evident in PPC marketing. One small increase or decrease in one metric can have a ripple effect that impacts other areas.
Thus, you cannot focus only on the most direct areas of concern, and ignore the others, because they all contribute to success.
Unfortunately, a lot of PPC marketers tend to ignore the peripheral stuff and exclusively focus on what they’ve decided are the critical factors of success.
The problem is that the PPC environment is always changing, which means your critical success factors are ever-changing too.
The metrics that are playing the most prominent roles in increasing PPC performance today may not be the same tomorrow.
One day, the best area to focus on is keywords, but days later, it may change to a problem with a landing page design. Then, the next day, it shifts again, and targeting options need to be addressed.
As these critical success factors move to different areas of your campaigns, it’s difficult to immediately recognize that a shift has occurred and identify where the new success factor is.
It creates a vicious game of whack-a-metric, where you’re constantly trying to chase the areas of your campaign with the most impact to offer.
Often, you’re focusing on an old success factor, without realizing that your attention is better served elsewhere.
PPC marketers follow this trail from one focus to the next because optimizing everything at once feels impossible. And, arguably it is.
There are too many factors, components, and metrics at play that optimizing everything at once is impossible. There isn’t enough time in the day.
That’s the advantage of the 1% improvement principle. You aren’t worried about optimizing everything at the same time, just like British Cycling wasn’t focused on a gold medal finish.
The goal is continuous progress.
By setting the goal of making just a 1% improvement each day, you can cover all of the bases of your PPC campaigns, without exerting a ton of time and effort each day.
As you make these daily improvements, you’ll hit some of the vital few tasks and the critical success factors. You’ll also take care of some of the smaller, peripheral marginal gains that nudge your campaigns further towards success.
Again, these small, continuous changes have a compounding effect. At the end of the year, your accumulated growth is not 365%, but rather 3,778%.
The correct formula is: 1.01^365
Not 1% daily change × 365 days of the year
Understanding and predicting exponential growth with the above formula is not always intuitive. Many people don’t think in terms of exponential growth. They don’t realize its potency.
For example, if you were to offer a child the option of $1 a day for a month, or a penny the first day, then two pennies the second day, four pennies the third day, and so on, most would choose the first option.
What this child doesn’t realize is that, by the end of the month, the exponential growth on that single penny would equal $10 million, which anyone would agree is a lot better than the $30 they’d receive from getting a dollar every day.
It’s not easy to get in the mindset of exponential growth. Often, businesses want the best and most immediate results. Like the child in the allowance example, it’s hard to predict how and when that single penny will grow into a tangible return.
With exponential growth, it’s not only the results that increase but the growth rate itself. This creates “hockey stick” growth, where progress seems to mirror incremental growth, before suddenly skyrocketing upwards.
As you discover areas of possible improvement and make decisions on which path to follow first, you have to maintain an exponential mindset. You need to make decisions that yield exponential growth, not just short-term gains.
Adopting the 1% improvement principle has its challenges. You’ve probably thought up a few of them yourself.
If you haven’t, here are some of the biggest obstacles facing PPC marketers trying to gain an accumulative advantage:
It’s nice to envision a 3,778% return at the year’s end. Such a performance boost, however, comes as a result of improving 1% every single day. That’s a serious commitment.
When David Brailsford and British Cycling applied the 1% improvement method to their training, it was all hands on deck. They worked together to find opportunities for marginal gains.
This is an essential component of Kaizen. You’ll want to involve at least your entire digital marketing team in the process.
You never know who might have an idea for unlocking marginal gains! You want to encourage open conversations and brainstorming about how to progress, even from members outside of your team.
But, these brainstorming efforts aren’t valuable unless you have a method or plan in place to capture the ideas and implement them effectively.
It’s also vital to devise a schedule that not only discusses when these small tasks will be achieved but also who will be responsible for implementing the changes each day.
Be reasonable about your planning and implementation of these principles. While “don’t let excuses stand in the way” is a primary Kaizen principle, you need to be realistic.
If achieving a 1% change every day isn’t possible, then you need to think about what level of progress and frequency is feasible.
Progression needs to be attainable!
As you’re compiling your list of possible marginal gains, it’s crucial to prioritize your attention on the 20% of tasks that will create 80% of the results.
The challenge is being able to differentiate between the two. How do you know if a task is vital or not?
The answer lies with your data.
If you apply the 80-20 principle to your campaign metrics, you will start to identify the areas of your campaign that are vital.
There are several different ways you can apply this rule to your PPC data. For example:
Your goal for this step is to look at these vital few performance indicators and use them to shape your knowledge of the best areas of your campaigns.
Then, you can use these insights to locate the marginal gains with the best opportunities.
It’s worth mentioning that the 80-20 ratio doesn’t have to be exact. As long as you’re identifying the few keywords, locations, landing pages, etc. that are yielding the majority of your results, then you’re applying the 80-20 rule.
As time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to find areas to improve, especially tasks that land in the ‘vital few’ category.
This is a good sign; it means you’re successfully patching all of the holes in your PPC campaigns. That said, it isn’t an excuse to slack on your dedication to building your accumulative advantage.
Similarly, some PPC marketers become too routine with their improvement methods, even with the 1% improvement principle. They continue to turn over the same rocks and explore the same avenues for marginal gains.
Perhaps, it is difficult for them to think outside the box.
These PPC marketers may even make the mistake of thinking that there are no more opportunities for improvement to be made.
There are always going to be more places to improve. Just because there are no obvious opportunities left, doesn’t mean that your goal is reached. PPC is so fluid and dynamic that there really is no such thing as a flawless account.
So, how do you identify these obscure marginal gains, especially when the obvious and direct opportunities have been taken care of?
There are two ways to go about this.
The first is to look for new relationships and opportunities manually. This path involves a lot of guesswork, testing, and evaluating to determine which adjustments are leading to progress, and which are detracting from it.
Not only is this incredibly time consuming, but also your daily 1% progress may start feeling like it is moving one step back with every step forward.
The second and more effective option is to use data analytics.
This final section will look at PPC Signal and how this data analytics tool makes it fast and efficient to find opportunities for improvement.
PPC Signal is a data analytics tool designed to alleviate many of the problems and pain points that face PPC marketers, particularly in the management of their campaigns.
PPC marketers face several challenges, some of which we’ve described already. To summarize, managing campaigns is very complex and puts a significant strain on time and staff resources.
By marrying human experience and know-how with data analytics and insights, this otherwise painstaking process can be simplified.
Using advanced AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities, PPC Signal quickly and efficiently combs PPC data and brings noteworthy alerts to the attention of the account owner.
These alerts are divided into opportunities and risks.
Opportunities are identified when there are actions that a PPC manager can take to potentially create a positive change.
Risks, on the other hand, occur when a PPC manager’s inactivity on an issue would result a decline in campaign performance.
A PPC manager can scan all of the alerts the PPC Signal returns and decide which they want to focus on first.
PPC Signal dramatically reduces the time and effort required to find ways to improve campaigns and unlock new opportunities for gains.
You absolutely need to know what is going on in your campaigns. It’s essential to be competitive in the PPC field.
That said, you don’t want campaign management to consume all of your time and attention. When you’re working on your own or with only a small team, managing your campaigns can easily become the needy child that always wants attention.
PPC Signal makes management more efficient by helping you hone in on the right areas of concern or opportunity. This is another big challenge for PPC managers.
While manually exploring and experimenting with different changes is possible, mistakes will cost you. Thus, it isn’t efficient or cost-effective.
Knowing what to do next is a necessary success factor in PPC. With PPC Signal, you always have the next steps to improve your campaign.
PPC Signal is founded on this belief of continuous and accumulative improvements. Every manager quickly runs out of smoking guns or major campaign issues to resolve. Then, success has to come from an unending stream of small, positive changes.
The alerts that PPC Signals returns are essentially a list of marginal gains that can be pursued. It’s up to you to choose which alerts will provide the best value.
Alerts are triggered when a shift, trend, outlier, or other anomaly occurs. You can view alerts at an hourly or daily granularity. The daily option is a great means of finding sources of daily improvements.
The power of PPC Signal doesn’t end at just identifying potential anomalies. It also provides information on what caused the trigger, how it will impact your campaign, and more, no matter if it is at the campaign, ad group or keyword level.
Without PPC Signal, identifying these areas of improvement is like finding a needle in a haystack. Even the most seasoned PPC professional can’t discover the complex relationships and changes that PPC Signal returns.
PPC Signal helps you locate both minor and critical marginal gains. Again, this is where the conversation of vital few versus useful many comes up.
While you certainly want to prioritize the vital changes, all of the alerts returned will help steer your campaigns in the right direction. Remember, you want every aspect of your campaigns performing well because this creates a cumulative improvement.
Sometimes, it isn’t about finding gains, but detecting possible risks and preventing those possible shortcomings. PPC Signal issues early warning signs when it detects a serious risk factor in your PPC marketing efforts.
It’s like having the check engine light in your car. The moment it goes on, you know that you need to have something serviced. The early warning indicator will help you identify significant risks quickly and more accurately.
It’s a great combination of machine and human. PPC Signal helps automate the process of identifying risks and opportunities, while PPC managers use their experience and expertise to choose the alerts that showcase the most promise.
The results of this combination are marginal gains that can be continuously accumulated.
Successful PPC management is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s crucial to adopt the slow-and-steady plus continuous improvement approach.
It’s time to forget about setting lofty goals that you’ll try tirelessly to reach and without any success.
Instead, simply focus on progress. Specifically, focus on acquiring marginal gains that lead to a 1% improvement each day.
Over time, these small goals and incremental changes will lead to massive, impactful progress.
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