Categories
The answer to the title question is obvious. You don’t need beyond a middle school mathematics class to know that a 10X number is way more than 10% of that number.
The part of the equation that eludes most marketers is how to actualize 10X ROI (return on investment) in PPC (pay per click) campaigns. The difference between a 10% and a 10X increase boils down to adopting an exponential way of thinking, instead of an incremental mindset.
More specifically, it is about identifying when and where the breeding ground for exponential growth exists. If you can predict the moment that your growth is about to explode, you can shift out of your linear-thinking gear and into the exponential one.
This discussion will compare and contrast exponential and incremental growth and how PPC managers need to utilize both mentalities to produce a winning marketing strategy.
Both incremental and exponential thinking will deliver results. It’s about progress, timing, and putting in the effort. No matter what your mindset is, if you’re not pushing your campaigns to perform, then you won’t witness that upwards progress.
Continuous effort – that’s the name of the game.
When you commit the time to improve your PPC efforts little by little, nonstop, growth is guaranteed. At first, this may seem like incremental growth, but, over time, you’ll start to see exponential returns.
In this respect, these two ways of thinking are interconnected. Marketers need those small, incremental wins to produce exponential growth at later stages.
Improvements to your PPC campaigns are synergistic. This means that they don’t just add up but build upon one another. Imagine that you and a colleague worked on the same project independently. The results would be less than if you worked together. Thus, 1 + 1 does not always equal 2. Sometimes, 1 + 1 is greater than 2.
The similarities between these two mindsets help shed some light on how they are different. In the early phases, incremental and exponential thinking start on very similar courses. The incremental mindset is great in the short-term when you want immediate results, but it is outperformed by the exponential approach the longer time goes on.
When a child is given a choice of $1 each day for a month (linear growth), or a small amount, like a penny, but it doubles each day (exponential growth), chances are most children will pick the first option.
Why? Because the child doesn’t think exponentially or long-term. The idea of waiting for that penny to double each day, while they could immediately have a dollar today is too tempting. The math, however, is well in favor of the exponential path. By day 12, you really begin to see the exponential path outperform the incremental one.
For the first 11 days, the incremental gains are better. Then, exponential rockets past, as represented in the table below.
This accurately depicts the differences between incremental and exponential thinking, particularly in how they produce business results. Growth starts slow before snowballing in the later phases of development.
The best way to describe this difference is to think of each approach as a road. Incremental thinking is a straight path will clear visibility. In the above example, the child knows how much money they will have by the end of the month, if s/he chooses a dollar each day.
Exponential thinking, on the other hand, is a road with an upward curve. You can’t always see what’s around the bend or know how steep the curve is.
This analogy provides insight into why incremental thinking is often the fallback way of thinking for marketers. Incremental progress is safe and easy to measure, while exponential thinking is less intuitive.
One way that marketing professionals distinguish incremental from exponential thinking is their objectives. The focus of incremental thinking is to improve or make something better. Exponential thinking, on the other hand, is about creating something different.
PPC managers need both of these objectives to be successful.
Human beings are hardwired to think in terms of incremental progress. It’s a linear mindset; you leave point A to arrive at point B. If the journey takes an hour, then the expectation is that you’ll be halfway there by the 30-minute mark.
The problem is that business growth doesn’t happen incrementally. Your growth trend line is not a straight line, but a curve. Thus, marketers need to try and ignore their natural tendencies to think in the short-term.
It isn’t easy. Waiting for a growth explosion that you can’t see around the bend can be extremely challenging.
For example, if you’ve set a year-end goal of acquiring 100 new customers through PPC marketing, the expectation is that you’ll have around 50 customers by mid-year.
Point A to B, remember?
When marketers think in terms of incremental growth, they begin to worry when the time spent is not aligned with the progress achieved. They will probably have less than 50 customers by mid-year. This can cause PPC professionals to mismanage their campaigns and keywords.
They start shuffling their campaigns and making radical changes to create immediate results. These short-term strategies don’t have the scalability and long-term potency that successful PPC marketing requires.
Short-term changes might make you look and feel good now, but there will come a time when the competition jets past you on the exponential growth superhighway.
A real-world example to demonstrate this is to think about constructing a jigsaw puzzle. The incremental thinker would immediately begin fitting pieces together and looking for matches.
Exponential puzzlers, on the other hand, take the time to find all of the pieces that form the border and then organize the remaining half-hour by colors and distinguishing characteristics.
This takes a lot of time and preparation. In the very early stages, the incremental thinker will have more pieces finished on the table. Thus, it will appear that the amount of time spent aligns with the progress achieved.
However, the patience and preparation of the exponential puzzler will quickly pay off. While they may have had 0 pieces on the table in the first half-hour, suddenly they’ll begin piecing the picture together faster and faster.
By the end, the incremental puzzler will still have a scattered puzzle, while the exponential thinker will have the finished product. Why? Because incrementally putting individual pieces together doesn’t have the capability to snowball.
The gap between the incremental and exponential lines is the danger zone for exponential success. This is the period when it is hardest to justify exponential growth. It’s also when you’ll start facing pressures from stakeholders and other concerned parties.
Waiting for results that are somewhere around the corner is not always possible when clients or stakeholders are asking for results. Again, there is an expectation that the progress will be on-par with the time spent.
With exponential growth, you may only be 15% of your way to the goal at the midpoint of the project. You’re not at the bend of the curve where progress really takes off. Those stakeholders begin asking, “When are we going to see results?”
The businesses that are progressive enough to stay the course on their strategies will end the year with the same stakeholders baffled by how much progress was made.
But, when businesses become impatient with slow progress, they abandon their exponential thinking and revert to their natural, incremental inclination.
For PPC managers, this can result in stagnant campaigns that don’t achieve the same level of results as your competition. You may win today’s battle, but you’ll ultimately lose the PPC war when your competitor’s long-term strategies start blossoming into exponential growth.
A lot of managers pick strategies that are safe and less likely to fail. In doing so, they ignore the most efficient routes. As Pete Palmer, an American sports statistician, puts it, “The pain of looking bad is worse than the gain of making the best move.”
It is this fear, coupled with impatience, which causes many managers to ignore the potential yields of a long-term, exponential PPC strategy.
You need to cultivate an exponential mindset. It isn’t just about developing strategies with exponential growth in mind. Instead, you need to think and plan exponentially.
The key is to make your exponential voice louder than your incremental hardwiring. Otherwise, you may slip into your natural, incremental tendencies without realizing it. This causes PPC managers to create campaigns and strategies that they think are built to achieve exponential returns, but are actually linear in nature.
An exponential mindset starts at the very core of your business and its mission statement. If you look at some of the top companies in the world, like Apple, Facebook, Google, Airbnb, and others, they use a massive transformative purpose (MTP) as part of their tagline or mission statement.
MTP is more impactful than a traditional mission statement. It is designed to be an aspirational tagline that the organization and its staff can use to encourage innovation and strive beyond what is expected of them.
Google’s MTP, for example, is to “Organize the world’s information.” Facebook uses “Make the world more open and connected.” Again, exponential thinking is less about being better and more about being different. This is best represented by Apple’s simple slogan of “Think differently.”
The ambiguity of the MTP statement allows for out-of-the-box thinking, which often leads to exponential growth potential. The MTP also provides direction and focus when there isn’t any.
Again, the exponential path is not always clear and direct. When the focus of your company is created from an exponential mindset, it is easier to guide people and create an organization that is built for long-term success.
In other words, a massive transformative purpose instills exponential thinking from day one and ensures that you remain comfortable and patient during periods of uncertainty.
As mentioned earlier, the gap between exponential and incremental thinking in the early stages of development is one of the most crucial stretches of times. It’s when your exponential mindset is most in jeopardy of being ignored or replaced with a new, short-term direction.
There are a few tactics you can implement to protect your exponential mindset from distraction.
As mentioned earlier, adopting an exponential mindset is about thinking differently, not just making things better. And, thinking differently isn’t just a matter of creating more impressive growth, although that’s certainly a great benefit.
Thinking differently in the PPC world is a necessity and an increasing expectation of the consumers you’re hoping to attract with your ads. If you can’t satisfy this expectation, your PPC efforts will be at risk.
Here is the situation: there are more and more marketers leveraging PPC ads than ever before, yet the real estate for ad placements is staying the same. On a Google SERP, for example, there are only four ad spots available on the top.
All of this increased competition means it is becoming more and more challenging to place ads. Moreover, ad costs and CPC rates are getting higher and higher. If you’re relying on dated, traditional ad messages and tactics, these costs are going to continue to grow and require you to work harder to succeed.
With an out-of-the-box, exponential mindset, thinking differently is at the foundation of all of your strategies. It’s even built into your MTP! This makes it more natural to produce ad messages and campaigns that actually stand in this ultra-competitive environment and deliver results.
In turn, this improves clickthrough rates and helps keep these rising costs low. So, while your competitors are trudging along the traditional pathway and spending more for fewer returns, you’ll be having the opposite experience.
This is perhaps the best way to maintain an exponential course. You need to demonstrate the changing PPC environment and make it clear that adapting to a long-term, exponential growth pattern is a necessity for your survival in the market.
It’s about meeting the demands of today’s consumers and channels.
Conveying the situation to stakeholders and colleagues is a vital first step. However, you still want to be able to provide some semblance of evidence to support and justify your exponential journey.
With linear thinking, you can predict an estimated arrival time because the path is straight and visible. Again, it’s the idea of leaving A and arriving at B. If you anticipate that the journey takes an hour, then you know when your goal will be reached.
Remember the example of the child with a choice between earning one dollar a day for a month, or earning an amount that starts at $0.01, but doubles with each day? Incrementally, the child leaves point A with $0, and knows he/she will arrive at point B with $30. It’s easy to measure.
The exponential curve, on the other hand, is not so visible. You can roughly predict when growth will start to build, but the real challenge is anticipating how rapid that growth will build.
This is where data becomes your biggest ally. While exponential growth is harder to track and predict than incremental thinking, it isn’t impossible. The real trick is understanding the limitations in predicting exponential growth and avoiding the pitfalls.
Predicting exponential results and, more importantly, showcasing those results to others, isn’t about predicting the destination, but rather setting different milestones along the journey.
Incremental: “The goal is to reach the destination by May.”
Exponential: “The goal is to grow by X% in this time period.”
These milestones provide proof of the concept that your progress, however slow, is on target. The truth is that you can’t predict when your exponential growth is going to really take off.
If you make the mistake of setting an incremental-style goal and your exponential curve is further away than expected, your strategies are going to appear ineffective. In reality, they just haven’t matured yet.
It’s best to monitor your exponential progress and set short-term milestones along the journey.
Despite your best efforts in setting milestones and conveying short-term results to stakeholders and other parties, there are still going to be detractors that demand more progress and question your results.
Critics are good; detractors can be toxic.
When these individuals are left unchecked, they spread their malcontent to others. You aren’t only letting them doubt your long-term PPC strategy; you’re also allowing them to detract from the vision and purpose of your company, as outlined in your MTP.
You have to work extra hard at getting them on board with a long-term strategy.
The first option is to provide them with real-world applications of exponential growth. Perhaps the most common example is to think in terms of compounding interest.
Let’s say you invested $1,000 at 3% interest a year. In the first year, your interest would be $30. If the interest grew incrementally, then you could calculate your interest as $1,000 + ($30 x t), where t is the number of years. This is known as simple interest.
Compounding interest, on the other hand, grows exponentially. That 3% interest doesn’t just affect the initial investment, but all of the accumulated interest over the years. Thus, the math is a little more complex.
A = P ( 1 + r / n ) ^ nt
where …
After five years, the two equations have very similar results. Incremental interest would equal $1,150; while exponential would be $1,159.27. It’s only a slight edge in favor of exponential growth.
But, if we look at 25 years down the road, the difference is $1,750 (incremental) versus $2,093.78. A much more noticeable margin.
A less mathematical example that accurately represents exponential growth’s superiority over incremental thinking is folding versus stacking paper. If you had to stack single pieces of paper (incremental growth) until you reached the moon, you’d be at it for your entire lifetime.
However, if you folded a single piece of paper in half (exponential growth) over and over again, you’d only have to make 42 folds before that paper was thick enough to touch the moon’s surface.
It’s a staggering difference.
There are thousands of case studies, business examples and non-business examples of groups using an out-of-the-box mentality and going against traditions to achieve tremendous results.
Here are some of the greatest hits when it comes to examples of out-of-the-box thinking leading to exponential growth.
Another easy-to-understand example is to think in terms of a viral social media post. At first, it is only the originator’s followers that see it. Then, a few of those individuals share it to their pages, thereby expanding the reach. Then, more people share it and the cycle continues until the content reaches almost every screen.
There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon as well:
It is the small drops in the bucket until the bucket overflows.
The snowballing nature of exponential growth makes it extremely difficult to plan for. Even if you can accurately predict when your exponential curve begins, it’s impossible to know how steep it is.
Essentially, you’re trying to plan for a party, but you have little-to-no idea where or when it will be, nor how many guests are attending. The unknown is not a comfortable place to be, which is precisely why so many marketers subconsciously hit the panic button and slip into the more-comfortable incremental pattern.
Remember, you’re not immune to the same questions and concerns as your stakeholders. This means that you’re equally at risk for falling victim to the gap between incremental and exponential growth lines.
The other problem is that you need incremental improvements to unlock the accelerated returns that make exponential growth so explosive and impactful. It’s a walk on the tightrope between thinking exponentially in the long-term, while still improving at an incremental pace in the short-term.
This creates a paradoxical situation that is hard to navigate. It can often feel like you’re walking the exponential trend line, yet you never achieve that promise of explosive growth. That’s because you’ve switched back to the more natural, incremental focus without realizing it.
How can you separate the two?
Arguably the best analogy is to think of it in terms of a large display of dominoes. Each domino is an incremental action in an exponential show. It’s up to you to choose how to arrange those individual steps and how the dominoes will fall to ultimately produce a beautiful, exponential sequence.
Once you lose the foresight to know how to prioritize your incremental improvements, you’re probably back to the 10% way of thinking.
Once your exponential curve starts propelling growth into the upper stratosphere, you’ll have weathered the uncertain storm, but you’re still not out of the troubled waters. When the exponential growth starts to snowball, it can be both exciting and terrifying at the same time.
You’re going to be growing at a rate faster than you’re used to, perhaps even quicker than you’re capable of handling. As this growth starts to explode, your inclination is to control and add more resources to the mix.
This is the incremental thought process that is creeping up again. That’s right, even when you are steadily riding the upward curve; there is still a risk of letting incremental thinking get in the way.
There are two drawbacks to incrementally approaching the resource gap.
First, the incremental mindset believes that sustaining this new growth requires a proportional increase in resources and inputs. But, it isn’t a 1:1 ratio. You don’t need 10X more inputs to achieve or sustain 10X more outputs.
Adding more people and throwing more resources at the exponential whirlwind is necessary, but it can also be a detriment when you add too much at once. Like putting too much wood on a fire, it can choke the flames.
This leads to the second drawback. When your exponential growth really starts to snowball, you won’t be able to put resources together fast enough to match your accelerated growth. And, trying to put hardware, staff and other materials in place ahead of time is too costly.
The exponential way of thinking aims to optimize resources so that even a meager increase in inputs still supports your 10X climb in outputs.
It’s about building a company with scalability in mind. Having partnerships, technology and other resources in place that can quickly scale to meet demands will allow you to meet your growth head-on.
Planning for the long-term is a vital part of the exponential mindset.
The technology and tools that you invest in are critical to a successful exponential journey. You want to find tools that are both scalable and help facilitate your climb to that upwards bend in performance.
When it comes to PPC management, there is no shortage of solutions and platforms available. It’s always nice to have options. That said, navigating the abundance of possible technologies and tools and coming out with only the options that provide the best fit for your needs and exponential mindset is not easy.
How do you select the right tools?
There are four pillars of exponential thinking that you can use to find the right tools.
When you can find a PPC management solution that fits these criteria, then you know you have a tool that is going the distance with your growth and fuels that upwards curve.
When it comes to technology that facilitates exponential growth, there is arguably no better solution than PPC Signal.
Using AI technology, PPC Signal automatically monitors and analyzes your PPC data for noteworthy changes and then alerts you to these items. These changes are essential in helping your campaigns grow exponentially.
PPC Signal effortlessly achieves all four pillars of an excellent exponential growth tool. Plus, it provides data-born improvements that you can show to stakeholders that need to see evidence of progress.
It’s dangerous to get trapped into an exclusively incremental thought process. That said, both incremental and exponential mindsets are necessary for success. Those small, gradual steps are crucial building blocks that birth the more substantial and exponential changes.
One of the severe drawbacks of incremental progress is its short-term and narrow focus. It can be very challenging to replicate these small wins continuously. This creates growth that is staggered and often unsustainable.
The advantage of PPC Signal is that it offers the opportunity to make incremental progress routine, which is precisely what PPC marketers need to unlock the power of exponential growth. Essentially, the alerts that PPC Signal provides are a never-ending fuel line of new ideas and areas of potential improvement.
This is the long-term progress that continues to grow and grow with each day. Even a small 1% increase in performance a day can yield a 3,778% change by the end of the year. And, you don’t have to sink your time, human capital, and other valuable (and potentially limited) resources into looking for these opportunities.
PPC Signal automatically does the work for you.
One of the other common pitfalls of the incremental thought process is that it can be narrow in focus. Businesses make the mistake of deciding on a few key targets and then driving all of their attention and energy towards these areas.
This is commonly referred to as the Pareto Principle or the 80-20 rule. This rule states that approximately 80% of your results will come from only 20% of your activities. It isn’t a harmful approach, but it also isn’t a long-term strategy.
Yes, you absolutely should prioritize some tasks over others. The upper percentile of functions that produce the majority of your results is known as the vital few. These are the parts of your PPC campaigns that you must obsess over because they align with your goals.
However, you can’t entirely neglect the other 80% of tasks because they still represent relevant and useful parts of your strategy that occasionally need some attention. Plus, there will come a time when those vital few tasks are so well managed and optimized that additional efforts produce minuscule returns. Thus, you need to turn your attention to the peripheral metrics that still need work.
PPC Signal doesn’t discriminate with its alerts. You’ll discover areas of improvement across the board and at all levels (account, campaign, ad group, keyword, targeting, dayparting, etc.). This means identifying tasks in both the 20% vital few and the 80% useful many that need attention.
Your competitors are equally aware of prioritizing tasks to focus on the vital few 20%. They may even be focusing on the same keywords, the same audiences, and the same objectives as your business. In turn, this weakens the potential for an exponential competitive edge to be earned through these vital few activities.
Exponential success is about being different. If you’re only focused on the same 20% of tasks as your competitors, then you are competitive, but not different. You need to shift beyond the competition and find other avenues to secure a that competitive edge.
This is where the useful many tasks become a rich opportunity. The reason that so many PPC managers neglect these opportunities is not necessarily because they don’t see the value. Rather, it is because optimizing for the 80% of useful many tasks is a monumental undertaking.
It’s hard enough securing those vital few opportunities. Now, think about exerting 4X more effort for only a quarter of the gain. Doesn’t sound that appealing right? Yet, that is what’s necessary to achieve that invaluable competitive edge.
By automatically alerting you of both useful and vital tasks, PPC Signal substantially simplifies this otherwise daunting task. You’ll find useful areas of improvement that competitors won’t be able to capitalize on, thereby extending your edge over your rivals.
PPC Signal automates much of the discovery process when it comes to identifying changes and finding areas that need attention in your accounts. As a PPC manager, it is still your job to decide where your priorities are and what alerts require action first.
It’s a great partnership of AI-based automation and human management.
The tool looks at both your historical account data and your recent performance to find the most significant changes that need attention. Alerts are categorized as either an opportunity or a risk. Opportunities mean that action could produce a positive result, while risks suggest that inactivity could create a negative result.
You can filter your PPC Signal alerts using the various settings and sliders available in the tool. These adjustments allow marketers to examine PPC data from many different angles to find the noteworthy changes on your account that really matter.
For example, you can select a specific campaign, ad group, or keyword to investigate. Alternatively, you can filter by device type, location, date, time of day, and even a particular metric. Users can also adjust how significant a trend in performance needs to be in order to generate an alert.
In short, PPC Signal allows you to focus on the data that matters most to you and your goals at the time and find changes that are noteworthy by your standards.
Your data, your alerts.
Out-of-the-box thinking is a pillar of the exponential mindset. PPC Signal is not like Google Keyword Planner, or another solution commonly found in the PPC manager’s toolbox. It’s different – and different is good.
PPC Signal offers an approach that is unlike what most of your competitors are using. With this benefit, there comes a new way to measure progress.
When stakeholders ask for a progress report, you have a list of past risks that have been avoided, opportunities that have been seized, and growth that has been gained. Better yet, you know that you have been proactively improving your PPC strategies every day, which means the exponential boom is drawing closer and closer.
You’ll have ample evidence to ward off even the strictest scrutiny from others. Plus, as you become more accustomed to receiving, analyzing, and taking action on alerts, your understanding of where your PPC growth comes from will also increase exponentially. This provides unobstructed visibility of where the curve is on the road and how steep the curve is.
Change and improvement need to be routine. PPC Signal not only makes this so, but acting on alerts in the tool becomes almost infectious. Making changes will become part of your daily marketing culture.
That said, you can improve at your own pace. This benefit makes the tool incredibly scalable. Whether you want to address five alerts a day, or fifty, is entirely up to you and your team.
As you enter into the curve and performance begins snowballing, you may decide to increase the energy you put towards PPC Signal, which doesn’t require any additional resources except the time it takes to analyze and act on each alert.
Having solutions that are quickly scaled like this to meet the explosion of your exponential growth is crucial for PPC success.
It can be extremely hard to differentiate between incremental and exponential mindsets because both are required to be successful. In other words, achieving 10X your ROI is not easy. But, that’s exactly why your competitors only see 10% returns.
PPC managers that are able to stay patient, put in the effort, think differently, and utilize the right tools will be on the path towards exponential growth and success.
How much did you enjoy this article?
We will help your ad reach the right person, at the right time
Actionable insights discovered for you. Now you can do more in less time.
PPCexpo Keyword Planner will help you align your keywords with the customers’ intent.
Frequent audits will help you optimize your PPC campaign for success.
Visualizations give you the ability to instantly grasp the insights hidden in your numbers.
Experience the new revolution in reporting … click your way to insights, don’t scroll.
Calculate the number of combinations in your PPC campaign. It may surprise you.
Related articles
A landing page is a web page designed to drive specific actions. Learn the essentials of creating high-converting landing pages in our guide.
ROAS calculation can help you evaluate every PPC campaign's performance so that you know which of your campaigns are converting the best.
Discover the marketing lifecycle stages and how they shape customer relationships. You’ll understand their role in driving customer engagement and retention.
