Understanding The 20/80 Rule

The 20/80 Rule isn’t really a rule, but actually a truth that most new affiliates don’t even realize exists.  By understanding this “rule” you’ll be able to know what to get rid of and what to keep!  It will help you with that overwhelming feeling you get when you have 800 adgroups that you’re trying to split test.

So what exactly am I talking about?

80% of your affiliate income will come from 20% of your work.  This means 80% of your work will in essence be no good.  80% of your keywords will not need to be focused on which allows you to focus on the 20% that will bring in the majority of your income.

Let’s say you launch a campaign with 10,000 keywords.  Once you split up your keywords into your adgroups, you’ll then upload them into either Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or Microsoft Adcenter.  Within a week or two of running a campaign, I would have ~8,000 of those keywords gone!

This is how super affiliates quickly get their CTR up and keep it up and also how they are able to manage campaigns easily.  You can’t be afraid to get rid of keywords that aren’t converting or are but producing too low of a CTR.

I’ve counseled numerous affiliates on this matter!  Too many affiliates are afraid that if they delete keywords or adgroups from their campaign then they may miss out on sales or conversions, when in fact, the truth is they most likely are losing out on tons of conversions and leads because they aren’t deleting these “bad” keywords.

By keeping keywords that aren’t performing great in your campaign you risk the chance of it having an effect on your entire campaign.  Keywords that receive tons of impressions but hardly any clicks ends up lowering your overall CTR which can effect your super performing keywords and stop you from receiving the twice as many leads from them.

Keywords that are receiving tons of clicks but aren’t converting are again going to effect your bottom line and your ROI.  This is why it is imperative that you are tracking at the keyword level and making sure you are getting rid of keywords that are no good instead of trying to hang on to them.

Conclusion:

I know this isn’t the best post on this blog, and it’s defintely not the best written, I’ve reread it now about 10 times as it’s been sitting in my drafts, but the bottom line is, it’s very important not to try to hang on to keywords that can and WILL sabatoge your entire campaign!  While this might not be the best written post I’ve done, it’s a very important subject that you need to remember when tuning your campaigns!

If you have anything to add to this, I’d love to hear it in the comments below.

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