The 80/20 of business

Today I got an email from Google Ads with this headline:

I laughed.

Besides the fact that it’s a hilarious example of personalization gone awry, it made me think how many people might see this and instantly go into their Google Ads account and apply the recommended changes from Google (remember: Google is incentivized to have you spend more money, regardless of if it makes you money) to get those marginal 9 more visitors.

Disregard the fact that they don’t tell you the timeline for those 9 new visitors, but is that really going to make an impact in your business?

It won’t make an impact in mine. Even over the course of a year, it’s 108 new visitors.

Here’s my traffic to my site this year to date:

Obviously this is kind of a ridiculous example (9 new visitors!), but I think it underscores a broader point:

Is the work you are focused on the work that is going to move your business forward?

The 80/20 rule is called Pareto’s (parrot-oh) Principle (Wikipedia link) and says that roughly 80% of results comes from 20% of the effort.

I’m not afraid of effort or of logging into my Google Ads account and tweaking some things, but when I expend that effort I want it to matter and to be leverage to something infinitely bigger than the effort I put in.

I’ve taken to asking myself, and would recommend that you ask it as well:

Is what I am working on now the highest leverage thing I can be working on?

If not, go do something else.