The changing nature of Goals

It occurred to me the other day that campaign goals are much like goals in life. If you don’t pay attention to the overall goal you can get lost in the noise. For example, as the pandemic struck I decided to say “at the end of this I will have accomplished 3 things I had been putting off.”  The idea was to come out stronger and to use the added downtime wisely.

In the days that followed, I made a list of 3 things that I wanted to do: take a course on Google Sheets, build a website and draw more. Looking at that list yesterday I noticed it had grown to more than 10 things! The creep was noticeable as I added new items while going through my daily life. Don’t get me wrong, it's not that I don’t want to do these things.  I was just reminded that when managing a programmatic (or social/search) campaign you often start with a very tangible idea of what you’d like to accomplish. For this campaign, I’d like to have a CPA under 2.00 USD. 

That’s a great start! But as the campaign runs it is important to keep an eye on the overall goal and not get lost in the secondary metrics that oftentimes can be handled by algorithms. My advice on this is to set a cadence to review secondary metrics and always look at them in the context of the larger primary goal.  For example, if you decide to take down your frequency to obtain better reach make sure that you monitor spikes in CPA closely for the next few days. This should help mitigate unwarranted consequences. It might also help to run a small test on a bundle of sites that you think might be the biggest culprits of frequency overage.

In campaigns it seems easy to set parameters that can help in limiting goal creep but how do you do this in life.  For me, I have a new rule. I call it 3+ and basically it means that only 3 goals at a time followed by a bench of secondary goals that get added as others get accomplished. An easy way to manage the goals and keep a list of accomplishments for the future.