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If you want reward training to be effective, you have to know when, and when not, to reward your dog.

A lot of people think that you should reward your dog every time they do what you ask, but actually, doing so is incredibly unmotivating for your dog. It teaches them that your standards are low and there's no urgency. They’ll learn that they will get rewarded no matter how slow or sloppy their responses.

If you want your dog's behavior to improve you need to impose quality standards. Whenever you ask your dog to do something, you should evaluate not only whether they did it, but also, how well they did it.

How quickly? How accurately? And how many times did you have to ask? Did you have to get closer to your dog, or use a hand-signal or lure? Were there distractions? Were they at a distance? Was the skill difficult? Did it last a long time?

If your dog does something that's particularly hard, or they performed a task particularly well, that's worth an extra special reward. If your dog does a particularly good job, you have to let them know.

On the other hand, if your dog does what you ask, but it took a long time, or a lot of work from you, or their response was below average then, obviously they don’t deserve a jackpot! On the contrary, limit your reward to tepid praise. Or, don’t offer a reward at all.

You see, not getting a reward can be a very powerful learning experience.

Now, this can be a lot to think about. There are a lot of factors you could consider when evaluating your dog's performances. For some training sessions you might want to focus on speed, in other sessions, you might focus on precision, or distractions, or distance, or some combination. You can even focus on subjective aspects. How cute was the performance? How much style or grace did your dog exhibit?

The point is, you should evaluate your dog’s performance and try to reward appropriately.

Generally speaking, just try to do the following:

1. Ignore, or weakly praise any performances that are below-average.

2. Only reward your dog for above-average performances, with better rewards for better performances

Give your dog the very best rewards for the very best performances. When they really impress you, give your dog a jackpot — shower them with delightful praise, cuddles, toys, games, walks, or whatever it is they love. Jackpots will make a big impression on your dog and have a long and lasting positive influence on your dog's motivation and behavior. 

Make a list of everything that you can use to reward your dog — praise, petting, kibble, enhanced kibble, chewtoys, bones, toys, games, activities, places, and so on. And then spend a few minutes trying to rank-order them in terms of what your dog likes most.

Keep in mind that your dog’s favorites may be different in different situations. Surrounded by exciting stimuli, the most potent reward might be the freedom to explore or engage with the environment. If you can safely make use of a distracting stimulus, it's often the most powerful reward.

Finally, if you really want to motivate your dog, the best thing you can do is gamify your rewards. 

Use a stopwatch and notepad to keep track of your dog's longest stays and fastest recalls. Use a tape measure to keep track of your dog's greatest-distance position changes, or longest distance walked on-leash without pulling. This will allow you to get a much better idea of what their average performances actually are. Also, you'll know when your dog sets a new personal best, at which point you definitely want to celebrate with your dog and offer a jackpot! 

You can even mount a whiteboard where you can keep track of their best performances.

By measuring and tracking their performances you can see their progress.

If there are multiple people in your household, you can have a competition to see which person is able to get the best performances out of your dog, thereby earning a place on the leaderboard.

Or have your dog compete against another dog and only the fastest dog gets the reward. There's nothing so motivating to a dog as seeing another dog get the reward that they wanted for themselves.

Or best of all, get together a bunch of your and your dog’s friends and compete in K9 Games like doggy dash, musical chairs, or chewtoy retrieves.

Games are so cool because they combine quantification and fun, motivating everyone to do their best, and making it possible to clearly measure and appropriately reward performance.