Which ad really made him buy? Are You sure?-the CXL Growth Marketing minidegree REVIEW(part 4)

4 years ago, when I was in high school, I had a whole course about Excel. It was 6 weeks long and 3 X 75 min per week.

I learned nothing about the topic.

I understood precisely nothing in the class, the teacher herself probably didn’t know much about excel. Or at least didn’t use it on a day to day basis.

And as much as I tried to learn it, I still understood precisely nothing.

This week I completed the Excel for marketers course in CXL Growth Marketing minidegree program.

And within 3.5 hours of content + my own experiment hours.

I learned more about Excel than I had ever before.

And to be frank, I fell in love with it.
I can’t wait to start making graphs and pivot tables in Excel and really use it for my work. And that wasn’t even the highlight of the week.

This is how good the CXL courses are.

They make everything so simple and fun to learn. They give you the basics or the basics of advanced skills and show you what is possible.

I haven’t felt so motivated in a long time.

I tackled something I thought I would hate.

But Excel wasn’t the only topic I covered.

Actually, I covered a lot of them: Attribution, Landing page optimization, Copywriting/product messaging, and Google Analytics intermediate.

But in this post, I want to talk the most about attribution.

What is attribution?

Basically, from fool to a fool, it is how you divide your marketing credits to different channels.

These days marketing is omnipresent. We see something on Facebook, then we search for it in google.

Then we bookmark it and revisit it, and then they retarget us on Youtube and so on and so on.

But when you finally make that purchase — which source gets the credit.

Your last visit?

But maybe you decided to purchase when you saw that display ad on youtube. And then three days later you went to the website and made the purchase.

And in statistics, the display ad shows that it brought in zero conversions.

But in reality, it kept the brand on top of your mind.
This is what attribution is.

It is making sense of how different channels affect you and how many dollars they bring in.

I am sort of an omnipresence nerd.

I love how, from time to time, brands occupy everything I see and do online.

I love brands which build their own worlds and suck people into them.

And I know if done correctly they can bring in massive results, but as always it is hard to measure how much effect something had.

Maybe the thing that helped you with converting was the meme they shared on the FB page.

In the attribution course, I heard that the industry average for e-com stores is 4 touchpoints before making the purchase.

There are different attribution models.

By default, Google Analytics uses last non-direct hit model.

Which means that for example when you use the default GA attribution time frame of 6 months then when a person enters your site via Google search and then 4 months later comes directly to your site and purchases, Google search still gets the credit.

In this attribution course, we covered a lot of these topics around attribution. And the positive and negative sides of different ones.

There are first-click attribution model, last-click attribution model and a few well-known ones more.

In GA Intermediate course, we explored GA Multi-Channel reports where the built-in attribution models can be found.

The thing with GA and especially attribution models in them is you can’t take them word for word.

It is an excellent tool for comparing different channels to each other.

Perhaps one channel works the best as the first interaction point.
Maybe another one is the best as a closer, but you have to look at all of them in the context of each other.

But what I got to know in the Attribution course was that the ideal model/solution would be that You create your own machine learning attribution model.

Hopefully, that way, you can also take into account all the touchpoints which don’t drive visits to the website, but still remind you to the customer and help you develop your relationship — social media content, billboards, traditional media.

When you have your own attribution Jarvis, you should also have an attribution team — a team of data scientists and marketers who know how to make the most of it.

This is where supposedly a lot of companies this day screw up, they don’t take that into account.

They just want a silver bullet, but actually, they need a well-trained team which uses the attribution algorithm as a tool.

Sadly in this day and age, it isn’t affordable for most of the businesses.

The creating of the machine learning algorithm is expensive + hiring the people capable of making use of it is as expensive.

What I started to dream about is how to create your own advanced automated marketing — CRM databases.

To track which ads this individual saw yesterday, and what emails did he receive, which of your social accounts does he follow, when was his last order and what was it.

When you combine that system with attribution — damn — killer.
Just thinking about this kind of database system makes me tickle all over the body.

Perhaps something similar already in some sort of form already exists.

I haven’t heard of it.

Hopefully, in the future, we can measure the unmeasurable more, or at least predict how the things we do affect our customers.

Too often, branding is poorly looked upon, it is seen as a complete waste of money, but it can make your future so much easier.

When you are a well-known brand, you don’t need to write long copy to sell your products, think of Apple, Nike, etc. You don’t need to persuade so much.

You can play around with innovation more because you have an audience built.

And it is useful to put some numbers behind the unmeasurable, especially when talking to the number- focused - management.

But this omnipresence concept is actually essential to everything in marketing these days.

It is crucial for optimizing a pleasant experience, especially for the customer based on where he is in his relationship with the brand.

It affects everything: Copywriting — Landing Page optimization etc.
But about those two, I am going to write about next week.

CIAO!