What Is SEO?

If you own a website on the internet, or you are a blogger then I guess you have probably already heard at least a little about SEO by now.

This article is intended to introduce SEO to those who are still living and doing business in 1990 and have therefore never heard about it. 

To help clear up the most dangerous misconception about the discipline of SEO for many people who have been poorly informed about it. 

And finally, it is to educate those who already have an idea of what SEO is, and wish to learn a little bit more. 

DEFINITION

Search Engine Optimization is the process of building or rebuilding your website so that it can be easily found on search engines (like Google search or Bing) when web users are looking for information that you have on the site.

It is a discipline that combines some IT skills with marketing ideas to help you make adjustments to your website (or building one from scratch) with the intention of making it easier to use and more visible to your desired audience. 

SEO is an important branch of digital marketing that serves as a good "meeting point" for the others. This is because a business' website is its most centralized source of information for outsiders. (always remember this)

Hence, SEO is best when it is taken into consideration before your website is built at all. 

Caution: perhaps the more commonly understood, but wrong definition of SEO among its unscrupulous practitioners is the claim that they can get your website to the top of Google Search results.

You need to be very careful with this because SEO cannot manipulate the search engines. There are rules and guidelines. And those who violate these rules often get punished.
Indeed, there are certain skills (especially in technical SEO) that can greatly increase your chances of ranking at the top of search results, but this is certainly not an outcome that any one can truthfully predict. 

The best thing you can do is follow the guidelines and do your best to increase your chances of getting ranked for the keywords that matter to you. But there is no use trying to manipulate the search engines. Google search is increasingly learning how to find the best web pages to show to its users. Therefore if you make your website user friendly and promote it properly to them, you are on the right path.

BENEFITS

There are many benefits of search engine optimization, but I just need to mention a few to get your mouth watering.

1. It gets your website visibility (product & brand) on most search engines (not just Google). And these search engines are accessed all over the world, millions of times daily.

2. It makes your website more friendly and easier to use by visitors, of which many of them could be your potential customer or target audience.

3. It sharpens your performance at the Zero Moment Of Truth (ZMOT). What do I mean?
When people search for your brand or (and especially) your competitor's brand online, that moment is a ZMOT - an opportunity for you to dominate your industry. This is too exciting to begin to discuss here. (call me for a consultation)

4. It will eventually make you understand your business better. It is hard to explain this to you now, but trust me, after some time of commitment to SEO, you start to know much more about your business you never knew.  

SEARCH ENGINES

For now, I don't know anything about optimization for Yandex (the main search engine used in Russia) or (the Chinese search engine), but I know that SEO for Google, Bing and Yahoo search are very similar in many ways. And since Google is by far the most popular search engine in Africa, I will be referring to that example in this post.

SEO is the branch of Search Engine Marketing that deals with organic results. 

But let me again warn that SEO cannot automatically get your website to the number 1 position on Google. 
Anyone who promises to get you to the top of Google is either a dishonest or an unskilled SEO (search engine optimizer) who will take your money, and could end up getting your website heavily penalized by Google.


Now organic results are the options that are presented to you in the larger area of Google's search page (as in the image below). This area fills MOST of the screen starting from the left to the right, and also fills most of the screen starting from bottom to the top. I say most because sometimes there are some small advertisements options on the right, and some larger ones at the top (eventhough these have a different color to distinguish them from organic results).

Anyway the reason they are called organic results is because they are presented as the NATURAL options to your particular search. People cannot pay for an organic search position, and cannot do anything that can guarantee the position there either. Which is why I said anyone who promises you the top spot is dishonest. 

However, there are some very honest and acceptable tactics that can help you greatly improve your chances of getting there - especially here in Africa (and depending on the industry you are in) where not too many of your competitors may have taken SEO seriously yet.

So Google presents those organic results as what it considers to be the most reliable and informative options that are related to the search terms you typed into Google. 

This process is handled entirely by a complex system of algorithms (robots or computer programs) that use a very complex set of rules to determine what they rank as the best organic results for each search term.  This process is still far from perfect, so you may not always find the best results on the first page. But I think Google does a much better job than any other search engine in providing the closest thing to the best results in the organic area.

SEO is also partly about making this process as easy as possible for the robots to do their job. This in turn, would make the robots like your site more, and hence give your site a better chance at a favorable position.

But at the end of the day, SEO is still more about chasing after your online audience than anything else. And it is important not to ever forget that. SEO consultants would help you develop decent strategies through keyword research and keyword aided brainstorming. Web analytics consultants would help you restrategize through analysis of your website's visitors.
But ultimately, you have to commit a decent amount of time and thinking effort to the process as well, to make it truly worthwhile and magical.

If you liked this article please be kind enough to share it on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Also drop a comment in the comment box below. And mind you, I am very open to criticism. 

Thank you.

Zero Moment Of Truth Part 2 : The Enthusiast

In my prequel to this post, I did a few introductions and tried to give you some ideas as to how important it is for you to take the Zero Moment Of Truth seriously. In this article I am going to try to guide you into thinking with a ZMOT mindset, and in to realizing how that can greatly improve your marketing efforts. 

The idea behind this second part of my post is to try to start you on a journey of becoming a ZMOT enthusiast like myself. Because by first becoming enthusiastic about the ZMOT, you would indeed learn much quicker, what you need in order to gain the necessary advantage for your business, your brand  or your product in this new digital age. 

Now some of the actual experts of this topic like Jim Lecinsky, Todd Pollack and Brian Solis have released articles and books that actually explain this concept much more indepth. 
But the dimension that I bring as a very keen enthusiast, is such that anything I write, I try my possible best to make you (the African reader) understand what we are talking about, and how you could easily bring it into reality in our environment.

1. Mobile Is A Must

One day, I was asked a question by a hopeful blogger. He asked, "Even if people want to use the internet to read and learn, the NEPA (electricity) problems in Nigeria make it so difficult for most People. So how can I find people to even read my blog?"  

So I told him that there was a relatively easy way to fix that problem. But he quickly added, "and you know that most people cannot even afford laptops or iPads".
So I said that that was even what makes my solution more of an advantage for him, if he could implement it.

"So what is this magic solution of yours"?

And I told him to have a mobile optimization plan! 

I know that may sound too simplistic, but then just try to wrap your head around the scenario that the vast majority of websites in Nigeria (I cannot say much about the rest of Africa yet) don't account for mobile users. 

And yet, from a marketer's perspective, you wonder why mobile internet is not more or less compulsory in Nigeria. 

No wonder Facebook usage in Nigeria is so phenomenal?
Because Facebook is one of only a few websites known by Nigerians to have a version that is comfortably responsive to mobile phones of different screen sizes. This point cannot be over-emphasized.

Meanwhile, the reasons why Americans and Europeans use smartphones to surf the web may be indeed very different from the reasons why Nigerians do. Nevertheless, what is certain is that smartphones have become key players in this whole global online struggle for our attention. 

Therefore if you are doing business and you wish to attract large amounts of people (whether American or Nigerian; whether for your corporate branding, or for lead generation, or for online retail) your website has to be able to communicate clearly through a mobile phone interface. Not to mention the added advantage you get as a mobile phone user can instantly make a call to your business, or at least store your phone number, when he sees your contact page on your site.

2. Social Media Re-visitation

Ever since people realized that social media networks were useful for marketing, we have been seeing people just going about dropping links and promoting stuff everywhere like crazy. 

Some of us have clearly forgotten the "social" in this whole social media thing. So we spend so much unnecessary energy dropping links all over the social sites, presuming that others are using the internet for the purpose of searching for promotional links to click on. 

ZMOT mindedness makes you a lot more creative and much more effective with your social media marketing campaigns. It opens your eyes to see what many other digital marketers don't see. It will help you remember or realize that you yourself don't go around looking for links to click on.

There is always an important trigger that gets you to click on a link. 

Zero Moment reasoning also protects you from coming into that irrational mindset of those marketers who would do anything to see their website rank on the Top of Google Search result pages; As if ranking on the Top of search automatically means that people would throw their hard earned money at your website.

A ZMOT minded marketer understands that there are more than one way to catch a fish. 
For example, I can show you a nifty way of using a combination of Facebook, Google+ and Youtube to do a lot of damage, even if you don't have a website. I talk more about using video for ZMOT warfare in this article here.
But if I started to explain those things here now, this article could become a book. I am always reachable at the Digital Africa Community. There I can take questions about ZMOT, FMOT and other areas of digital marketing.

Now there are many other techniques to ZMOT readiness like using AdWords PPC campaigns and one magical thing they call Remarketing, or taking advantage of Affiliate bloggers, and my own personal addition, the use of digital print and direct mail solutions. But for the sake of your time reading this article, the 3rd and last tactic I will mention here is learning how to stalk users at the review sites.   

3. Raptness To Reviews

Again, I'm not sure I know how people behave in Ghana or South Africa, but here in Nigeria, I know that word of mouth is an extremely powerful form of product promotion. So if you can put words into Mr A's mouth, that could easily lead to Mr B buying your product.

I mean, I have literally seen people come to a store specifically to purchase an iPhone, and right there in an instant, they ask some other customer for his advice, and he suddenly turns into a smartphone expert; And before you know it, the lady who came to buy an iPhone4 is going home with her brand new Blackberry Z10.

In fact, more or less, everyone in this country is a consulting physician (both medical and trado-medical).
You feel slight dizziness and a throbbing headache? Your next door neighbor, the bank manager, prescribes an anti-biotic for you. Just like that!

So whether you realize it or not, most of your potential clients or customers are easily susceptible to influence from others. At some point in their journey, they could easily have been your customer. But along the way, someone prescribed an alternative for them.
And this behavior is happening on the internet as well, so it is not wise to ignore it. You must learn how to benefit from it. 

You might not be able to prevent or rescue every one of your potential customers from those self-appointed experts, but there are ways that you can work on wrestling some of them back to your own offering. And of course, you can generate your own "experts".

In this other scenario, try to imagine you didn't log out of your Yahoomail, before you visited the Trip Advisor website to check out affordables hotels in Abuja. Incidentally, your Facebook account is associated to your Yahoomail.

Now you are gazing at the hotel at the top of the page that costs only N5000 per night; it looks like a good option for you. Then suddenly you notice that some people you know have already spent time at some other hotel below, and they gave it very good reviews. It costs only N400 more than the one you first noticed. And these people you know are people you really respect.

This could happen because Trip Advisor is using your Facebook friends list, and it doesn't even occur to you what's going on, or why they are showing you what your friends have reviewed.

This is a real ZMOT phenomenon. It happens everyday, and nobody really cares to ask why.
But what you should be asking is, how do I capitalize on it?
That should be he question every merchant is asking in this era....how do I win the zero moment of truth?

And the more you think and strategize in this mind frame, the more likely you would come up with answers for your digital business goals. The technology is available to help you win some of the battles, you just have to discover what they are, how they work, and how to use them. 
The more you actively take part in ZMOT warfare, the more you'll learn; and the more new tools you would discover. This is my advice to you if you have a small business. 

However, if yours is a large company that can afford it, it is best you hire a ZMOT Coordinator who is, at least, handy with his AdWords and Google Analytics, and has a ZMOT mindset. 

ZMOT ZERO MOMENT OF TRUTH Infographic-Shoppers' Path to Purchase via Cool Daily Infographics

Now, someone might ask, "hey why do I need a consultant who claims to be ZMOT-savvy?", "Can't I just give this article you've written here to my already existing traditional marketing department to handle"? 

Well, you could try that....But you should be careful about how they run with it. Afterall, those guys are coming from a mindset that is quite different from ours. A mindset where so many boundaries and limitations exist. 

So someone else could say, "Or I could even read through this article several times over, add some extra research, and do it all by myself?"

Well, actually you could. And in fact I am hoping you would. 
I am hoping that all those who pay attention to my articles would become ZMOT-minded marketers, and do their own marketing by themselves one day. This would open up huge opportunities for me with the larger businesses, who are always the slowest to adopt these kinds of ideas. 
However, their current paradigm is such that they always seem to want to minimize risk and pay more attention to financial budgeting, rather than statistical and analytics data.

So they are not likely to take a chance on investing on a ZMOT-manager or an inhouse digital marketing team until they see the result of my ZMOT strategies through those who have used it and profited from it, at lower levels. 

Yet, this leaves you, the small or mid-sized business owner, with the opportunity to become enthusiastic enough about the ZMOT to learn how to get a head-start and an advantage for your self, and hopefully taking some of their market share while they are still asleep.



Thanks for reading.
Feel free to drop a comment or question below. I'm always here to assist. Also consider reading my post defining ZMOT in Nigeria, using Nigerian examples.

Zero Moment Of Truth - Part1

The ZMOT is not such a complex thing to be honest. 
In fact it could be incredibly easy to understand, especially if you already know a lot about how the internet works, coupled with some reasonable knowledge about the business process of marketing (which usually involves advertising, publicity and sales distribution). You need a combination of these two, if you want to really enjoy this article. 

So consider the zero moment of truth as that point in a customer's journey where she/he bounces back and forth looking for answers about a product or service she/he may be interested in. She/He uses Search, Reviews, Ratings, Specifications Data, and even user comments as a guide to come to her decision. So clearly, you can see why you need to play a part in at least adding something to the conversation that leads to this decision.

WHERE TO SLOT ZMOT 

There already existed a tested and trusted marketing model that was conceptualized by Procter & Gamble and has to a very high degree, revealed the strategic points in a customer's journey where it is best to try to capture his attention.

STIMULUS – When the customer sees an advert of any product or service that may interest him (let's say a pair shoes) and does get interested; or he saw the ad and suddenly remembers that he had already planned to buy a pair of shoes at some point.

SHELF – First Moment Of Truth – The customer has finally taken the decision to go to the store to get those shoes. There are some customers who go out with a plan not to return home without a pair of new shoes, no matter what. There are also some customers who never really have an idea of what they really want to get, so they rely on cues from shop attendants or other shoppers. Traditional marketers realize that the packaging and labeling of the product can go a long way in winning the First moment of truth. They also know that by having their shoes advertised boldly all over the shoe section of the store,or maybe even having sales agents in the larger stores, could help to nudge undecided customers.

EXPERIENCE – The Second Moment Of Truth – this comes after the customer has purchased his shoes and has started wearing them. Chances are that the customer will report his experience with the shoes (and possibly with the store where he bought them from) to the next person. 

This is why good marketing actually begins at the point where you ensure the quality of the design of your product. It is important for your marketing that customers don’t go about saying bad things about your product or about your store. 

Or rather, if you’re just the dealer and not the manufacturer of the shoes, then hopefully your sales-reps and floorwalkers are respectful and patient with customers. 
Because that is the experience they take away from your business. 

But most customers would definitely say something, whether it is good or bad. Whether it is about the shoes or about your store. 

The idea at the Experience Stage (Second Moment Of Truth) is to get them to say more of the good stuff. Especially about your store, if you’re the store owner.

Zero Moment Of Truth 
To be honest, going by today’s turbo-charged rate of information & technological advancement, we could almost say that ZMOT (since 2011) is already an old marketing concept. I have already given an intro on it for an African audience in one of my previous articles about ZMOT in Africa. But a good way to summarize it here would be to just say that ZMOT is that virtual valley of decision that your customers go to after getting inspired by an advert that catches their attention, and before going to a shop to spend their hard earned money on the product that is promoted by that advert. 

So despite the way I listed these terms to make the introduction, ZMOT actually slots in between Stimulus and Shelf. So now, I'll try to explain how it works...

DIGITAL MARKETING, ZMOT TARGETING

A ZMOT Ready Marketer first of all has to be a Digital Marketer. He then has to be the kind of DM who has his eye on almost every area of digital marketing, as well has having a decent understanding of typical offline advertising as well. But in addition to those, he has to be aware of the importance of the ZMOT, know how to identify the ZMOT moments in his industry, and he must be able to respond swiftly to take advantage of them.  

By now, the reason should be quite simple, if not then allow me to illustrate with this example:

Imagine you’re on an island where 10,000 people plan to buy shoes within the next month. Now imagine if there were 10 shoe retailers on that island. Then assume that all these shoe retailers have basically the same quality of shoes and they all sold at the same exact price.

Now, all things being equal, and if they all did some local advertising in the same magazines and on the same tv stations on the island; then there actually isn't much reason to doubt that their total units sold could be almost identical as well. 

Maybe some would sell 1100 shoes that month, and others who were unlucky might do 900. Just humour me for now....

Enter digital marketing.
Imagine if 2 of those retailers decided to step up to owning websites; and they took on some online advertising campaigns (especially Enhanced Campaigns from Google). Imagine they did some pretty effective SEO, and some social media marketing. 

The dynamics would have changed because you would now have some shoe retailers encroaching on customers of retailers that are geographically far away from their territory. 

They have the shoes on display on the website so the customer from 20 miles away can gaze at the shoes from different angles and in different colors. 

These smart retailers could also offer free delivery to further convince the customer to shop with them instead of the retailer close by. 
At this stage it may not matter even if the near-by retailer has the same shoes the customer has seen on the web. What matters is the information, and the knowledge of where & how to get it. 

So thanks to their digital marketing campaigns, the 2 retailers with e-commerce websites could very well draw as many as 2800 and 2400 customers respectively, while the remaining 8 retailers may have to struggle with an average of 600 sales each for that month. Or it could even be worse for those remaining 8 guys.
It all depends on if one, or both of the ecommerce-smart retailers are willing to go the extra ZMOT mile. 

So let us just assume that one of them did. 

So this retailer has the normal brick & mortar store (i.e. a store that is physically on the ground – not one that operates solely online). He also has the e-commerce website where customers can order shoes and have them delivered to their homes. 

Then if he decides to upgrade to invading the zero moment of truth, he could take a size-able chunk out of the share of the other website retailer’s 2800, and even further flatten the margins of those retailers who are doing 600 sales per month.

How?

INFILTRATING THE ZERO MARKET OF TRUTH

By being at the ZMOT, our retailer can know when consumers are looking for shoes, when they are making inquiries about them online. He can learn about consumers, their behaviors and preferences before the other retailer who also sells online, and way ahead of the others. He knows how to fish out ready customers as well as future customers. This is the wisdom of the marketers who take the ZMOT seriously.

Research shows that in 2011, 84% of a sample 5000 people in America did research on a product after seeing an advert, and before deciding on buying it. There is also more recent data to show that this trend is increasing. Now I can easily guess what just popped into your minds. 
You are going to say that that is America! 
This is Africa! 

Yes, I know. 
And yet my point here is that just because we are not a continent that is particularly keen on gathering statistical data and analyzing such data, it doesn’t mean that we do not have the same sociological tendencies of shoppers everywhere. Afterall, we are all human.

For example, if you doubt that Africans are being affected equally (if not at a quicker rate) by the New Digital Age, why not visit Christian Amanpour’s Page on Facebook, or checkout ESPN FC? 

I am willing to bet that by just doing a quick scan, you are going to find as many African names (mostly Nigerian) in the comments as any other continent of the world. 

Africans are as driven to search out their interests and engage share their thoughts with others, just as Europeans and Americans are. And I dare say, Nigerians more so than anyone else.

Hence, there’s no wisdom in betting against the continued exponential growth of internet connectivity & activity in Africa and indeed the rest of the world.

The fact is that all human beings are social animals. We all have a desire to connect with others. And most of us find connection with like-minds from foreign lands particularly more fascinating. 

In fact, with all of the poverty that we face in this continent of ours, the obvious lack of many alternatives (such as large theme parks, space museums, video game arcade centers, ice skating rinks, and a truly infinite number of satellite/cable tv channels) no doubt leads many Africans to find more time and desire to connect online.

Google’s Jim Lecinski, says, “ZMOT turns small wins into huge ones — and potentially big wins into letdowns — millions of times a day, around the clock.” The idea being conveyed here is that your well executed tactic could lead you to huge gains from doing just a little thing better than your rivals. While they, with all of their big spending and expensive tv and magazine adverts, may fail to register their presence at ZMOT and as such suffer huge losses.

Please try to remember that ZMOT is the name for the virtual meeting ground where you will find your target consumer, not rigidly the name of your tactic itself. 

Anyway, I particularly like the way Dina Howell, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi X, presents her argument on the ZMOT ( she was formerly in Procter & Gamble – at the time they came up with the First Moment Of Truth marketing model in 2005). Now she says, 

“Shoppers today want to explore and think about how products can improve their lives. They do reconnaissance to gain the insights they need, and they’re driven to bond with others and enrich relationships as they learn.”

The bottom line is that today’s marketers need to realize that shoppers’ decisions are no longer predominantly taken at Stimulus stage and Shelf (First Moment Of Truth - or FMOT) Stage. There is now clearly a 3rd pre-purchase battle ground. And from the simple bar chart above, you can tell that this battle ground      is getting more and more crowded.

The question is, 

If you were the Director of ZMOT for the marketing division of a company like say Samsung in South Africa, Kenya Airways or maybe GTBank in Nigeria, what are the things that you would do, and what is the mindset you would employ in order to garner potential customers from this abundance of ZMOT-congregating web surfers?

Please feel free to leave a comment, ask a question, like and do share. :-)   

Google Analytics, Marketing Attribution and the True Football Analyst:

Now, it would probably amaze some of you that I want to relate web analytics with football analysis! Well, I am doing so because I live in Nigeria in Africa and there isn't that much "analyzing of websites" going on in this part of the world, I can tell you that much! And this is mainly because most business owners haven't yet come to the realization that they need to analyze their effectiveness. 

So what I am going to do with this article, is try to relate this concept of Analytics to another one that practically all African people (Nigerians especially) know so well....

GAFC - GOOGLE ANALYTICS FOOTBALL CLUB!

Now, I would first need to quickly point out that I will be discussing soccer, and not the NFL. In short, European football and not American Football. Okay that wasn’t shorter, but I'm sure you get the point.
I must also mention that, unlike almost every soccer fan I’ve met, I am the very rare type that actually hates to “analyze” why a team won or lost a football match after the 90 minutes have been completed. So often times I say things that shock practically everyone that call themselves football fans.

For example, I still insist that Diego Maradonna’s Argentina squad in 2010 was tactically one of the best since 1994. In fact I consider Jose peckermann's 2006 squad the only one better in that time frame. A claim that not one human being I know agrees with.
But I don’t care about that; it’s not my problem….they are the ones who need to open their eyes. Hahaha!

Anyway, seriously, you should also know that I never judge the performance of a soccer team according to the number of goals that were counted for or against them at the end of one single game. So my take is that unpredictable things happen during the course of 90 minutes that sometimes make the beautiful game of football seem to resemble an adulterous whore. Do pardon the illustration.

But now let me quickly get back to this discussion and define Marketing Attribution and Google Analytics so that the football fans reading this article can catch up with what I am about to introduce to you geeks out there:

WHAT ARE THE KEY CONCEPTS?

Google Analytics is a powerful instrument that is used for measuring a website’s activities, like visits, clicks, and the defined goals that may have been setup by the website owner.
These activities need to be measured when you decide to start using your website as a marketing, branding or promotional instrument for your business or whatever cause the website was built for.

So burn this in: A website shouldn't be just a dummy in cyberspace that most companies around you have one of and so you feel you must therefore have one yourself.
You’ve completely missed the point, if you go this way.


Visits and Clicks to your website can come from any part of Africa or the world at large. They can be attracted by your brand name, or they can be attracted by your website’s marketing strategies and tactics. Either way, once they’ve come to your website, chances are, you can get them to buy your products, visit your shop or direct their colleagues to it, subscribe to your articles, and even promote your brand for you. It all depends on how you much you are willing to get out of digital marketing.

Conversions are the completion of goals that are specified by the website’s owner as important things he would like visitors to do while on his site. These goals will depend completely on whatever is the nature of your business, and they will be the major things that you would be measuring with Google Analytics. Additionally, if you have an e-commerce website, these goals would primarily be the actual purchases of items made by online customers on your site.

So Google Analytics is like an instrument of forensic examination that helps you scrutinize your website’s performance in terms of how well it is achieving its GOALS (just like in soccer you know?). It is the only way to know for sure, what and where you need to make improvements so that your website can perk-up on its performance and begin to achieve those goals, and reach for greater goals.

But the aspect of Google Analytics that I really wish to discuss today is Marketing Attribution. 

Along with Advanced Event Tracking, Attribution is one of the least mentioned topics in GA by the so-called digital marketing "experts" in Nigeria. I have also searched online for articles on this topic by other digital marketing professionals from the African continent; sadly, I've found none.

Nevertheless, the impact of Attribution (when it is well done) on your website and your entire business could be quite useful in creating quite a mismatch between you and your competition on the digital frontier.

So without further ado, Attribution is about giving value to different channels within your overall marketing campaign so that you can get a clearer understanding of how effective each of the various channels or “players” in your marketing efforts are performing.

We use Attribution Modeling because often times digital marketers think that one aspect of their marketing strategy is working better than other channels, and as a result they tend to focus so much effort on that particular medium at the detriment of other channels. The potential problem here is that if you are mistaken with this assumption, then your marketing campaigns may never reach their full potential.

WHO WOULD RELATE SUCH THINGS TOGETHER?

So let's go back to football for a while:

Now, if you were to take away both Mezut Ozil and Angel DiMaria from Real Madrid FC, you could be surprised that Cristiano Ronaldo would score fewer goals than you know him to score. 
I could have said the same about Iniesta and Xavi on Leonel Messi, but I have seen otherwise.

Anyway I don’t mean to start an argument here, I am only pointing out that it is important for you to learn how credit should be shared in your marketing campaigns. And thankfully, your marketing campaigns don’t have huge egos. Hahaha!

And for those who wish to argue football, you can join my football community on Google+. But you should be warned that there are many who consider me a real rabble-rouser, who became an obsessive football watcher when I was 16 yrs old.

I had started disagreeing vehemently with the usual British commentators and studio pundits from when I was about 20, and since then I have very seldom ever taken their kind of football analyses seriously.

By the time I was 22, I was watching some matches 3 to 5 times over, just so that I could discover patterns in certain formations. It even got to a point where I preferred watching a recorded game to a live one; since in a recorded match, you may easily press review to understand why a player made a certain move (whether it was a fluke or a calculated knack of genius).

In any event, the relevance of all I am saying is that (and this is just my opinion) Attribution in Google Analytics also requires a similar kind of obsessive behavior in paying attention to analytics data. When I first started using GA, I thought it was extremely complex and boring. But the trick was to tarry and then learn first to pay attention to the simpler details before graduating to the more advanced metrics. 

If you did that, and also opted to follow the most knowledgeable experts and the insights on Attribution that they very generously share on their blogs, You would suddenly realize that this could all be so much FUN………Or maybe not.

BASIC ATTRIBUTION MODELLING

Anyway that depends on the kind of person you are, I guess.
For me the connection became obvious when I first noticed that the Last Click assumption that almost every digital marketer was pre-occupied with, could easily be likened to the Leading Goal-scorer in a football team, and how most people assume that he scores those goals by conjuring them all out of nothing. So just like in football, most people come to digital marketing with the Last Interaction model of Attribution already ingrained in their minds.
In case you are a bit confused with what I am talking about, I will give you a quick background of how it works.

Marketing Attribution in Google Analytics, comes with a few models that are given by default to help you appreciate which of your marketing channels are actually bringing you the most goal conversions in your campaign. Isn’t that awesome?! In digital marketing, there are a few given models, like Last-Click or Last Interaction model where 100% of the credit for the conversion is attributed to the last marketing activity that led to the conversion. Another example of a model is the Time Decay version, where credit is shared in a progressive way, where more of the credit is given to those marketing channels that the visitor encounters later on into his journey to conversion.

So with Attribution Modeling, I quickly found an expression for my unique kind of football analysis. The fact that my analyses are NOT ABSOLUTE in nature makes me feel very much at home with Attribution. The constant learning and testing of Marketing Attribution models in Google Analytics can greatly sharpen your ability to improve future marketing efforts; which makes me very glad that I have always rebelled against football commentators’ and general opinions, but have always learned to chart my own course in assigning credit in football teams’ victories or losses.
Let me demonstrate:
 

LAST CLICK - The Barcelona Example:

I am not a Barcelona fan.
In fact I actually hated the club immensely from the early 90s right up until Pep Guardiola took over and turned them into the second most glorious footballing spectacle that I ever saw in my life. The most glorious being the Real Madrid era from 1995 to 2002.
Yes. I am a Real Madrid supporter; but I guess that other Madridistas might refuse to believe that, on account of what I just said about their rivals, FC Barcelona. But in such an event, all I can say to them is “grow up, and enjoy football as a game!” Hehehe.

Anyway, now I am going to demonstrate how paying close attention to Sergio Busquets, Xavi, Dani Alvez, Pedro and Lionel Messi, has coincidentally helped to greatly improve my understanding of Attribution in Google Analytics.
Now If you’re a fan, you’ve probably noticed that I left out Iniesta from this Barcelona selection. Well that is because this article is NOT exactly about football, but more about Marketing Attribution. And I have actually observed that Iniesta’s contribution to the Barcelona team’s overall attacking potency is much more of a diversion to the opposition’s defensive formation. And that doesn’t adequately help me in analyzing website macro and micro conversions.
So for the sake of this model, let us assume that Messi, Busquets, Xavi, Alvez and Pedro are 5 variables of marketing channels in an Attribution model. They could represent, if you like, PPC, YouTube, Banner, Email, and let’s add some shiny new toy like TourDash.

At FC Barcelona, Leo Messi is the guy who scores the vast majority of their goals. But what really makes this individual special is that he is also the one who provides a reasonable majority of their goals (at least over the past 4 seasons). But what might yet surprise most of you, is that I have also carefully observed that this same Messi is often also involved with providing the assist to the ASSISTS…what I am now call the 3rd Ball To Goal.

Meanwhile, this doesn’t automatically mean that without Messi, Barca won’t score goals, because football is not that simplistic. What it does mean though, is that those who have everything to gain from the team’s overall success (the coach, the owner of the team, and the fans)are forced to reckon with Messi, and will not likely be willing to gamble on leaving him out of the team for important matches.
Now, in an extreme case, if Messi’s contribution is overemphasized, and his team mates’ are assumed to be redundant; such a situation could illustrate the Last Interaction Model in Marketing Attribution.

Many business & website owners are fond of taking the reports of their web analysts superficially, assuming that the Last Interaction of each customer is the sole reason for his/her purchase or goal completion. Thus they are assuming “Messi” does it all, without digging deeper to find out how much of a role the other players are playing to assist him. The problem is that these clients may therefore increase their focus on that particular advertising channel; and reduce, or completely freeze off any efforts on improving other channels. Yet such a scenario could be very harmful.
So thanks to FC Barcelona, I came up with a custom model of Attribution. Which is merely a more conservative and perhaps more practical variation of the Last Interaction model.

From the diagram labeled Figure 1 above, you can see how I have reduced the over dependence on the Last Interaction, by assuming that other marketing channels may have played a more important part in the decision process of the customer. It is important to note also that the labeling of each color bar with a designation of the 5 various channels

Once you’ve done your goal setting in Google Analytics (GA) and all of your online marketing campaigns (and even your traditional marketing campaigns like TV, billboard & magazine ads) are being properly tracked; the next thing is to begin to analyze and do some tests with the new assumptions that you discover from your attribution models.

LINEAR ATTRIBUTION- Falcao Left Atletico Madrid:

Now any true football fan today as heard of a Colombian footballer by the name of Radamel Falcao, but those of you pure digital marketing nerds may simply just take my word on anything I say, for the sake of the argument okay? Hehehe!

So the funny thing about Falcao is that he was such a great striker that only a few people noticed how awesome his supporting cast was. The likes of Arda Turan, Diego Costa, Adrian and Koke made Falcao’s job spearheading the attack much easier that it looked. 

But now that the Colombian striker has left the team, they seem to have become even stronger.

Attribution helps you to understand that the visitor of your site that converted (i.e. took an action that you have indicated in GA as a goal) may not actually be experiencing your website’s marketing tactics for the first time. It doesn’t always mean that because a customer came into your site and purchased a camera because you sent an e-mail the day before, that it is automatically the sole reason why he took that action.

There is need to discover if there were probably several assists leading to that email. The same customer could have at various points taken a mental note to visit your website after seeing several of your other marketing campaigns like your blog, your Pay Per Click advert on Facebook, and maybe even your banners on affiliate sites.

Now, the Liner Model of Attribution is designed to give equal amount of credit to each of the marketing channels of your campaigns. Digital marketers use this when they assume that every member of the “team” is of equal importance. Ofcourse, this may also be a poor assumption that could lead to wastage of marketing spending on some channels, but the idea is to experiment until you find what works best for your campaigns based on understanding how your customers interact with your channels.

WE ARE STILL AT THE BEGINNING HERE IN NIGERIA

I hope this was at least slightly enlightening to you, and you’ve gotten the idea that Google Analytics is a great tool that you might have been overlooking in your marketing efforts.

Starting early enough is what really matters. Then we must patiently continue growing in understanding, in know-how and in experience. I have shared a few other articles in digital marketing that you might like to look at.
If you would like to pick more of my brain on other digital marketing topics, you may reach me on my Google+ profile and add me to your circles. You may also join my Digital Marketing Community. 

Alternatively, you might wish to see how opinionated I am about Football/Soccer on my G+ Alternate Page, True Football Analyst. 

I am Rotimi Orims. 
I am passionate about Exploring the Web, about Learning, about Digital Marketing, about Football, about Movies and about Music. 
I know, those are a lot of passions!