Week 5/12 - CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Review

I am participating in the CXL Institute Scholarship Program, and I’m going through the Growth Marketing Minidegree. I'm posting a new article about what I've learned every week. This is part 5/12. 

This week I’ve completed the course about Attribution, Excel and am in the middle of Michael Aagaard’s landing page optimization course. 

Let’s start by reviewing the course content:

Attribution

Attribution is about understanding your customer, and trying to understand which activity or step in the funnel is most influential to your customer. 

For as long as I have been interested in marketing, attribution has always been fiercely discussed — in forums, in the comments on various social media networks, and on the stage of almost every marketing conference. 

Attribution is an evergreen topic that can be discussed infinitely, because there is NO one solution that works for every company. 

Imagine this: 

Someone in your target audience goes to Google and searches for "running shoes". 

In the search results, they see your ad... And they click on it. 

They visit your website, and proceed to make a purchase. 

How would you attribute that purchase? To your ad and the last click that drove the visit? Or to any of the 20-40 touchpoints that happened before they saw your ad?

If you use any standard analytics software, you would probably attribute that purchase to your ad, because it was the last trackable interaction (last-click attribution) your new customer had with your brand before making that purchase. 

For you, as a marketer, you see your customers going through a customer journey. But no human in existence sees themselves going through the different stages of a customer journey (not in the B2C or B2B space). 

It’s just not a very natural way of evaluating something you want to buy.

Nobody ever thinks "Oh look at that ad, I'm now aware of a new brand. This gets me into phase 2 out of 5! Let's see if these guys have any great reviews so I can move into the evaluation stage as soon as possible." 

Instead, your audience might see your ad 4-5 times without even noticing it. 

Then they hear one of their friends talking about this great new e-commerce store they bought something from (you).

Suddenly, they start seeing ads from your ecommerce store all over the place, because they're now aware that your brand exists. 

The next time they search for something on google (I.e. running shoes), they might see a blog post from you. 

And 6 weeks after that…

After seeing an influencer talk about your brand, seeing 10+ display ads, and an interview with your founder… they might actually notice your ad, and proceed to make a purchase. 

It could be as many as 6-8 "touchpoints" with your brand before someone is even aware of your existence. 

But still, most marketers track "awareness" from the first time someone sees their ad. 

This just goes to show that there is no mathematical equation that can be applied to any and all businesses to work out their attribution model. 

There are A LOT of non-trackable interactions offline, where you have no control over what's being said.

So what should you do instead? 

Understand the value of a conversion

There are two types of conversions: 

1. Macro conversions - sales, leads, demo requests, signups, etc.
2. Micro conversions - add to cart, starting a signup process, downloading an ebook, etc

For B2C this is pretty straightforward. You basically have a direct relationship with the consumer throughout the journey and every trackable touchpoint. 

For B2B it's different, because there is a lot of activity going on behind closed doors. Multiple individuals across and outside the organisation will probably be involved in any consideration process. 

What's important to understand is that you need to complement your digital analytics and trackable touchpoints with some good old fashioned customer research.

Customer research is just briefly touched upon in this course when the instructor mentions ROPO (Research Online, Purchase Offline), but it would probably make sense to dive a little deeper into that. Because if you think about it: 

You need to ask your customers how they make their purchasing decisions, and tie that back to your trackable touchpoints. 

Because it's not enough just using a specific coupon code for your print ads, or a special phone number for your direct mail ads — unless you know what actually influences your customers, when and why, you have no way of knowing how to do attribution correctly. 

The two most important takeaways I got from this course was: 

1. Are you able to collect the data required to do attribution correctly? 
2. Do you have the people, skills, and cross-team alignment necessary to find an attribution model that works for your business? 

Okay, on to the next. Excel! 

Excel for marketers

I seriously don't know what I would do without excel. Or, I really only use Google Sheets, and except for some minor limitations in Sheets, they're both basically the same. 

This course was probably the nerdiest course I've ever gone through - and I mean that in a positive way. 

In this day and age, you really can't call yourself a marketer unless you know how to use a spreadsheet to sort, filter and extract value from a dataset. 

Almost every tool out there— from Google Search Console to Google Keyword Planner, Mailchimp, Triggerbee, Hubspot or any other software that contains lists of information (i.e. Contact lists, keyword lists) can be exported as a CSV and then imported to excel. 

But, then it's up to you to find the value in those datasets.

And to do that, you need to know how to use excel. 

This course used a dataset from Google Search Console to show you a bunch of different ways you can manipulate the data. 

My key takeaways from this course: 

1. Learning how to master SUM, COUNT(IF/A), and VLOOKUP will make you an excel ninja 
2. Pivot tables with filters or calculated columns makes your (and your coworkers) life a lot easier
3. Excel/Sheets is an invaluable tool

Okay, so this brings us to the course I am going through right now…

Landing Page Optimization

This course is one of the most interesting courses for me so far, because it focuses heavily on one of my favorite subjects: psychology. 

Michael Aagaard is the instructor for this course, a former optimizer at Unbounce, and a worldwide speaker. If you’ve ever attended Conversion Jam or any other CRO conference, you probably have heard him on the stage. 

Once again, user research is one of the most important steps in optimizing your landing page. 

Aagaard talks a lot about how the human brain works, and he references Daniel Kahneman's principles of fast and slow thinking. 

Basically, your brain has two modes:

1. Fast, intuitive thinking (i.e. "what is 2+2")
2. Slow, analytical thinking (i.e. "how many zeros are there in 10 billion?")

This plays a huge role in optimizing for the web. 

Because if your landing page uses the wrong language, or has an illogical structure of the information, you will increase the cognitive load. This basically means you force your visitors to search and find the value, while you should be the one making it effortless for them. 

If we don't understand something, and unless we have a gun to our head, most of us would just hit the back button without any regrets. Overloading the analytical part of our brain is mentally exhausting. 

Aagaard also talks about cognitive biases, and how to use them when building your landing page. 

Here are the 4 different concepts within the cognitive bias-section: 

Priming

Exposure to one stimulus influences response to subsequent stimulus.

Example 1: Ad says “Free 30 day free trial” - but you need to add your credit card. 

We’re priming our audience it’s free, but then it’s not. This will backfire. 

Example 2: One ad experience, a completely different landing page experience. 

Framing 

The way you deliver a message has a direct impact on how it is perceived.

Example 1: 

“Tonight we’re having cold, dead fish with old seaweed” vs “Tonight we’re having delicious sushi with wakame salad”

Example 2: 

Which is healthier? 80% lean meat vs 20% fat

Example 3: “Order information and prices” vs “Get information and prices”

Very powerful. The word “get” insinuates that there is something in it for me

WYSIATI

What you see is all there is. Our reality is what we have in front of us.

If there are gaps in the story, you’re going to fill the gaps out automatically for yourself. 

Summary of week 5

The first half of the week was pretty slow, with the attribution and excel course.

But, with the landing page optimization course, it's getting more and more interesting. 

I personally have a tendency of feeling like I'm not making any progress when watching courses that I'm not super interested in — even if the information is very valuable and useful. 

Based on what I've learned about fast and slow thinking, it's probably because I’m experiencing a cognitive overload when I actively try to understand concepts that I'm not very familiar with. I think it would feel easier if the course was more related to SaaS because a lot of the course material is aimed at e-commerce.