💻 Steve Hawkins’ Post

IN DEFENCE OF LAST TOUCH ATTRIBUTION (because I keep reading people slagging it off) Suppose you're a small business owner who has to deal with online sales. You have four hours a week max to check your website performance - usually much less. And you want to keep an eye on where your sales come from. So you start seeing where a user was just before buying, and attributing sales there. That's the last-touch attribution model, which gives 100% credit to the final marketing touchpoint before someone makes a purchase. But here's the challenge – this sort of tracking doesn't quite represent how we really shop. The customer journey is a labyrinth of touch points, each doing some work to 'win' the sale. Linking a sale to a specific activity is a huge oversimplification; just because someone bought from you just after seeing an ad, doesn't mean that ad was what drove the sale. A full team of touch points wins the game, not one player. Indeed, Nielsen did a huge study on attribution in 2011, 'Beyond Clicks and Impressions', and found the relationship between engagement, clicks, or even ad recall is pretty close to nil. But the dirty little secret is that no model is perfect. Data-driven, linear, time-decayed or other models don't *really* capture what happens. They might be more accurate, but they're never perfect – and if you don't have hundreds of thousands a year to spend on analytics, then you need a quick-and-dirty way to see where your sales are coming from. Even if it's not perfect. That's where last-touch shines. It cuts through the noise and focuses on what really matters: the final push that led to a conversion. It's attributing your goal to your centre forward, even if your midfield has done all the heavy lifting storming past the defence and setting up an easy shot. And last touch was used for over a hundred years – Claude Hopkins turned marketing to a science with couponing, a last-touch attribution model, with huge success. It's principles are still alive today, and worth tens of millions - Nectar loyalty cards was sold to Sainsbury's for £60m just a few years ago, after all. If you want wholly accurate modelling of your customer journey, and you've the budget to implement it, then last touch isn't right for you. But if you need to quickly see what platforms are where your customers are coming from, its bloody great.

Here's a small but useful change on Google Ads I've just spotted – if you create a campaign manually without goal guidance, you can now see where your campaign types will be displayed. Great little quality of life change. #GoogleAds #PPC #advertising

People keep asking me how to do SEO, so here's the five most important things you need to do: 1. Submit your website to 100 directories for links. Everybody who does SEO knows that this is the bread and butter of a good campaign. 2. Give every article a unique meta description. *This is the most important thing to Google*, so make sure it's right. 3. Repeat the key word you want to rank for five times - no more, no less - on the webpage. That's how Google knows what your article is about, without it being spam. 4. Make sure every page of your content is long. At least 1200 words, so you always will be able to rank. 5. Manually disavow any link you didn't make yourself. You can't trust things on the internet, so why would you trust them on your website? Redo this work every month, every year, and eventually you'll see great results 🚀🚀 (this advice only applies for our direct competitors. for how we do #SEO ourselves... well, get in touch)

Absolutely brilliant ad, but even better work by System1 to *measure* what happens when you watch an ad. Not all ads need to be evaluated based against sales. But all ads should evaluated against *something*, and this shows how you can review + visualise giant brand awareness ads in real time and get meaningful feedback on whether something does or does not work.

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We've just released our Trends Report for 2024 – stuffed full of practical insights around eight key themes that will matter for startups and scale-ups who want to cut through the BS this year and make an impact. Read our Founders Makers Trend Report containing a handpicked selection of key insights about how to *actually apply* some of the key trends that you should know about. https://lnkd.in/ep7xy6wy Fantastic work from Charlie Holman Katie Briefel Kate Anderson Zoë Bonham Matilda Niven ✌️ Faraz Aghaei Jessica Campbell on pulling this together 👏 #slingshotstateofmind #2024trends #founders