When it comes to soccer, in theory it is pretty simple– you need to put the ball in the back of the net. When this happens it is usually the goal scorer who gets the most credit, but what about the defense who got the play rolling? In reality there is far more to a team’s scoring strategy than the person who gets the ball into the back of the net, in fact Paul Tomkins has devised a system to track the contribution of each individual player. This system creates a value of how they contribute to the team over a number of games.

“When turning soccer into numbers, there will always be problems. And when it comes to ‘assists’, this is especially true. How can you reward someone who rolls the ball eight inches from an indirect free-kick as highly as someone who beats seven men and puts the ball in the striker’s path in the six-yard box?”

Those in the Internet marketing industry may want to take the time to read Tomkins’ strategy in order to relate it to the website conversion attribution debate. When it comes to website conversion, each keyword searched or direct visit – which ultimately results in a conversion–is in most cases a hit from a repeat visitor, or from a visitor who is familiar with the brand name, and each step of your search engine marketing strategy can be seen as an assist that led that conversion goal to your website.
With the highly-anticipated World Cup right around the corner, here is an analogy of how the steps to scoring a goal in a soccer game are similar to making a visitor react a desired way on your website.

 Website Conversion = Goal
You’ve done the hard work, you’ve found a potential customer who is interested enough in your website that they return via a keyword (or direct visit) and complete a sale, give you a call or whatever your call to action may be. This is the same as giving a player a free shot with just the keeper to beat. You won’t always get a 100% conversion rate – but in both cases there’s a very good chance it will end up with a goal.

Second to Last Visit = Assist
Some players don’t always score enough goals (David Beckham for example) but if you take him away from taking freekicks, corners and crossing the ball into the box then you’re likely to see a noticeable drop in chances created and goals scored. This could be exactly the same with your complete online strategy, which is why it is so important to find those advertising channels and keywords which are contributing to the end goal.

Mid-Level Visit = Midfield Pass
If Liverpool scored a goal last season, there’s a good chance Xabi Alonso (player known for his high number of assist) was involved at some point during that move. This may not have a huge importance to the overall outcome, but if involved more often than not, then he is clearly having a positive impact to the team. This could relate to an email marketing campaign, social media campaign or a keyword which may rarely convert, but is often involved in an assist. Take it away and those conversion chances may start to dry up.

First Visit = Defensive Build Up
What got the ball rolling in the first place? In the case of a soccer game, it may start with a key pass by the goalkeeper. When online, perhaps it was a search at the early stage of the searching process, as far back as typing your search words into Google. After this happens there is still a huge amount of work to do in order to grab that conversion, but you need to start somewhere!

So in which stage does the importance lie? In tracking the performance at all stages you can really get a strong idea about how every aspect of an online marketing campaign (or professional soccer team) is performing. With this valuable feedback from web analytics, you can make informative decision (whether that decision be to change up your keywords or to trade your center midfielder) based on the actual facts and figures. All in all looking at every step of your marketing strategy, rather than just the end result, will tell you which components of your overall efforts are effective, and which ones could use some help.