CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree: Week 6
I recently signed up for the Growth Marketing Midigree at the CXL Institute and got a scholarship for the program (so exciting!), getting 12 weeks to complete the Minidegree, starting from April 19th. During this time, I will be writing one article on a weekly basis, describing my experience and summarizing the most important points of this education, showing why this probably is the best education program I’ve ever gone through. This is the sixth article of the series.
Last week, I started the course about Google Analytics by Chris Mercer. Chris Mercer is regarded as an expert in helping marketers grasp their figures in a straightforward manner. He is a top contributor and speaker at several analytics and optimization conferences and blogs, including ConversionXL, Content Jam, DigitalMarketer, Traffic & Conversion Summit, Social Media Examiner, and others, in addition to educating people how to evaluate and optimize their sales funnels. He also owns MeasurementMarketing.io, an agency that helps companies make analytically-led decisions.
When you’re working on anything for yourself, a client, your business, or your employer, the common scenario is that you’ve got money streaming into something, whether it’s a sales funnel, an e-commerce site, or something else with a customer journey. You’ve got money coming into it, attracting attention and traffic, and something occurs as a result of everything going on, ideally resulting in more money. Unfortunately, there are situations when it is less money. But, in any case, the secret is that you know the outcomes, how much you’ve spent, and how much is coming in from the ad platforms. The majority of people are aware of the outcomes, but they are unaware of how they were achieved, which is why Google Analytics is so useful.
You’re blind when you don’t have to be because you don’t have the necessary data — and the capacity to grasp it. For this reason, Google Analytics is the most widely used digital analytics product on the planet. It allows you to start focusing on the proper things and allocate marketing resources properly when you use it.
The course is really demanding. There’s a lot to learn about Google Analytics, especially if this is your first time utilizing it. Frankly, I believe this is one of the most crucial aspects of growth marketing, therefore I’ll be sure to pay close attention during the course. To be honest, I thought I had a good understanding of Google Analytics, but it turns out I had only scratched the surface. This course goes into great detail about each type of report and how to apply them, so I’m looking forward to improving my Google Analytics skills this week and next.
I started with the Google Analytics fundamentals introduction, which explains the differences between Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Google Data Studio, as well as why knowing them all is vital. It also offers an outline of what Google Analytics can accomplish and how to utilize it to achieve your marketing objectives.
The next course was an introduction to admin. The lesson objectives for this lesson are:
- The structure of your admin account. There are three different areas back there: the account, the property, and the view. There’s a brief discussion as far as how they fit together and how to think about those. Then, there’s a talk about user settings between the three of them as we actually go back and toward the admin section. Then, we create an account, a property, and a view so that you can see how that is done.
- Getting to know GA. We’ move on to real-time reports, then audience reports, acquisition reports, behavior reports, and conversion reports as we continue the journey of getting to know GA.
Then, we move on to Realtime Reports. The lesson objectives for this course are:
- Why Realtime Reports exist?
- What question they’re actually trying to answer?
- What specific answers can you get from Realtime Reports?
- Limitations that you will find within the Realtime Reports
The first segment of the course is dedicated to Users and Pageviews. Then, the course explains Conversions and Segmentation.
However, the limitation here is that you can’t see what’s trending — your information here is worth about 30 minutes. After that it’s gone out of the Realtime Reports it’s very difficult to get any sort of Trending from it and it’s a huge limitation with Realtime Reports, which is why you can’t use Realtime Reports to actually make any truly meaningful decisions other than something that you’re looking to de-bug, test, or just verify that something’s tracking the way you think it is tracking.
Next, we move on to Audience Reports. The lesson objectives here are:
- To figure out the purpose behind the audience reports. They are there to answer basically one single question.
- To find out what are the more specific answers that you can get from those reports.
- To discuss some of the limitations around those reports.
The Audience Reports are there to answer one primary question: Who are my users?
The last lesson I watched was about Acquisition Reports. Here’s what you learn in this lesson:
- The purpose of Acquisition Reports.
- Specific answers you can get from those reports
- Limitations of Acquisition Reports
Acquisition Reports answer: “Where?” Where are my users coming from?How did they find me? They were just on somewhere else, now they are here. Where was that somewhere else?
Then, there’s also a specific section that covers Google Ads and Search Console reports within Google Analytics and how to analyze them in order to get information that will help you make decisions.
The course is around 9 hours long, and there are several extra materials that you need to review in order to fully comprehend what is going on. However, there’s a small problem. I’m currently on vacation and trying to get the least screen time possible :) So, I probably won’t be watching too much of it this week, but I’ll definitely make it up by the end of the 12 weeks.
