CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree: Week 7
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.
I’m still on the Google Analytics course and my vacation is ending today, so I have to admit I only spent an hour or two learning this week. This means that the next few weeks will be very busy, with me trying to make up for everything that I missed during vacation. However, I’m happy that I did this break because now I feel refreshed and ready to get into work and learn mode more easily.
Around the end of last week, I watched the lessons about Google Analytics reports. These are the types of reports you can find on Google Analytics:
- Realtime Reports
- Audience Reports
- Acquisition Reports
- Behavior Reports
- Conversion Reports
When it comes to Realtime Reports and Audience Reports, the course covers:
a) Purpose of Realtime Reports
b) Specific Answers You’ll Get
c) Limitations
Audience Reports answer the question “Who” and cover the aspects of your audience related to demographics, interests, and technology.
Next come the Acquisition Reports. Acquisition Reports provide a response to the question, “Where?” What are the sources of my users? How did they track me down? They used to be on someone else’s site, but now they’re here.
Then there’s a section on Google Ads and Search Console reports in Google Analytics, as well as how to analyze them to gain data that can help you make better decisions.
The lesson about Behavior Reports talks all about the actions users take on your website. They cover the landing pages you have and how users behave on them, as well as what they click next. Then, they follow the user engagement and show you what they engage with most. Finally, they allow you to set up events and track them, finding out when a user completes an event you’ve set up. There are some important resources you can check out when it comes to behavior reports:
● Exit Rate vs. Bounce Rate:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2525491
● How Page Value is Calculated
So, Behavior Reports answer the question: “What actions are my users taking?” The course talks about specific answers that you can get. Also, it makes a deep drive drill down into looking at that basket page and looking how it was a lander. How many times was it a page overall? How many times was it uniquely a page? Kind of giving us an idea of whether people are seeing it again and again in the same session.
However, there are some limitations. For example, events themselves don’t automatically track. You can solve these challenges by merging Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager and get the best of both worlds. As a standalone platform Google Analytics won’t give you all the information you need.
The next lesson was about Conversion Reports. They answer the following question: “What are the results of all of my user’s actions?” Essentially, this is all about the results. So, that’s why you see goals, because that’s an intended result that you would set up.
What are some of the specific answers you can get? You can see in the goals report and find out where the goals are being achieved.You can get a rough idea of the path that led tothat achievement, as well as get an incredibly specific idea of the actual steps that were required to achieve it. In terms of the funnel visualization report, you can see the flow of people and how they actually flow through and loop back, and skip around steps in the flow reports. So, there’s a lot of behavioral things that youcan see there in terms of how you’re achieving the results, not just the results themselves.
There are some limitations in the fact that things that you see in that report don’t necessarily translate in some of the other reports. Another limitation to the reports themselves is that if you have not set up goals, you can not use goals. If you have not set up eCommerce, you cannot use eCommerce. These are not something Google analytics will track onits own.You have to set things up. So, that’s why it’s so important to think through your setups in Google analytics.
This was the end of the introductory part of the course. The next part is about getting started with GA, where Mercer shows you what you need to do to set up your specific account. Therefore, the first lesson is about Account Settings.
The basic setup is really the name, the permissions that Google allows. And then it’s important to accept certain privacy permissions. So, make sure that you’ve worked with your team and your compliance officers to make sure that you’re able to do that if it’s not been done already.
The next thing the course talks about was the users, or more precisely, user management. It elaborates on filters and the fact that you could manage your filters at the account level, which is set to be shown in action in some of the following courses. I’m looking forward to seeing these things over and over again, hoping it will help me remember better.
If you’re setting up your Google Analytics account now, here’s a resource that can help you:
● Account Settings Overview:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1009704
So, now that I’m back from vacation, I’m going to make up for everything that I missed the past few weeks. I’m looking forward to finishing this course and finally passing the exam and obtaining the certificate. I think it will be very challenging but also very exciting. Wish me luck!
