CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree: Week 8
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.
It was a tough week getting back on track after vacation so I wasn’t very productive in any other field. This means that I didn’t get to learn much too, but I did make some minimal progress. Still can’t make up for what I missed during vacation, but I’ll do my best to do it in the next week.
So, last week I finished the “Getting to Know Google Analytics” part of the course. This part consists of eight lessons that introduce you to Google Analytics, what it does, why you need it, and all the reports it can generate for your website. The reports are the following:
- Realtime Reports
- Audience Reports
- Acquisition Reports
- Behavior Reports
- Conversion Reports
The next part is about Getting Started with GA, which covers how you can set up your Google Analytics account, connect it to your website and set up your goals to start tracking. It covers the following topics:
- Account Settings
- Property Settings
- View Settings
- Filters: The Basics
- Understanding Traffic: Types of Traffic
- Understanding Traffic: Customizing Traffic Sources (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Understanding Results: Destination Goals
- Understanding Results: Duration Goals
- Understanding Results: Pages per Session Goals
- Understanding Results: Event Goals
- Understanding Results: E-Commerce
- Analyzing Reports — The Basics
- Wrap Up & Resources
- Final Exam (OMG!!!)
The first lesson was about Account Settings. Here’s what the deep dive covers:
a) Basic Setup
b) Users
c) Filters
d) Activities
During the entire course, Chris Mercer creates and works on a new test CXL account to show the actions in real-time. So, on this account, he’s setting up all the basic settings and this is really valuable. At the beginning of the lesson, he covers the user management and the way you can access your accounts and give permissions to other people. This is really important because you can’t really do everything and see all the reports if you don’t have full access. For example, if you try to use the Google Merchant Store test account you will see that you only have limited permissions.
Next come the filters. The “all filter” section shows you all the different filters that you’re using for your account. And filters are actually more applied to views, that’s where they work their magic. They work their magic at the view levelbut you want to manage them at the account level.
Now, after you’ve kind of got filters, you have the option of checking out history. Have you ever gone to Google Analytics and you saw that something may have changed, a goal was setup and your like, “How did this happen?” Or maybe something got changed back thereand somebody creates a new view or a new filteror a new property and you’re not sure who it was. Well Google Analytics does a pretty decent jobat bread crumbing some of that. That’s in the Change History. Or, maybe you did change it and you just forgot, so you would see it in your Change History. That’s an important one to focus on as well.
And, finally after history is the Trash. Everyone’s got to have a trash can. So Trash Can is basically the purgatory where, whatever just got deleted has an intention of being deleted. It get sent into the Trash Can for 30 days and then it’s gone.
Here are some resources on account settings:
● Property Overview
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2649554?ref_topic=1009620
● Data Retention
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196
● Google Signals
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985
● Google Ads Linking Troubleshooter https://support.google.com/analytics/troubleshooter/7475553
The next lesson is about Property Settings. Here’s what it covers:
- Basic Setup
- Customizing Your Tracking
- Product Linking
- Introduction to Advanced Features
We went into a deep-dive into the property level settings. There’s a lot more back here than at the account level. So within the basic setup, which is super important to go through, make sure all the check boxes are checked. Moreover, make sure the user settings are correct. Go through all of them and customize your tracking info after that. As for the tracking info section, you will want to spendsome time with it.
So, think about the data collection,the data retention policies that you have in place. If you don’t know those answers, work with somebody in your team who does’cause you can’t always make those decisions and you don’t necessarily want that responsibility. So go to your team and make sure whose job it is to take care of this.
At that point go ahead and link whatever products that you want to that are other Google products you’re using, probably Google Ads and Google Search, but maybe also AdSense or BigQuery, which could be involved in your particular situation.You can link those together. And then really just be aware of the advanced features. Mercer doesn’t think there’s something extra you need to do here but you need to be aware.
We also talked about data retention, Google Signals, and Google Ads linking troubleshooter. There are some resources that help you if you are trying to link accounts and it’s not quite linking, ’cause there is confusion over that. They’ve created this nice little wizard that’s back there that you can use to fix that.
Here are some useful links:
- Property Overview https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2649554?ref_topic=1009620
- Data Retention https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7667196
- Google Signals https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/7532985
- Google Ads Linking Troubleshooter https://support.google.com/analytics/troubleshooter/7475553
Continuing with GA this week too. Hope I’ll finally finish it and move on to the intermediate GA course. Really excited to get back on track :)
