Growth Marketing CXL Institute Minidegree — Review Week 5

More than one month done in the training and everything is moving very fast. This week has not been my best in terms of productivity in the training. My Block 3 is now underway with the completion of the first course with Chris Mercer, Google Analytics for Beginners. I have not yet completed the final exam, but that should be coming up this week.

Since the vacations are starting, it will be more and more difficult for me to keep a good pace in my learning. There are some great challenges ahead. At least the training is very motivating and it is very interesting to learn many little details like the ones I started to see with Chris Mercer.

As a reminder, for 12 weeks, as part of the scholarship granted to me from the CXL Institute, I will be writing a series of 12 articles looking back on my learning and practical ways to apply what I have learned in my day-to-day activities.

So, here is part 5 of my review!

What is the CXL Institute?

CXL brings you advanced level marketing training: get deep skills in growth, customer acquisition, analytics, and conversion optimization.

What you get is top-notch training from leaders and instructors within some of the fastest growing and biggest companies in the world.

Google Analytics for Beginners

Last week, I told you about the first courses and what Chris explained about the different reports:

• Real-Time Report
• Audience Report
• Acquisition Report
• Behavior Report
• Conversion Report

As discussed, it is important to understand the subtleties of each of these different reports when navigating through Google Analytics, as it is easy to get lost in all the data. In this week’s blog, I will mainly cover the second part of the course, where Chris takes us to another level in vignettes entitled :

• Understanding Traffic: Type of traffic
• Understanding Traffic: Customizing Traffic Sources Part 1
• Understanding Traffic: Customizing Traffic Sources Part 2
• Understanding Results: Destination Goal
• Understanding Results: Duration Goal
• Understanding Results: Pages per session Goal
• Understanding Results: Event Goal
• Understanding Results: eCommerce Goal
• Analyzing Reports — The Basics

In summary, here is what Chris explained us during all these classes.

So we talked all about getting to know GA. Then we talked about getting started. And we started in the back end of Google Analytics, where we talked about how to set up the account, the property, and the view. We covered important information around tracking information in property settings. We talked about how to link certain Google products if you wanted. We also talked about the importance of multiple views and at the very, very least, having your production view, having your testing views, and then finally having a backup view.

We also talked about setting up filters in this section. Where the filters themselves are what really kind of do the magic. Remember the views are there to answer certain questions and you customize the views with certain filters to help make sure that you’ve got a good story in your Google Analytics.

Once we moved on getting started, we moved into understanding traffic and at this point, that’s where we started doing the deep dive into, in particular, the acquisition reports and kind of talking about where our traffic is coming from. And we spent a bunch of time in the Source/Medium report because that’s where a lot of the breakdown is. This is where we find out the brand of the traffic and we find out the type of traffic that is coming through. We also gave you a tool that you can use to set up your own UTM’s to make sure that they are structured, to make sure they tell a story. As we showed in our example when we came into our all campaigns report, you can see the different products as we have for our Win courses, or they the members of the Academy. We can click-down into the campaign, and this is your goal how this report is supposed to work, you click-down into it, and then it drills down into the Source/Medium.

You can see all the different sources of traffic, and the types of traffic that are contributing to the ultimate purpose of that campaign. Remember, if you’ve been doing it one Source/Medium for each campaign and each campaign for one Source/Mediumyou’re not taking full advantage of your UTMs structure, and you must understand where your traffic is coming from, or it makes it a whole lot harder to ask that question, “Hey, which traffic is causing which result?”Speaking of, Understanding Results came next, and then that whole section, besides traffic, once we’ve sort of nailed where the traffic was coming from whether it was GoogleAds or search or otherwise. Then, we moved into, okay let’s talk about the results of that traffic. Which, fortunately, also show up in this particular report which is why it’s one of my favorites.

Now, here you see all the results that you’ve set up including the goals. We talked about all the different types of goals that you can set up destination goals, how you can set up funnel goals, and track those in the funnel reports. We also talked about eCommerce, we talked about event goals, we talked about engagement goals, we talked about how time works in Google Analytics. There’s a lot that was covered in the Understanding Results, and remember when it comes to Google Analytics, over half the battle is understanding what those numbers mean, how they got there because when you understand that it’s a whole lot easier to read it, to understand the story that Google Analytics has been trying to tell you. Finally, we started to come to a close with Analyzing Reports. That’s where we introduced QIA.Remember?Question Information & Actions where it came down to the action being the most important part of that little formula.

So, question: What questions do I want to answer? Information: what information am I going to need to get those answers? But most importantly, what actions will I take based on those answers? When you have that figured out, then and only then, are you armed are you ready to go into Google Analytics to find the information and ideally make an analysis. All right, here are some next steps for ya.

If you follow me, you would probably recognize that those words above aren’t my writing. It is true, I quoted Chris Mercer for this review of these courses because, in his classes, he offers a recap session that covers everything. This guy is amazing and I can’t wait to start next week my Google analytics for intermediate and Google Tag Manager classes.

Have a great week everyone.