Growth Marketing CXL Institute Minidegree — Review Week 6

More than a month was done in training and everything is moving very fast. Again, this week was not my best in terms of productivity in the training. I have completed the entire Google Analytics Intermediate course. However, I have not yet taken the exam for this course.

The vacations have started and it will be quite difficult to get anything done this week. Nice challenges. Some nice challenges are coming up. At least the course is very motivating and it’s very interesting to learn a lot of 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 6 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 Intermediate

In this course, we went a little deeper into the features of Google Analytics with different topics. On the one hand, we started with three vignettes on how to clean up your captured data:

• Clean Data: Filtering Out SPAM
• Clean Data: Removing Internal Hits
• Clean Data: Cross-Domain Tracking

Then, we get into the Finding Answers part with different courses :

• Finding Answers: Funnel Tracking
• Finding Answers: Segments Part 1
• Finding Answers: Segments Part 2
• Finding Answers: Custom Reports

Then, the Tips & Tricks section :

• Tips & Tricks: Saved Reports & Alerts
• Tips & Tricks: Channels
• Tips & Tricks: Multi-Channel Reports
• Tips & Tricks: Attribution
• Tips & Tricks: Exporting to Google Sheet
• Tips & Tricks: Measurement Protocol

So here is the review of what we saw in all those classes quoted from the teacher himself: Chris Mercer.

We’re just going to talk through and think back about everything that we’ve covered. We started with clean data. We talked about being able to go through and make sure that we’re trying to find the story in Google Analytics and Google Analytics has a story to tell. Good data has a story to tell. Great data, great data tells you the story. You don’t have to go through and hack through it to figure it out. Great data, the story’s naturally there, right? And that’s what cleaning your data helps you to see. It helps you to see that great story that’s sitting there. The great data and the story that it wants to tell you now.

Clean Data

So how do you do that? We talked about filtering out spam. We talked about removing internal hits, that is your internal traffic. We talked about cross-domain tracking, which is a huge one ’cause that is directly going to affect your attribution and everything else in a report, so clean data incredibly, incredibly important. Make sure that you do that. We also talked about finding answers. That is, of course, the whole — We have our questions that we have, and then when we know the information we need to be able to find the answers for those questions and ultimately the actions we want to take based on those answers, but we need the answers. And Google Analytics has the answers.

Finding Answers

We talked about funnel tracking and being able to track through different steps and different styles of funnels in Google Analytics, including the funnel visualization report, goal flow reports. We talked about creating tables with those. We moved into segments and talking about how you use the built-in segments, how you can create your segments, how you can create sequences. And then we talked about custom reports, being able to create your custom reports.

Tips & Tricks

Then we also talked about tips and tricks that you could use for Google Analytics. Things you may not use every day that is, sure, really, really useful and can help make the job a lot easier. So that includes things like using dashboards, saving your reports. If you’re doing a lot of built-in reports and you’ve edited them and sort of customized them quite a bit using secondary dimensions and table filters and everything else, you can save those. And you can kind of create these shortcuts. Little trivia, they used to be called shortcuts. Now they’re called safety reports. But that’s what they are. You can set up proactive alerts. So if your Google Analytics like four of four pages, you saw as an example, if that goes up, it’s going to send you an alert. If a certain goal drops down or revenue drops down or traffic drops to zero, it’ll send you an alert. It can even text you with alerts. We talked about channels. How to use channels, how to think about channels, how to create your channels. We talked about multi-channel funnel reports. This is a whole new aspect of Google Analytics and allows you to see things like assisted conversions and last-click conversions. And how your traffic sources and how your channels are interacting together to cause certain results, whatever that conversion is that you’re measuring. We talked a lot about attribution, what attribution is. The differences in the different reports in Google Analytics.How the source meeting report attributes in a completely different way than what multi-channel reports act. And you also saw how to use attribute models and the different models that were available and some examples of how you can play around, maybe learn a little more about your traffic sources as well. We also talked about exporting to Google Sheets. And all of a sudden, those sequences and the segments started coming back because we found yet another way that we could track a funnel. This time in a spreadsheet and have it be completely automated. And then we finally just wrapped up with measurement protocol, which is kind of the promised land of being able to track any behavior, even if it’s not happening on your website. That is offline behaviors, like phone calls or rebills, that sort of stuff can be tracked using measurement protocol in Google Analytics.

See you next week !!