Growth Marketing CXL Institute Minidegree — Review Week 7

Half of it is completed in this course and I see so much material. it is really interesting. Again, this week was not my best in terms of productivity in the course, but I was able to move forward by several courses. I completed the following different courses:

• Google Tag Manager for Beginners
• Attribution
• Excel and Sheet for Marketers

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 Tag Manager for Beginners

Chris Mercer went through 20 classes with us in this class. Here is what he had to say as a wrap-up of all classes.

You know that tags are your way of telling Tag Manager here’s what I want you to do. You know that triggers are your way of telling Tag Manager here’s when I want you to do that. You know variables are information that you give Tag Manager in order so that it can do the job. You know different ways to organize in terms of folders, you know different ways to organize in terms of naming conventions so you can keep your workflows in order. You know all about our friend, the data layer. You know how to push data in, you actually know how to read the data from the data layer using data layer variables, so you know that as well. You know all about preview mode, it is my favorite feature of Google Tag Manager, it’s kind of like an x-ray, right? It shows you exactly how Tag Manager is working, and you can see all the ins and outs, and in preview mode, you know how to check for each event at a point in time of your Tag Manager journey, what was happening with the variables were at those different points in time. And you know the data layer and what it was at those different points in time. You know the summary so that you can see that the total data layer value up until this point in time, you can see the tags and what was fired up until this point in time. You even know how to go in and get a little more details around those tags, when they were fired, what details were fired over, when they were fired, according to the point in times the events in Google Tag Manager, you know how to set up triggers for custom events that you want, you know how to set up timers, you know how to set up clicks, you know how to pass Google Analytics events over to Google Analytics, you know how to pass page view events to Google analytics.

We talked about setting up scripts like FaceBook pixels as well, we’ve covered a ton of stuff if you think about it so far. We know about publishing, and being able to actually publish changes live, we know about working with versions, and you can see here, all the different versions that you and I have gone through as we’ve covered it, so we do cross-domain, and more recently we just did our formatting variables and pushing those changes live. And we know how to come back to these versions if we need to, for example, if I didn’t like this version for whatever reason, I wanted to undo it, I can come down here, or YouTube one, we did our YouTube, which is again, something else we now know, how to actually track plays and how far somebody makes it through a YouTube video, and I could just say, hey you know what, publish this one. I could say, set this as the latest version so I can edit from it, so don’t make it live for the world, but I want to edit from it. Or, again, publish makes it live for the world. So I could export it, right? Make a backup copy of it, I could change the notes on it, all sorts of fun stuff with versions back here.

So, we’ve talked about a ton. We even talked about e-commerce and being able to push information into Google analytics e-commerce reports. And we did that by using other variables, like the URL query variables. We even talked about formatting those values of said variables. Lots and lots of stuff that we have chatted about in this course. If you have not practiced, if you have not practiced at this point in time, this is it. You must practice this information. Because just being exposed to this, you won’t learn it. I promise you you won’t learn it. You have to jump in there, you’ve got to make mistakes, you’ve got to look at what I’ve done and be like, oh okay, no problem, that’s super simple, I’ll go ahead and set it up. And then it doesn’t work, and you’re like, man, what happened? What did I do? And you realize it’s going to be something tiny, something simple.

Professional tip, it always is something tiny, it’s always something simple, in the vast majority of cases. I’m sure there are some cases where it’s not. But most of the time, it is something simple so you don’t have to get freaked out about it.

Attribution

In this course, Russell explains the details of the different models of attribution in great detail. Some of the different models that exist include:

• Last Non-Direct Click: A model that gives credit for the conversion to the last non-direct click. This model is useful but incomplete in my opinion
• Last Interaction Attribution: This model gives all the credit of a conversion to the last interaction made by the consumer with his website. Depending on the objectives behind this analysis, this model can be useful but is not the most accurate.
• Linear Attribution: This model gives credit to each of the consumer’s touchpoints equally. This is a good way to know what the customer journey is. However, it will be difficult to know which of these touchpoints really had an impact, because each and everyone gets the same percentage of attribution.
• Time Decay Attribution: This model gives an increasing percentage to the different interactions the consumer interacts with the closer they get to the final conversion. It is an interesting model, but it is not possible to know exactly if the last interaction had a significant impact on the consumer versus the others.
• Position Based Attribution: This model gives 40% to the first and last interaction. Since it judges that these two interactions are in some way the most important in the conversion of the consumer. The remaining 20% is allocated equally between each of the interactions between the first and the last. This is an interesting model, and it is worth analyzing.

In addition, Russell presented tactics for each of the communication channels in relation to the different attribution models. Both online and offline channels. Finally, Russel presented different strategies to apply according to different concepts that are very important to consider when talking about attribution, such as

• Customer Journey Analysis
• Value of Brand
• Life Time Value
• Customer Data — Individuals
• Value of Visitors

Excel and Sheets for Marketers

In this course, Fred Pike covers different important elements to know when using Excel and/or Sheets. A very interesting course where I learned various tips and tricks with the use of Excel. Mainly, how to create and use a Pivot Table. A large part of the course is attributed to the knowledge of this function offered by each software and as a marketer, it is essential to know how to use it. I strongly encourage you to listen to this course, because if you are not an Excel or Sheets expert, you will become one afterward.

This is what concluded the courses I had the chance to listen to this week. Next week I’ll come back to you with more details on block 4, because actively, I finished block 3 out of 7. I am very happy with my progress so far.