Be Data-driven seriously (CXL week 3 review)

As my journey with CXL progresses, the harder it gets (and we’re only in the third week!).
In this article, I want to focus on the third module of the Growth Marketing mini degree by CXL Institute about data and analytics.

About me

Hello, my name is Michele Rosa, I’m from Italy, and I’m a young growth marketer, who is interested in innovation, marketing, and technology!

About this series of reviews

This series of reviews (12 articles) will be focused on the Growth Marketing Minidegree of the CXL Institute, where I will write about my opinions about the mini degree and my weekly learning.

I learned about the CXL Institute through a search on Google and when I came across the number of well-qualified professionals that studied and teach there, I was very excited to start my studies there too!

I’m super excited to be sharing my learnings, and this week, I had the privilege to learn from two men I’ve admired so much through their works and writings. They are Peep Laja and Ton Wesseling.

About CXL Institute

If you’re zapping within the Digital Marketing world for a while, chances are that you’ve heard of CXL Institute. They offer marketing training courses taught by the top industry practitioners in CRO & UX, Analytics, and Marketing. Their in-depth programs are true gold for those who’ve grown tired of poor quality marketing content out there.

Successful businesses work with CXL Agency to identify growth opportunities, understand their customers, and keep increasing their revenue, thanks to the different services they offer, such as Revenue optimization, Customer research, Analytics Implementation, and Digital Intelligence.

But let’s not get lost in small talk, and go back to talking about the mini-degree.

So, this was the third week of the program and I want to explain to you what I learned.

Ready? Let’s start.

The topic: Data and Analytics

There are two Google Analytics courses in the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Program: for Beginners and Intermediate. So, what you will learn during those courses?

First of all, you will get knowledge about the structure of Google Analytics, including the admin section (account level, property level, different views). You will understand the importance of having multiple views (production view, testing views, backup view).

Then you will understand how to use reports, and how to get started at the back end of Google Analytics, how to set up the account, the property, and the view.

In conclusion, you will learn how to find answers through:

1. Funnel tracking (different steps and different styles of funnels in Google Analytics, including the funnel visualization report, goal flow reports, creating tables);
2. Segments (built-in or your own segments and sequences);
3. Custom reports.

Source: Google Analytics Demo Account

You will also learn tips and tricks that you could use for Google Analytics. So that includes things like using dashboards, safety reports, alerts, your own channels.

You will learn how to use multi-channel funnel reports, which is a whole new aspect of Google Analytics and allows you to see things like assisted conversions, last-click conversions and how your traffic sources and channels are actually interacting together to cause certain results.

Multi-Channel Conversion Visualiser. Source: Google Analytics Demo Account

There is a lot to learn, especially if You are new to Google Analytics, but it is worth the effort.

And remember to follow the next steps:

1. Practice
2. Stay connected with the Google Analytics community
3. Stay curious and play with it
4. Keep growing your skill sets
5. Test yourself

Things I’ve been able to do immediately

I have a few websites under my sight. I started with the biggest one and oh boy, I found pretty serious areas of opportunity. I will list the mistakes I found and how I was able to correct them.

• Just 2 Views. Yes, I only had 2 views and none of them were for testing or for storing raw data. So I put that in order and created 2 more views!
• My UTM tagging was not that bad, but it needed some twitches. I changed my campaign parameters to get the most of the Campaign report of GA. I also changed the source naming, because I was making the mistake of naming it a thing that wasn’t on GA database.
• My referrals were all over the place. I was the textbook example of the guy who has like 4 different Facebook and 3 different Linkedin’s. So I followed the steps to group the sessions. My next goal is to learn regex and do this on my own, yay.
• I applied the lowercase filter on almost everything.
• I’ve already had excluded the internal traffic
• My site has a search bar, I wasn’t tracking searches.
• I spotted some event tracking opportunities on my site. I guess the next step is to actually know how to do it with GTM (the next course!).

Conclusion

The content is incredibly thorough and in-depth, and the value of the course highly compensates for the rushed pace. The lessons are highly practical and applicable in the real world, as the instructors are top-notch leaders in their respective fields, having a lot of real-life examples to share. The curriculum looks extremely diverse and I’m looking forward to diving deep into areas I may not be an expert in.

As a way to stay accountable, weekly, I’ll be sharing key takeaways from the program here on my blog on Medium.