CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review Part 3
This is part 3/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Institute growth marketing. I will be posting a new part every week.
CXL Institute offers some of the best online courses and industry-recognized certifications for those seeking to learn new technical marketing skills and tools highly useful to growth professionals, product managers, UX/UI experts, and any other marketing profile looking to become more customer-centric.
I was given an amazing opportunity to access and review one of their online course tracks, the Growth Marketing Minidegree. For the next few weeks, I’ll be discussing the content of the course as well as what I think of it as I go through it. Here is part 3!
In this blog, I am going to review the last courses of the third module — Data and Analytics.
Both the courses that I am going to talk about in today’s blog is taught by Chris Mercer.
This is a comprehensive training program that will give you the theoretical knowledge and empirical know-how to get started with Google Analytics. It will help you get started with your Google Analytics data to improve product, marketing, and strategy decisions.
Without the right data — and the ability to understand it — you’re blind when you don’t have to be. Google Analytics is the world’s most popular digital analytics tool for a reason. Using it enables you to start focusing on the right stuff and allocate marketing resources wisely.
With this course you will learn to start measuring what matters, and be able to answer specific business questions using Google Analytics.
For those of you who have a basic understanding of Google Analytics, I would suggest that you skip the lessons and take the test directly. If you are a beginner, you would find these lessons extremely useful. If you have already worked with Google Analytics before, you will already be familiar with the topics covered in the lesson.
The basics course would cover:
- When (And When NOT) To Use Google Analytics
- Where GA Fits in the Measurement Ecosystem
- Installing Google Analytics
- Using the Google Analytics Demo Account
- Different Types of Reports in Google Analytics
- Dimensions & Metrics
- A Tour of the Features Available in Reports
- Structure (Account / Property / View)
- Managing User Settings
- Creating Accounts, Properties, Views
- Purpose of Real-time, Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversion reports
- Getting started with Account, property, view, and filter settings
- Understand How GA Records Traffic — the defaults and customizations
- Events and goals
The master class is advanced and covers specific usecase. You will start learning about cleaning data and then move on to removing internal hits, cross-domain tracking, and so on.
After that, you will learn about data interpretation funnel tracking and introduction to segments.
In this 16-class program, you’ll learn how to:
- Master attribution so you know exactly how your channels work together and how your users convert.
- Get 10x more out of the basics you already know: custom dimensions, custom metrics, event tracking, etc.
- Draw out advanced insights from your content analytics, form analytics, social analytics and PPC analytics.
- Produce enterprise-level reports using Data Studio.
- Unlock all of the potential of enhanced ecommerce to make smarter product, placement and promotion decisions.
The third course in this module is on Google Tag Manager.
Google Tag Manager is an essential skill of any technical digital marketer or analyst. Google Tag Manager is a tag management system (TMS) that allows you to quickly and easily update measurement codes and related code fragments collectively known as tags on your website or mobile app. Once the small segment of Tag Manager code has been added to your project, you can safely and easily deploy analytics and measurement tag configurations from a web-based user interface.
Once Tag Manager is installed, your website or app will be able to communicate with the Tag Manager servers. You can then use Tag Manager’s web-based user interface to set up tags, establish triggers that cause your tag to fire when certain events occur, and create variables that can be used to simplify and automate your tag configurations.
A collection of tags, triggers, variables, and related configurations installed on a given website or mobile app is called a container. A Tag Manager container can replace all other manually-coded tags on a site or app, including tags from Google Ads, Google Analytics, Floodlight, and 3rd party tags.
In this course, Chris covers the following topics.
- Knowledge of how to use Google Tag Manager to deploy third-party tracking scripts.
- The power to set up tracking without having to rely on a developer.
- A system you can immediately use to make sure all of your tags (HotJar, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc.) stay organized.
- Google Tag Manager is an essential skill of any technical digital marketer or analyst
- Google Tag Manager probably isn’t something that keeps you up at night, wondering where you’re falling short skill-wise. But if you’re in digital marketing, maybe it should be.
When I first started my career in marketing, I would go through tons and tons of blogs to understand what other companies have been doing, to learn the hacks, and to go up the ladder easily. I am sure you have done that too. These are the common mistakes every marketer makes at the early stage of their career. But, two to three experiments down the line you would have come to a conclusion that this does not work for you? Why do you think that is? That is because you don’t know what you are optimizing for. Your experiments will only work if you know what goal you are trying to achieve.
In the next part, I’ll be covering landing page optimization and product messaging.
This is part 1/12 in my series reviewing the CXL Institute growth marketing Minidegree. I will be posting a new part every week!