CXL Conversion Optimization Minidegree Review — Week 4

Unfortunately, the fourth week of my time with CXL Institute’s Conversion Optimization Minidegree didn’t go as smoothly as I hoped it did. I didn’t manage my time well and haven’t progressed as much as I’d like to.

However, a promise is a promise, so here we go. Week 4 brought me to:

• Influence and Interactive Design by Dr. Brian Cugelman
• Google Analytics for Beginners by Chris Mercer

Let’s begin with the smaller module: Influence and Interactive Design.

This lesson gave you a pretty solid model you can use to structure your buyer’s journey and the ideas to use to direct your prospects through the journey. It also gave you a pretty good overview of what kind of message you need to form to create an impression on your prospect on each step of their journey.

The second lesson for this week is Google Analytics for Beginners.

I’ll be honest here.

This module is a monster to tackle. There is a lot of information you need to process, and there are a lot of things you need to try for yourself to really get the lessons.

Unfortunately, I’m only halfway through this course, so i can’t give you the full review of this lesson.

Just know that it’s a very detailed course, with a lot of practice needed to make the new information sticks.

Fortunately, the lessons involved are also very practical, and they’re more like over the shoulder tutorials than theoretical lessons so far.

The Google Analytics for Beginners module is divided into 5 sections:

• Getting to Know Google Analytics
• Getting Started
• Understanding Traffic
• Understanding Results
• Analyzing Reports

The sections up to Getting Started is just an introduction to the features available in Google Analytics.

Let’s leave the meatier parts, Understanding Traffic and Understanding Results, for next week when I have more things to say about them.

Before we delve into getting to know google analytics let’s talk about what Google Analytics actually is.

Google Analytics is a service part of Google Marketing Platform used to collect, store, and present data from websites.

While it can do all three, Google Analytics is exceptional at storing data. The other two functions, collect and present, have a better alternative you can use: Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio, respectively.

Since this is an introductory section to Google Analytics, you won’t learn much about those services. But, it’s good to know that these three services working in tandem will get you a much better system than Google Analytics alone.

If you have an existing Google Analytics account, you can poke around in your own account as we go so it’ll make more sense.

If you don’t, Google Analytics provides a demo so you can still look around and try to make sense of the story behind the data. You can find the link to the demo here.

Let’s start with how to read reports in Google Analytics. The three main types in Google Analytics are:

• Table report is what you’ll mostly be staring at when working with Google Analytics. As with common tables, you can pick the date range you want to show, as well as other dimensions you want to relate to.
• Overview report gives you the state of your website in one screen. It’s not a comprehensive report by any means, but it’s plenty if you just need a quick update.
• Goal flow report is one of the rarely used format, but it’s often used to see how a user interacts with your website, so it’s a good format to understand.

The categories you can sort your data by is called the ‘dimension’ while the values are called ‘metrics,’ just in case you find yourself in a heated discussion between two analytics expert.

Another thing you want to practice using is segmentation. For most reports, you’ll be able to segment your data. By segmenting your data, you’ll be able to find different perspectives on what happens to your users as they go through your website.

Next up, we’ll enter the Getting to Know GA section, which introduces the types of reports we can see through Google Analytics.

There are five categories you can choose from. Each category excels at answering one question you might have when poking around Google Analytics.

1. Real time reports allow you to check whether or not your analytics is working. While it’s not useful to make most important decisions, you can use real time reports to discover issues with your tracking so you don’t lose valuable data.
2. Audience reports give you an insight into who your users are. Although, the term ‘user’ is a bit misleading, as what Google Analytics tracks is mostly their user ID or the device your users are using. However, a cross-device analytics called Google Signals is also available.
3. Acquisition reports give you the origin of your users. Or namely, where your traffic is coming from. You can also use acquisition reports to analyze campaigns and channels directing traffic to your pages.
4. Behavior reports let you know what actions your users are taking. You can see the bounce rate, entrance, and exit statistics for all of your pages and identify issues with your pages. You can also track specific actions, such as playing a video or submitting a form. Although, you have to set the events up manually if you want to use it.
5. Conversion reports stores the results of actions your users take. Reports in this category include goals, e-commerce, and multi-channel funnels. Goals give mainly gives you an insight into the steps (pages) your users take to achieve the desired action and where they did it. E-commerce focuses on your monetary gains. The enhanced version contains the shopping behavior and checkout behavior reports that’ll show you the percentage of your visitors go through the whole process. The last one, multi-channel funnels, lets you see the contribution of each page to your total sales or clicks, including assisting pages and final ones.

This introduction to Google Analytics is quite overwhelming for someone who doesn’t use it often. However, introducing the features before getting into understanding the insight behind the trend is very helpful to familiarize yourself with Google Analytics.

Now that Week 4 is over, I’ll most likely spend Week 5 catching up to my initial goals (finishing the ‘Foundations’ chapter).

In the future, most probably when I’m finished with the minidegree, I’ll try to restructure the article so that you can find the Google Analytics module within one article.