CXL Institute Conversion Optimization Minidegree Review (5/12)

This is a fifth of a twelve-part (5/12) review of conversion optimization mini degree by CXL Institute. They offer multiple programs that help you get to an advanced level in digital marketing and offer industry-recognized certificates after program completion. In this review, I will revisit the Google Analytics course for beginners.

Google Analytics gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your business in one place and helps you get a deeper understanding of your customers and website performance. With the help of Google analytics, you will be able to track important information about your audience such as demographics and devices they use, how they interact with your website, where they come from, and so on.

All of this data that is collected helps you in making a better business decision and creating a hypothesis to test to increase your bottom line.

Google Analytics will help you answer these questions:

• Who are your users?
• Where are they coming from?
• What actions are they taking?
• What are the results of all those actions?

Google Analytics is just one tool offered by Google and it can be used as a standalone tool, but the best way to use it is to combine it with these tools.

• The tag manager is incredible in collecting data.
• Data studio is incredible in reports.

Google Analytics is incredible in storing data that is collected through tag manager and sending it to data studio.

When first setting up your google analytics account you should understand the hierarchy:

• Organization
• Account
• Property — usually a website or mobile application, you can have multiple properties if you have multiple websites or apps that are connected together and you want to track your users across all of them
• View — it is a way you structure and sort collected data so you can make decisions faster

Usually, the master view is broken into 5 types of reports:

1. Realtime
2. Audience
3. Acquisition
4. Behavior
5. Conversions

1. Real-time reports

Real-time reports are useful to see if your setup is actually working!

You can do segmentation in real-time. You can go to pages and if it is only 1 user you can see which pages he is checking out.

2. Audience reports

Audience reports answer these questions about your audience:

• Who are they?
• What tech are they using?
• How old are they?
• Who are you talking to?

Another important report you can use is mobile under the audience section. It will show you which device your visitors are using to view your website.

For instance, if more visitors are coming from mobile devices than desktop, you need to make sure your website is optimized for mobile

3. Behavior reports

Using behavior reports you can understand what your users are doing on your website and how they move through it.

Behavior flow visualizes the path a user follows from one page to the next or from one event to another. A path can be multiple page views or just a single pageview during a session. The reports help you identify the most engaging content on your website as well as identify problem areas and potential content issues.

You can set up custom events that you want to track. Events are specific actions users are taking and they are custom added. By default, google analytics will not track that. The best way to do this is to use tag manager.

4. Acquisition reports

The Acquisition section tells you where your visitors originated from, such as search engines, social networks, or website referrals. This is a key section when determining which online marketing tactics are bringing the most visitors to your website.

The main channels you’ll come across are:

• Organic — Traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
• Referral — Traffic from another website besides search engines.
• Direct — Traffic from users typing your domain into the browser.
• Social — Traffic from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.

5. Conversion reports

The conversion section report is used to summarize your conversion performance.

It is split into these sub-sections:

• Overview
• Goal URLs
• Reverse Goal Path
• Funnel Visualization
• Goal Flow
• Smart Goals
• Multi-channel funnels

And if you have eCommerce, you will have that sub-section as well. Also, you can set up enhanced eCommerce reports.

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce enables product impression, promotion, and sales data to be sent with any of your Google Analytics pageviews and events. Use pageviews to track product impressions and product purchases, and use events to track checkout steps and product clicks.

GOAL URLs — whenever google analytics records the goal, it will show you what page they were on. For example, if someone clicks a link on your page that is set as a goal or lead generation form, it will say where that goal was completed.

Reverse Goal Path — will show you pages (3 steps deep) that users visited before they completed a certain goal.

Funnel Visualization — they are used when you push visitors through a specific flow on purpose. For example, you can track how many users visited your home page and then visited a certain product page, and how many from those who visited that product actually made a purchase.

Multi-channel Funnels — you can view which channels assisted in conversions by contributing at least once during a user’s path. Assisted conversions show us which channels appeared on the conversion path, but was not the final conversion interaction. Is the channel more of an assistant or the leader? If the rate is towards 1, it is equal between the two. The closer to 0, the channel is the leader, which is the driving force that converted a user. Whereas a rate above 1 indicates that the referring channel was more of an assistant in the path where it only influenced the order.

My thoughts

It is week five and I have currently completed 31% or 10/32 courses. Thank you for reading about my experience with CXL Institute. In the next part, I will cover the landing page optimization course.