CXL Series: Basics Of Google Analytics
Part 1 of a series of 12 posts that will document my progress, learnings, and discoveries from the Digital Analytics mini degree at CXL Institute.
Over the next 12 weeks, I’ll keep you updated on my progress on the Digital Analitycs mini degree at CXL Institute.
Why? You may ask. Well, I’m doing this because in my journey of becoming a better marketer I came across CXL. Of mere curiosity, I enrolled in the 7-day trial and started the “Conversion Optimization” Minidegree.
It left me hooked. I was amazed at the level of detail, but more importantly the hands-on approach of their courses.
When my trial ended, I wanted to keep going, and for my luck, I found out about their Scholarships program. Obviously I applied.
Part of the process is to write a weekly article discussing the learnings of the week. It’s kinda intense, but the opportunity of learning is worth it. This is exciting for me for 2 reasons:
- I will practice my writing.
- I like to share what I learn. It gives me a sense of deeper understanding.
I expect this to be exciting for you because I will try to share my learnings in the most interesting way possible, always keeping it concise and detailed. You’ll have 48h and 29min of content at your disposal.
So I hope you join me in this deep learning journey through marketing analytics. I’m sure we will finish with something valuable that will enhance our ways as marketers. After all, analyzing data is (or should be) the core of what we do.
This first post will be more sided on setting the ground. I will talk a little about CXL and the content of the course. I also will cover a little about me, why I took this course and my inner motivations. Later on, I will share my learnings on the firsts lessons of the course. You’ll notice this won’t be very heavy on content, I’m still adjusting day to day itinerary, but stay tuned for the next ones!
First of all, what is CXL?
CXL provides courses and resources from the top 1% of practitioners as instructors. It is a skill-building platform designed to develop individuals or teams in their desired marketing field. You can learn more about them and their philosophy here.
They provide structured on-line education programs called mini-degrees. As for this day, they have 6:
- Content Marketing
- Conversion optimization
- Customer acquisition
- Digital psychology and persuasion
- Growth Marketing
- and Digital analytics
I chose the last one.
Why digital analytics?
I think that to truly grow, you have to drive results, but you can’t drive results if you don’t understand the analytics behind them and what you want to achieve. As I dive more and more into my career, I came to realize the power of data. It’s overwhelming, but exciting too. We have a sea of data at our hands we can use. And I believe it’s the core of every great strategy.
Also, I use Google Analytics on a daily basis for work. Everything I’ve learned until now is because of the Google Certification and hands-on experience. I work in the B2B field, and I notice a lot of gaps in my reporting or things I’m aware I’m not diving enough. For this reason, I know I need the knowledge to successfully execute my vision.
On the other hand, even though I know a handful of things, I know I can improve.
This week was pretty much introductory to Google Analytics. The course indulged in its set-up, and the reports that are part of it, some valuable hacks and tips to keep your GA account neat. So here we go.
The firsts steps for a successful Google Analytics Account
The basics: What is Google Analytics? Why do you need it?
Google Analytics stores all the information you want about what your visitors do on your website. It STORES data. Basically it helps you to answer, what are my visitors doing on my website? Is it what I want them to do? Moreover, it also gives you valuable insights on WHO your visitors are.
To answer these big questions, there are many tools and reports to visualize the information.
The structure of a GA account and how it works.
For GA to work, you got to do a little set-up first. Data is recollected when you put a GA tracking code into your website. Without this piece of code, there won’t be data available.
The interesting part is that you can track almost everything, but you need a piece of code to track the action you desire. Let’s say, clicks on a button, video views, sales, lead forms sent, and so on. For this task, Google Tag Manager comes very handy, but we won’t be covering it in this post.
So, returning to GA. How you set-up your account depends deeply on your business and goals. So I’ll cover very quickly how a GA account is structured.
There are 3 levels: account, property, and views. To put it simply:
The account level is the higher on the hierarchy, thus it comes with an overall visualization of the brand/company/business. It can contain, as many properties and views as you need. It’s like a box with the name of your brand to keep things organized.
The property level is where you set-up the GA tracking code. You’re most likely to have one code per website, so in properties, you’ll see the websites within your account (brand, business).
The view is where you finally see the data. Here you actually see the reports, numbers, traffic sources, and so on. A view can be set-up to meet your data-needs for a specific team.
To put it more clearly:
I own a retail corporate business, called “X”. I have 2 main businesses, one where I sell clothes called “Sunshine Shirts” and another one where I sell women’s shoes, called “Cactai Fashion”. We are the same team managing different brands.
I have 4 websites: sunshineshirts.com, blog.sunshineshirts.com, cactai.com, and blog.cactai.com. This is how I would set it up:
Account: I would just set up one account because that’s how my business is structured, the 2 brands are owned by the same corporate and the data is handier in 1 place.
Properties: I will configure 2 properties. One for cactai and another for sunshine shirts. My marketing strategy, audience, and goals are different for one another, that’s why it wouldn’t be convenient to track them together. The blog for each one is on a different domain, but I need to clearly see how it is working. Setting up another property for the blog, would make it harder to visualize the data.
Views: I would set up 4 views for each property, a Raw data view, a master view, a marketing view, and a finance view. Each one configured for the goals of the user.
The amazing thing is that you can give out permissions to users to access exactly the information you want them to see. Moreover, you can restrict the actions permitted on the account.
There are permissions for:
- Lecture only
- Collaborate
- Edit
- Manage users
For example, maybe the marketing intern just needs access to the marketing view at a lecture only permission level.
The set-up: What do I need to know?
This is the crucial question you must have in mind all the time.
Chris Mercer, the course instructor, makes abundantly clear how we must keep our goal in mind while making the set-up. Sometimes we can get carried away by other factors, but we must stay true to the future functionality of our account. It helps to ask:
- Do I have multiple domains?
- Are they related?
- Am I sending traffic from one domain to another directly?
- Is it easy to understand how the information is stored?
- Is it useful and actionable?
While answering these questions, you can decide on the structure of your account.
View level: The reports.
After you’ve set-up your account, now you can play with the thrilling part: the data. GA has multiple built-in reports, such as real-time, audience, acquisition, behavior, and goals. I’ll put a brief description and use of each one below.
Real-time: As the name suggests, you can visualize the action as it happens on your website. It’s kind of exciting to see but is not very useful for a true analysis or to drive important conclusions. On the other hand, it is handy when you need to validate if something is working, as an event tracking code.
Audience: This report answers the question: who are my users? It provides demographic data, interests, and even devices and OS used to access your site. It is amazing for optimizing your campaigns by getting a clearer picture of who your visitors are, and which of them are converting.
Acquisition: How did my users land on my site? This report helps you understand where is your traffic coming from. It will help you see what are your most successful digital campaigns. You can prioritize work, or focus on a certain source that needs more effort.
Behavioural: What actions took place on my site? A website isn’t useful if my visitors end up doing nothing. This report helps you track that. You can see the flow the visitor took on your website, what pages they visited, and in which ones triggered events.
Wrapping up…
This was an exciting week. It was like a reminder of the nature and structure of a GA account and how it works. As I dive deeper into the course, I expect to be even more specialized. So let’s keep going!
