Review: CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing 5/12

This is my review of the 5th week at the CKL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing. For me this week was very special, because even though we’re still in the lockdown I was much more motivated and engaged in studying than the weeks before. I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do with the fact I’m working at a really exciting project at the moment and it’s also a start of the holiday season, which makes all of us a little happier and more motivated.

Also, I’m really fond of the topic I was studying about, which makes it way easier to stay motivated through the whole week. I gained a lot of new knowledge and I’m really excited to use it at my work in the nexk months/years.

In this week I focused on the track 3, Data and analytics, which serves as a crash-course in the data analytics skills. I found the whole track very well structured, informative and I learned tons of new things. I was really happy for the course about Google Tag manager, since it’s one of the things I don’t know much about, but I’m very interested to learn more about it/use it more at my work.

The Google Marketing Platform has become the industry standard when it comes to understanding user behaviour on the web, and the insights derived from Google Analytics inform hundreds, if not thousands of business decisions every day.

Google Analytics can make many junior marketers weak in the knees. If you don’t know your way around GA, it’s all tables, graphs, strange headers, and headaches. Although I shouldn’t pick on juniors — I distinctly remember a former boss once telling me she was glad I’d recently started work at that particular company, since it meant that she didn’t have to look at Google Analytics any more!

And while digital has a leg up on traditional marketing when it comes to tracking direct interactions with users — measuring the effectiveness of campaigns is still a major challenge for many teams. Maybe it’s because it’s not something you’re generally taught on the job or at university, or maybe it’s plain intimating if you’re not comfortable working with numbers, but it is one of those tools that you need to know how to use in order to fast track your career in digital.

At the same time, you’ll also need to know how to analyse the data at your disposal, and how to create and revise strategies by the numbers — not just regurgitate them in your reporting.

But aside from the Google Analytics Academy, with its cute little videos and occasionally outdated exam questions, where can you go to learn more about GA?

Track 3: Data and analytics

Track 3 at the CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree is focusing all around data. Now that you’re up and running when it comes to planning your experiments and running your A/B tests, the next series of lessons are there to serve as a crash-course in the data analytics and analysis skills you’ll need to map out and optimise for your KPI’s. The core idea behind the unit is that you’ll learn more about the data you have at your disposal, and how to understand consumer behaviour, in order to enhance your growth marketing strategy and drive value for your organisation.

What you learn over the track 3?

• Google Analytics for beginners — analytics reports, event tracking, and behavioural data analysis
• Intermediate Google Analytics — attribution, custom reports, and data audits
• Google Tag Manager for beginners — tracking, tagging, and the data layer
• Attribution — consumer behaviour, analytics, and tactics for various channels

A Tactical Training Course

CXL offers tactical training courses — so you’re only a few videos away from starting to use your own Google Analytics data to improve product, marketing, and strategy decisions. It’s not just theory that you might or might not use one day.

The overall value of the Growth Marketing Minidegree is clear when it comes to the data and analytics courses — you’re basically watching over the shoulder of one of the world’s leading Google Analytics experts, from the comfort of your own home. If you don’t know which stages of your checkout cause friction, why your bounce rate on your blog is so high, or how you can leverage advanced segmentation to get closer to your customers, listen closely to Chris Mercer.

Mercer is great on camera — his GA and GTM lessons are incredibly easy to follow, and he can hold your interest while discussing normally dry topics. When you’re ready to go beyond the basics, you can’t go wrong with Mercer’s tips and tricks lessons. If you want to get 10x more out of the GA basics you already know: custom dimensions, custom metrics, event tracking, etc. — then checkout the Intermediate Google Analytics lesson videos. This is where you’ll really start to master attribution, understanding exactly how your channels work together, and how your users convert.

Key-takeaway

When a user engages with a business or a brand, there’s plenty of data within the Google Marketing Platform to help you understand the value of that individual, at the time of their visit. This is the sort of data that powers conversion rate optimisation, bid optimisation, and personalisation, so you need to know where to find it, how to ensure that it’s as clean as possible, how to read it, and how to present it — to get to grips with the fundamentals of growth marketing.

As I said already at the begining of my blog post, I found this track extremely useful and also well-structured, because sometimes, specially for the beginers, it’s difficult to follow along with really advanced material on data analysis (Google Analytics). I’m positive now I’m capable of using both — Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager — at my work at much higher level than before.

I can easily say, this is so far the best and the most useful track at the CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth marketing. Congratulations on the great study material!