Sid Learns Data Analytics #2— DA Minidegree Review — CXL Institute

Week 3 of my Data Analytics journey has been extremely insightful! I’ll be honest here, although I’ve been in Performance Marketing for the past 1.5 years I never took GA seriously.

And yes, looking back I do feel bad about it now but I guess in life you live, you learn.

I can’t recommend CXL enough with this course. It has definitely been a game-changer for me.

That being said, this post is just a summary of what I learned this week.

Understanding Traffic: Types of Traffic

To understand where the traffic is coming from, we need to access our Acquisition reports. As discussed earlier in our Lessons the Source/Medium report reveals the Brand and Type of Audience we are receiving eg: Socials, Paid, Organic, etc, and Referral Report states the referral Traffic such as External Websites.

A very important point to note here is that all your traffic should be tagged for better reporting and visualization. A lot of times, we see the direct/none in the source/medium report, this can be a result of various sources i.e emails, affiliates, podcasts, members logging directly, etc, to minimize this, we need to tag our traffic through UTM

Another thing that I found really interesting in the way I look at landing pages on my website is to filter them out using the secondary dimension feature in GA.

Understanding Traffic: Customizing Traffic Sources — Part 1

To customize the traffic we need to Tag the Traffic through UTMs (Urchin tracking module)

There are five different UTM parameters.

Traffic Source — The source parameter allows you to track where the traffic originated from eg: &utm_source=facebook

Medium — The medium parameter tracks what type of traffic the visitor originated from — CPC, email, social, referral, display, etc. eg: &utm_medium=cpc

Campaign Name — The campaign name parameter allows you to track the performance of a specific campaign such as Facebook Ad campaigns or email campaigns eg: &utm_campaign=test

Content — If you have multiple Links directing to the same URL, this helps to identify which link was clicked such as Image 1 or Image 2 in the email. eg: &utm_content=image1

Keyword Term — The keyword parameter allows you to track which keyword term a website visitor came from. eg: &utm_term=tshirt

Google Analytics is Case sensitive, so either make sure that we have all links in lowercase or use a lowercase filter for a particular view.

We can either create UTMs manually or through the campaign URL Builder

Understanding Traffic: Customizing Traffic Sources — Part 2

Finding the Story after collecting the data is important and that is only possible if the data is easily readable and can be grouped to compare.

Understanding Results: Destination Goals

Goals are unique to the View. Goals are 3 Kinds i.e ACE — Awareness Completion and Engage

Destination goals are not just completion goals i.e Purchase or Lead sign up but can also be used for Awareness and Engagement.

The Goals contain Goal setup (Industry template or custom), Goal Description, Goal Details (Type of Goal with match type, Value, Funnel)

There are 3 Match types Begins with, Equals to, & Regular Expression

• Equals to — for standard, fixed URLs
• Begins with — to eliminate trailing URL parameters
• Regular Expression Match — for matching on multiple criteria

How to verify the goal a destination goal

Always use UTM and check the goal firing in the Real-time report

Sometimes the goal takes around 30mins or more to reflect, you can check if your location is visible in the real-time report and if it’s matching the landing page mentioned in the Goal destination.

You can also set up the funnel and this can be view in funnel visualization. please note that the funnel goals follow the match type of destination. It is important to set up a funnel to understand the audience flow and behavior till goal completion eg: Drop off (We can identify the problem pages causing the drop-off and fix them)

Understanding Results: Duration Goals

A duration goal is triggered when a session lasts a specific amount of time or longer. For example, you can set up a goal that fires when the user spends more than 5 minutes on a particular page i.e Blog

Understanding Results: Pages per Session Goals

A page per session goal is triggered when a user views a specific number of pages or screens during a session (e.g. 10 pages or more have been loaded).

Note: If you have a SPA (Single Page application), you need to set up the events for pageview through tag manager as due to no other Page Hits or Engagement Hits, the session time is recorded as 0

Pages per Session goal is useful to understand the engagement of visitors. These do not show up in real-time reports, hence we need to check it in source/medium reports using UTM.

Understanding Results: Event Goals

Events are behavior data points, they are not directly fed to GA and need to be set up. Event goals can be triggered when actions such as “video played,” “slider interaction,” or “social share clicked occur.

The event goal is divided into Event category, Event Action, Event Label. The events are set up through the tag manager.

Eg: I have a video on Landing Page, I can measure the engagement by setting up events through tag manager such as Video played for 10sec, Video Paused, Video Play — 50%.

Once the event is setup up, we can create the goal and when it matches the criteria i.e Category or Action, it gets triggered.

Understanding Results: Ecommerce

Ecommerce reports are mainly two types Standard Ecommerce and enhanced eCommerce. Mercer introduces the concept of FiGS( Find, Grab and Send). we need to make sure that the Ecommerce setting is turned on in our view and also we can use Website Integration apps to smoothly set the eCommerce.

Note: Shopping and Checkout behavior is only present in enhanced eCommerce. Also in Product Performance in Enhanced eCommerce we have additional details such as Initiate checkouts, Refunds, conversion rate.

We shall be mainly using the Product performance report to understand and make decisions on our Products i.e Which are our slow-moving products, what is the source for major transactions etc

Other reports to look at are sales performance, Internal promotion, Order Coupon, Product Coupon, and Affiliate Code

Analyzing Reports — The Basics

Mercer wraps up the course module leaving behind the basic report analyzing framework i.e QIA ( Question, Information, and Action). Before entering GA, we need to ask ourselves specific Questions and then find information based on it and finally take action.

Final Verdict

As a beginners course module, this was a very thought out, Informative, and Engaging module that encouraged the learner not to just skim through the views but practice them. I am determined to ask myself many questions and seek answers to them.