Sid Learns Data Analytics — DA Minidegree Review — CXL Institute

As a marketer, I can’t stress more on how important experimenting is. Be it your copy, your creative, your landing page, even the way your CTA button looks lol ( Making it sticky, colour changes and so on xD )

But it’s only with constant experimentation and validating different hypotheses that you will reach or even exceed your business objectives. This week for me was a marathon of experiments. As an agency for our clients, we had a list of hypotheses and “hacks” we thought would work to boost conversion rates and even to improve WoM from our audience.

While some of these brought us tons of insights ( I prefer not to use failure ) some of them were just right on point and have propelled us in a direction that we never thought was possible!

Well I guess these small wins are the things that brought me to Marketing and these very small wins will keep me going as well and I’m sure it’s the same for you as well ;)

During these small experiments over this week, something which came up, again and again, is measurement and why and how it’s the most vital thing when it comes to having an online business. CXL Digital Analytics Mini Degree for me has been a game-changer in terms of how I look at collecting and reading Data and I can’t recommend this enough for beginners who want learn and grow!

That being said you can find my learnings for this week summarised below-

Getting to Know GA: Acquisition Reports

Acquisition reports help us to understand “Where” the user is coming from? These reports essentially help us to understand how are the visitors discovering the Business. Like every Report in Google analytics, it has an Overview which summarises the channels, Behaviours, and Conversions (Goals).

The main channels 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.

Behaviors include bounce rate, pages per session, average session duration) and Conversions include Ecommerce Metrics such as Transaction, Revenue, Conversion Rate and Goals setup for your Business eg. Signing up a Form.

Source/Medium help us understand the quantity and quality of audiences and their behaviors. Source/Medium can also be read as Brand/Type which means that Brand is where the traffic is coming from and Type is the Kind of audience eg. Google/Organic, Direct/(none), Google/PPC, etc

Mercer mentions that a lot of times, the checkout pages or Shipping Tracking Pages are recorded as the Referrals, but essentially referrals are supposed to be other websites that redirect traffic to our Business, Hence we need to remove them and add them to the referral exclusion list

The Campaigns reports help us to understand which Paid Campaigns such as Facebook or Google Ads which fulfilling our goals and KPIs.

The other reports which need to be synced first for enabling them in analytics are Google Ads and Search Console. Syncing the Google ads can answer some of the important questions regarding the Traffic from different kinds of campaigns such as Display or Search, making it easy to compare and choose the correct placement and optimize our Paid Campaigns.

The search Console report gives us access to our performance on Search Engines, through search term queries we can understand what our visitors are looking for.

Getting to Know GA: Behaviour Reports

Behavior reports help us to understand “What” actions are the visitors taking. It gives you an overview of page views, unique page views, average time spent on each page, bounce rate, and exit rate. It can be drilled down with a secondary dimension.

As these reports give data about each Page URL, it is very important to take a plunge into these reports with specific questions you want to answer, or else it gets pretty overwhelming.

Implementing the same rule, Mercer Explains the difference between Bounce Rate and Exit Rate. Bounce rate is dependent on the entrances i.e it is the bounce of the entrances (first landing page of a session) whereas the exit rate is the percentage of users exited at the end of the session and is dependent on Pageviews.

To use the Events report, the events need to be fed, Google analytics doesn’t track automatically. We can use tag manager for setting up the events.

Getting to Know GA: Conversion Reports

These reports answer what are the “results” of our users. We have 3 main sections i.e Goals, E-commerce, and Multichannel Funnels.

Before accessing Goal reports, we need to make sure to create goals.

The goal URL reports show the Landing Pages on which the Visitor was when the Goal was fired and the Reverse Goal path backtrack to the journey of the visitor before goal completion i.e it shows the URL of pages visited earlier. The Funnel Visualisation is an invaluable report which shows the no of users on each funnel eg: To buy a product the user goes through Product View, Add to Cart, initiate Checkout, and Purchase, we can understand the percentage of abandonment through this. The only limitation of this report is the lack of a segmentation option.

Moving on to E-commerce, this report is important for Businesses selling products online. This report emphasizes how each of the products is performing. it is to be noted that Shopping and Checkout Behaviour is only available, if you have selected Enhanced eCommerce, it does not appear in Standard E-commerce.

In the last section i.e Multi-channel Funnel, Mercer discusses the importance of Assisted Conversion, this was a pretty interesting topic. A lot of times our paid campaigns efforts get attributed as Direct or Organic, because commonly the attribution is set to last click, so assisted conversion attributes how much of the revenue is assisted by our different efforts.

Getting Started: Account Settings, Property Settings, and View Settings.

This is the most basic yet important and powerful learning before indulging in analytics because if the settings are wrong or missing, the whole analysis is misread and misleading. I shall be shedding light on the keynotes to take care of in each level of setting.

Getting Started: Filters — The Basics

Filters can make or break your reports, they are powerful yet dangerous. Hence always test your filters in the Testing View. This is a very wide topic and the most interesting of the topics I learned this week. Mercer explains the basics of How to use filters and why we need to use filters. I learned how to make the data clearer and also some minor sacrifices to be made to achieve them.