CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree Review #5
By: Newaz Chowdhury
Tags: Google, Bigquery, Google Cloud Platform, Analytics

Can’t believe it’s been 5 weeks already since starting CXL’s Digital Analytics Course program. These few weeks have flown by rather quick. I’ve learned a good amount of data and analytics stuff. It’s been a lot of challenging information so far. Definitely trying to put everything that I’ve learned so far into use for my clients and projects that we’re working on. I know I have to go over these videos/courses and continuously practice getting better. I have no knowledge of SQL and in this program this is the first time I’ve heard of Google Big Query. SQL seems like a very important and useful skill to learn to analyze data. This course was intimidating and hard to follow. It was a challenge to follow Khrystyna Grynko. She seems very bright and knows her stuff well. It’s interesting how she began her career in this. She’s a self starter and learner. Just like me, I’ve learned everything through online courses, articles, blogs, e-books, etc. Learning programming on my own is very hard. If she can do what she did all on her own, It motivates me that I can do the same. I had absolutely no prior knowledge of SQL or Google Big Query. So this course was one of the tougher courses for sure. A bit of a learning curve. My goal is to become an analyst. I want to handle marketing data and be able to calculate things like cost per acquisition, Lifetime value, total new customers, conversion rate, average value order, and most importantly, ROI. Obtaining data analytical skills is crucial to knowing your numbers and running marketing campaigns and running a business. This is where I fall short in and this course is making me learn all that.

Analytics was always something interesting to me and intimidating at the same time. I love to figure things out and solve problems especially when it comes to making marketing & business decisions. But sometimes I can get intimidated, confused, lost, etc. when I’m looking at a very large data set and I have no clue what this data is about. I’m trying to practice more and look into data even more to overcome my doubts and get more experience. This is one course that is slowly making me more comfortable working with data and analytics. Big Query is a really cool tool and it seems like you can do a lot of data analysis with this. I learned that it’s a great tool for consolidating all my data in one place. I can automate my marketing reports. Google Big Query is part of Google Cloud Platform. It’s a complete data warehousing solutions. It’s great that they have a free tier version of it.They have a sandbox where you can use sample data from Google Analytics. Learning Google Big Query is a major step on my road of becoming a data driven marketer. I want to get into analytics and business intelligence.

Google cloud platform seem popular and is growing a lot. I’ve been hearing it more often now. Khrystyna gives a quick intro about Google Big Query’s interface. I learned some good info on what I need to use as a marketer and don’t have to worry about the other functions. In Google Big Query, I can import data from CRM, Google Sheets, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google Data Studio and much more! You can load data manually or you can use API or client libraries. It’s crazy what you can do with this tool. Another amazing Google product. Khyrstyna quickly goes over of what the entire Google Cloud platform can do. Google services for BigQuery data import include transfer services, analytics 360, cloud storage, cloud data flow and cloud functions. It’s amazing how much Google Cloud and Big Query can do. A lot of features and functions. I didn’t know at first but Amazon has their own data warehousing via Amazon AWS as well as Microsoft with their Azure platform.

Khrystyna showed in the course how to fill in your data source and destination information as well as connecting your Google accounts. I’ve learned how to import/transfer data, check run history and more. I learned that I can delete/pause data transfer at any time. Big Query allows me the ability to manipulate my data and customize it. It can be used to create customized solutions for website and apps. You can use it for deep analytics, which is my goal on using this platform. Google cloud dataflow is a cloud based data processing service for streaming data applications. it enables developers to set up pipelines for integrating, preparing and analyzing large data sets. There’s a lot of things that I don’t understand about big query but I’m going to make it one of my goals to learn this platform.

As much as I don’t like coding, the SQL in the course didn’t seem too bad. I really have to go over and practice many times that’s for sure. Khrystyna does some programming and shows how queries are formed. She goes over views and some other Google Analytics data. She talks about joins, tables, nested fields, partitions, just to name a few. Not too difficult to understand. It gets complicated when she starts using more formulas and symbols for data analysis. Big Query has a lot of flexibility. You can pretty much use it for any solution and use case. I’ve learned to build marketing reports with big query and google sheets and google data studio. I learned how to connect big query data to non google tools. Pretty amazing stuff. In order to create automate reports using google sheets and big query is that you need to have a data connector. Unfortunately, you need to have the premium version which is called Google G Suite, which I didn’t have, so I couldn’t do this in the course. Khrystyna loves using the tool OWOX BI. She prefers this and talks about it multiple times in the course. I had the opportunity of obtaining this too long time back.