A glimpse into Analytics Fundamentals via CXL
Tags: Digital Marketing, Google Analytics

Since the lockdown began in March 2020, I decided to upskill myself in Digital Marketing. I started off by completing a lot of courses in this area and I also stumbled upon CXL. After going through their course list, I decided to focus on the ‘Digital Analytics’ mini degree.

They also have some very interesting courses like the Digital Psychology and Persuasion.

I’ve started the course by going through the Analytics fundamentals chapter. This covers some very basic but important steps in understanding metrics that are crucial to any business.

It’s all about how much money you are making.

So this is very apt for most businesses in the digital space. They are all objective driven eg: to get sales or leads. Avinash Kaushik describes the Goals as DUMB

D — Doable

U — Understandable

M — Manageable

B — Beneficial

Think critically about your business model, and the type of KPIs you need to track.

This chapter goes to list a lot of KPIs we need to take into account. I will not be writing all of them here but just a few that I felt I should keep in mind.

1.Revenue per visit

2.Average items per cart completed

3.Checkout abandonment rate

When we measure KPIs, we get metrics. Some metrics that I’ve also kept track of or seen as a journalist are Bounce rate, exit rate, time to convert, etc.

And then there are Bad Metrics. Yes, you read that right. I feel these can be a bit tricky and would need some insights to understand them. Eg: Our average time on site is up by 30 seconds, so what does this mean and how can one use it from the business objective point.

Now I am moving onto the ‘Google Analytics and this is for 9 hours 17 mins. Quite comprehensive, I must say and I am sure this will be useful to go through and understand.

Going into Google Analytics unarmed is an issue.

The first session starts off with four key questions we need to ask:

Who your users are? Where your users are coming from? Action your users are taking? What is the result of all those user actions?

I agree with the fact that setting up GA is not an easy task since I’ve faced this issues as well.

We learnt about the difference between Dimensions and Metrics. Metrics are numbers so we can say that Page views and page value are metrics but a’Page’ like /home or /search.html are Dimensions. Then we move onto reports. Here we get an understanding of what’s happening with all the dimensions and metrics. I like the ‘user flow’ report as it is a very visual way of understanding a journey of a customer on your site. We are also shown many other reports like ‘Browser & Os’, etc. All of these reports have their own useful purpose and it is important to understand them.

From here (t=15 mins), it was getting a little difficult as we started learning about the 404 pages. (I might go thru this part again later).

We learnt about the structure of GA. How to do a data range search. It does not give the current date as that take some time and the servers could take as little as 30 mins to over a day. Then there is also the ‘Comparison’ date, and how it can be handy when we are running tests. The instructor told us about how many students make a mistake with the data range and that we should ensure that this is correct.

Now I decided to try my hand at the Demo GA account. You can find it here.

The GA account has a real view tab that allows us to see how many active users there are on the site. There are also other dimensions like Location, traffic, etc where we can see or get an idea of other metrics.

I then proceeded to go through the next video. Here, we are learning about the introduction to admin. There are three points discussed here in the structure ie,(account, property and view).

I then went to the admin section to see how to set up an admin account. We can change the account name (in this case it is demo account). If we click on property, we can see all the different properties associated with this account.

Then we move to the view section. If we go to User Management, then we can see that we don’t have complete access to this account.

You have access to this account, but you don’t have permission to manage this account’s users. Without user management permissions, you cannot add/remove users or change other users’ permissions. To manage this account’s users, one of this account’s administrators must grant you user management permissions.

It’s interesting to note that in GA there is no super admin. There is just an admin and that’s all. One place you can check what level of ownership you have is to go to Goals. There you will get a view on what all level of access you have. We also learn how to create and manage a new account. The industry category is an important indicator to select and tells us how we are doing in comparison to other industries.

I found the point about choosing a time zone based on your server interesting because generally I would have done it based on where I am.

Also when you are asking someone to give you access to GA, do ask them to give you access to ‘edit’, ‘Collaborate’, and ‘Read and Analyze’. You should be careful to who you give the ‘Manage Users’ permission as they can remove you from the account and that’s certainly not a problem we want to encounter.

So this is certainly a lot of information to take in. I don’t know how much of this I’ve taken in but let’ see how this goes and we can take it forward from there. Pls continue to watch this space for more updates on learning GA during the pandemic.