CXL Institute — Using analytics to find conversion opportunities and Excel and Sheets for marketers — review
When we learned about the basics of Google Analytics and Google Tag manager then we need to know what to do with that data. Google Analytics cannot do everything for you. You need to know what you want and what are your goals.
First, you need to start to be familiar with Google Analytics. You can download the Google Analytics Demo account so you can practice apart from your own site or client’s site. It is important to explain some basic terms like bounce rate and page value and why it is important for our growth. Page Value is the average value for a page that a user visited before landing on the goal page or completing an Ecommerce transaction (or both). This value is intended to give you an idea of which page in your site contributed more to your site’s revenue. If the page wasn’t involved in an e-commerce transaction for your website in any way, then the Page Value for that page will be $0 since the page was never visited in a session where a transaction occurred. A bounce is a single-page session on your site. In Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, such as when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.
In this course, analytics expert Jeff Sauer explains these terms so well, and you can comprehend everything. All the metrics matter, but we need to know which ones are most important. Also, he talked about traffic, and we can check that in the Acquisition area and press Overview and we can see all the channels, where our views come from.
We have some conversion opportunities. First, we need to see how users arrive on our site. Second, where users land. Third, the structure of the landing page. Fourth, each step along the sales funnel. And fifth, identifying shopping cart problems.
And, again, I need to stress that everything is showed in Universal Analytics, but despite the differences between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, you can learn a lot of things that you can use in both analytics tools.
Also, Jeff explained the benefits of segmenting the data. As in Google Analytics is written: “A segment is a subset of your Analytics data. For example, of your entire set of users, one segment might be users from a particular country or city. Another segment might be users who purchase a particular line of products or who visit a specific part of your site.
Segments let you isolate and analyze those subsets of data so you can examine and respond to the component trends in your business. For example, if you find that users from a particular geographic region are no longer purchasing a line of products in the same volume as they normally have, you can see whether a competing business is offering the same types of products at lower prices. If that turned out to be the case, you could respond by offering a loyalty discount to those users that undercut your competitor’s prices.”
Everything is here explained, what you can do, what is a segment, and how it helps. But in this CXL course, you have examples, and analytics expert Jeff Sauer showed in a simple way everything you need to know. And final, auditing your data and checking the numbers of your goals, and if needed make micro-goals.
Once we have learned how to see our metrics and goals in Google Analytics, we need to know how to export these data, so I decided to take the course Excel and Sheets for marketers. I think that a lot of people have fear of Excel and Sheets, so do I, but after this course, a lot of things will be more understandable and clearer. I admit I had problems with functions and it takes a little bit of time to understand everything, so you need to practice. Every lesson has resources with examples of the work that is done in every lesson, so you can go slow and easily and understand what is all that about. Instructor Fred Pike explains everything well, and also I was shocked when I saw how fast he type. It was very interesting to see :).
Aside from how fast he is typing, he is also a good instructor. Some things he explained in more ways so you can take what is more simple for you and use what fits you more.
First, he showed us how to download data from Google Search Console, which applications he used, how to make filters and sort the data. Also, we used SUM commands, like SUM which sums everything, SUMIF which sums based on one condition, and SUMIFS which sums based on multiple conditions. It is not difficult just take the time and repeat the action again and again. Also, the COUNTA actions are very similar to SUM commands, we have COUNTA, COUNTIF, and COUNTIFS.
But, I need to stress that your Excel file or Sheet needs to be clean and neat, so, take care of headers and columns. Then we set pivot tables that are very useful, and use filters and slicers in the pivot table. We also can download data from GA Merch Store and play with that data and see how to remove duplicates (in an easy and difficult way).
We can do a lot of things in Excel and Sheets like Vlookup, use Index and Match formulas, string formulas ( Len, Substitute, Find, Search, Mid, Left, Right). So we need to say what is string. Strings are text, so when you have an address, when you have names, when you have a URL, all that is a string or is text, and there are a number of functions within Excel that you can use to address that string or that text.
Probably I will need more time to learn everything about Excel and Sheets because of the number of functions, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. But I do not want to make this scary, just take the time, practice, and follow CXL courses and you will be on the top of the mountain called Digital Analytics.
If you want to explore our world of CXL Institute and try yourself, you can find all of this in the Digital Analytics minidegree program.
