CXL Institute’s Digital Analytical Mini degree has become quite helpful in knowing from very little to knowing much more.

As always I start by saying analytics is the sexiest word, for at least the professionals who understand it, most of the students and professionals are following this as a career, rather for the pay than its actual understanding and passion. Let’s not argue over this, since it has lots of points balancing on either side of the equation.

Before I go any further I will just give a brief on myself, I am Nischith a sales & marketing professional working in the health sector. I live in Bangalore India and I am from Mysore, City of Heritage.

The information shared below is based on the learnings from CXL Institute, you need to have a bare understanding of what Digital Marketing or Google analytics is, as CXL themselves say their courses are not for beginners. Let’s dive in, I hope I give you a good insight into their teaching.

In the last week’s review of the whole CXL’s Digital Analytics curriculum, we covered Beginners Google Analytics: Including How Google Analytics Work, Dimensions, Metrics, how to keep data clean, the QIA Framework, GA4 the new Update, auditing Google Analytics, identifying opportunities in Google Analytics, A/B Testing Basics, we will cover the next half of the summary of what is taught in the Digital Analytics Mini Degree.

The next part will be on Google Tag Manager from deploying tools to advanced javascript. We learned why Google Tag Manager is used & how helpful it is to track & analyze the web data.

Here we learned to track Google Tag Manager by Deploying third-party tracking scripts, to set up tracking without having to rely on a developer. and Make sure all of your tags (including HotJar, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, etc.) stay organized.

Google Tag Manager might not keep you up at night, wondering where you’re falling short skill-wise. But if you’re in digital marketing, maybe it should be.

Something to remember the Tag Management System is quite helpful in passing on the codes and info back & forth from different platforms. Through Google Tag Manager even platforms like Facebook, Google ads, or any social medial marketing platform out there can share a script and get various actions tracked.

Basically, GTM is there to collect actions efficiently and send them to the parent platform.

GTM has a few important things you must know,
Tags, Triggers, Variables, Data LayersPage View Triggers: Page View, Window loaded, Click: All Elements, Just Links, User Engagement: Form Submission, Scroll Depth, Others: Custom, History Change, Preview mode in GTM

There were other concepts like tracking video, different page elements,
e-commerce and enhanced e-commerce.

We also understood custom dimensions & metrics, user-id tracking, table variables, event variables, javascript variables, using cookies in GTM and we saw what is GTM API

Refer to this link:

Next, we learned few advanced concepts in Google Tag Manager

  • Understanding the GTM data model, useful Javascript skills, and how to automate tasks using the GTM programmatic API
  • Customizing GTM event tracking to track interactions on a site
  • Customizing your Google Analytics setup using Tasks API, hitCallback, the Google Analytics Settings variable, and regular expressions
  • Ins and outs of the dataLayer in-depth
  • Turning GTM into a true force of power in your data organization

then there was something called a measurement matrix, that teaches a framework that tells you on how to plan and understand the planning pillar and where it fits in QIA(Question, Information, Action), build Tag Manager & Analytics (Collect & Store), report(data visualization to tell a story), forecast and optimize to work together in the implementation.

The next module taken up was how to present the data, crucial and important too.

Tools used in the module Excel, Spreadsheets, Google Data Studio.

Excel and Spreadsheets do almost the same work, we were taught some of the important operations and functions that are quite helpful in analyzing the reports from Google Analytics(for that matter from any platform or trade excel and spreadsheet has been a useful to many in analyzing the data, (people right from an executive to CXOs use excel and spreadsheet to find actionable marketing insights)

Different operations like sort, filter, sum, count, pivot tables, slicers, timeline, text to columns, vlookup, sparklines, conditional formatting, string functions, error trapping in excel.

some of the other functions and operations that are quite useful for marketers are Proper function, Length function, Duplicate removal Operation, Highlighting Duplicates, IFERROR(), Index and Match, Named Ranges

Excel is quite an important part of every marketer in cleaning the data you can also use excel to create visual dashboards like Pie Chart, Scatter plot Chart, Linear Chart etc.,

Google data studio is another way to represent data, building charts and funnel visualizations using different parameters like the page views, bounce rate etc., through dates, filters, control and segments.

Google data studio is a free tool, creating customizable report dashboards with page layout, text, graphs, metrics. It shares interactive and automated dashboards and these reports are shareable through links, emails & scheduled email deliveries.

Another good thing is data studio can be connected to Multiple Data Sources.

The next module on Bigquery, Learning the basics to automate insightful reports with Google’s lightning-fast analytics data warehouse. Getting data into Bigquery and work with data in Bigquery using a query to analyze your Google analytics.

There is also a module on Facebook Analytics including creating funnel reports, the advantages and disadvantages of the LTV report, measure the outcomes from posts on Facebook, and more.

There is another module on Data presentation and visualization, which tells you how the brain science work, how the reports bring in a psychological concept of cognitive load. There are some important points while data visualizations, few expert points on Data storytelling(including how to prepare for a presentation,

Finally a module on how do you attribute data & understand what data is there and how do you understand consumer behavior to help your company move forward.

All the information provided is from the CXL institute’s Digital Mini Degree program.

I thank all the teachers who taught the subject in such a way making it understandable for me all through the modules from the mini degree.

I really appreciate CXL for their efforts in giving me the scholarship to study some advanced stuff.

A special thanks to Mr.Chris Mercer, Mr.Simo Ahava, Mr.Tim Wilson

As all good things come to an end, there is one last thing to say.
I earnestly suggest people in marketing to enroll with CXL.

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Nischith R

Marketing Enthusiast — helping right products and services reach the right people