CXL INSTITUTE DIGITAL ANALYTICS MINIDEGREE REVIEW

INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL ANALYTICS:

This article covers my first-week review of studying Digital Analytics Mini degree at CXL Institute or Conversion XL Institute.

For the past one week, I have been privilege to part of the 2020 beneficiary of the CXL Scholarship to study Digital Analytics. CXL Institute is a leading training provider on all data driven marketing.

WHAT IS CXL INSTITUTE?

CXL Institute is a paid training program institute and it provides mini degrees and online certifications in Marketing. All the programs in CXL Institute are taught by industry leaders and top marketers which makes this platform the most expository and best place to learn marketing.

The CXL Institute provide mini-degrees in 5 scopes of Digital Marketing and they are as follows:

1. Digital Analytics

2. Customer Optimization

3. Customer Acquisition

4. Growth Marketing and

5. Digital Psychology and Persuasion.

They currently have about 48 online courses divided into CRO & UX, Analytics and Marketing.

In this article and my coming articles, I will be purely and majorly focusing on one segment that I was offered a scholarship to learn and that is Digital Analytics.

WHAT IS DIGITAL ANALYTICS.

Digital Analytics is a web analytics platform offered by Google to measure, track and report website traffic. Google Analytics is part of the Google marketing platform and the most widely used web analytics service on the web. There are two different versions of Google Analytics viz: Analytics which is the free version and Analytics 360 which is the paid version and specifically made and designed for large enterprise. Other forms of Google marketing platforms include: Google tag manager and Google Data Studio.

Google analytics does three things primarily.

1. It collects details using tracking codes.

2. Stores the details

3. Present reports.

Google Analytics is incredible in storing information. Tag manager is great in collecting information while Google digital studio is best and great in making reports.

Analytic answers the question about how results come to be. In a world where technological advancement is taking over every sphere including business and education. Many customers are interested in making purchases online, business owners most times are interested in how much money is been generated from the sales made online using one platform or the other; but the link between the customer actions or behavior in product purchase and results which may appear as traffics or income are not really known; and this is where Google Analytics come into play.

Google Analytics helps in measuring the “HOW” which is actually the behavior of customers as they navigate through the blog post or site.

While one may primarily talk about collecting data from a website, Google Analytics can also collect behavioral data from a variety of systems such as mobile applications, online point-of-sales systems, video game consoles, customer relationship management systems, or other internet-connected platforms. This data is compiled into Analytics reports, which the manager can use to perform in-depth analysis to better understand how his/her customers and their purchase journey. From there, the manager can then decide to test out new solutions to improve your business.

Beginners can start using GA by opening an account Using Analytics.google.com. Once the account is opened a tracking ID is generated which serves as the individuals GA ID which can be shared to customers when needed. All activities in the Google Analytic platform can be organized by setting up a Google tag manager.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN DIMENSIONS & METRICS

METRICES: Merices are the numbers you find in the Google analytics thematic areas. It is defined by their labels E.g. User metrics, Revenue, Conversion rate, and active user metrics.

DIMENSIONS: The breakdown of metrics. E.g Google Ads. Revenue.

Different Report Types

1. Home Report. This is a general overview.

2. Overview Reports.

3. Goal Flow Report.

4. Other forms of reports include: Table reports, Auxiliary Reports, and Funnel visualization reports

DIGITAL ANALYTICS IN PRACTICE

Google analytics is practical in its application, for example, a store could analyze geographical sales data to understand if people in certain places buy a lot of shirts and then run additional advertising campaigns in those areas. They could also use analytics to understand how users progress through their online shopping cart. If they notice that users have trouble with a particular step on their website, they can make changes to the site to resolve the problem.

Different kinds of businesses can benefit from digital analytics:

? Publishers can use it to create a loyal, highly-engaged audience and to better align on-site advertising with user interests.

? Ecommerce businesses can use digital analytics to understand customers’ online purchasing behavior and better market their products and services.

? Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with potential leads.

THE PROCESS OF COLLECTING ANALYTICAL DATA

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles it into useful reports.

Tracking a Website

To track a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a small piece of Java script tracking code to each page on your site. Every time a user visits a webpage, the tracking code will collect anonymous information about how that user interacted with the page.

For the Google Store, the tracking code could show how many users visited a page that sells drinkware versus a page that sells houseware. Or it could tell us how many users bought an item like an Android doll by tracking whether they made it to the purchase confirmation page.

But the tracking code will also collect information from the browser like the language the browser is set to, the type of browser (such as Chrome or Safari), and the device and operating system used to access the Google Store. It can even collect the “traffic source,” which is what brought users to the site in the first place. This might be a search engine, an advertisement they clicked on, or an email marketing campaign.

It is also worthy of note for a Google Analytic Manager to keep in mind that every time a page loads, the tracking code will collect and send updated information about the user’s activity. Google Analytics groups this activity into a period of time called a “session.” A session begins when a user navigates to a page that includes the Google Analytics tracking code. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. If the user returns to a page after a session ends, a new session will begin.

PROCESSING AND REPORTING

When the tracking code collects data, it packages that information up and sends it to Google Analytics to be processed into reports. When Analytics processes data, it aggregates and organizes the data based on particular criteria like whether a user’s device is mobile or desktop, or which browser they’re using.

THE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT STRUCTURE

All of your Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under an “Organization,” which is optional. This allows you to manage multiple Google Analytics accounts under one grouping.

Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts, while, medium to small-sized businesses generally (only) use one account. When you create an account, you also automatically create a property and, within that property, a view for that account. But each Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property can have multiple views. This lets you organize your Analytics data collection in a way that best reflects your business.

The Google Analytics Account determines how data is collected from your websites and manages who can access that data.

VIEW SETTINGS

Just as each account can have multiple “properties,” each property can have multiple “views.” You can use a feature called Filters in your configuration settings to determine what data you want to include in the reports for each view.

The view level also lets you set Google Analytics “Goals”. Goals are a valuable way to track conversions, or business objectives, from your website. A goal could be how many users signed up for an email newsletter, or how many users purchased a product. We’ll discuss Goals and Conversions in a later lesson. Be thoughtful when setting up your accounts, properties, and views, because you can’t change data once it’s been collected and processed. by Google Analytics.

Some important things to note about views includes:

1. New views only include data from the date the view was created and onwards. When you create a new view, it will not include past data.

2. If you delete a view, only administrators can recover that view within a limited amount of time. Otherwise, the view will be permanently deleted.

USER PERMISSIONS

You can assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or view level. Each level inherits permissions from the level above it.

For example, if you have access to an account, then you have the same access permissions to the properties and views underneath that account. But if you only have access permissions for a view, then you won’t have permission to modify the property or account associated with that view.

HOW TO SET UP ACCOUNT VIEWS WITH FILTERS

To see what views are currently available for a property, click the “Admin” tab at the top. Then, under View, click “View Settings.” You can see that when you first create a property, Analytics automatically sets up an unfiltered view called “All Web Site Data.” This contains all of the raw, unchanged data you collected for the property. We recommend changing the name to “Raw data,” so you’ll know that the data hasn’t been filtered. To change the name, we’ll simply type in the new name. Now click “Save.

Setting up a Test View

Next, we’ll set up a “test view” to test our settings. If we configure something incorrectly, we may inadvertently lose data we want to collect. So it’s best to test all of our configurations in this test view first.

? To set up a test view, at the top left, click the view selector pull-down menu.

? Then select “Create new view.” We’ll name this view “Test View.”

? Now click “Create view.”

Notice that we are now in the “Test View” for this property. We recommend adding a setting to the test view that filters your data for automated bot and spider traffic.

? For this Test View, select “View Settings."

? Then we’ll scroll down.

? Under “Bot Filtering,” select “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”. This will help filter out bot traffic.

? Now click “Save.”

Creating a Master View

Next, let’s create the Master view. This will be the view that we use to do all of our reporting and analysis. We can simply copy the test view and rename it.

? To copy the view, in the top right corner click “Copy view.”

? We’ll rename the view “Master View.”

? Now click “Copy view.”

If you go into the View menu, you can see that we’ve successfully copied and created this new view. By copying the view, all of our settings and filters we created like excluding bot traffic will also be included in the new view.

Adding Additional Filters

Now we have three views that can be used to back-up our data, test new analytics configurations, and do our daily reporting and analysis.

But we still need to add filters to determine what data we want Analytics to display in each view. We’ll first set up a common filter on the “Test” view to exclude internal IP traffic. That way, we can measure online Google Store behavior strictly for external customers, without any employee influence.

Analytics offers two kinds of filters, “Predefined” and "Custom" Filters.

Predefined filters are templates for the most common filters you’ll use while Custom filters let you design a filter to include, exclude, or modify data.

Note that the filters that will be created afterwards will show up in the list of filters.

Once you have saved the filter that is applied it to a view, Google Analytics will check the IP addresses of traffic to the web property and exclude those that match the filter. It will take a little time for the filter to catch all of the traffic. To test that the filter is excluding internal traffic, click Reporting. Then, click “Real-Time” in the left-hand navigation. Next is to click “Overview.”

This will show up a report of real-time traffic to your website. If you’re on your internal network, it will be noticed that your internal user traffic will decline over the next 30 minutes. Once the filters have taken effect, Analytics won’t collect any internal activity for the IP address that has been filtered. Once you’ve verified this filter is working in your test view, you can add it to your master view. Click on the Admin tab again. Then select the View pull-down menu.

Select the “Master View.” And then click “Filters.” Then click “Add Filter.” Now, instead of “Create new Filter,” select the radio button for “Apply existing Filter.” This will allow you to select from a list of filters you’ve previously created. Click Save. Afterwards, you can see that the filter is applied to the “Master View.”

Note that if you apply multiple filters to a view, each filter will be applied in the order they ap

pear in your filter settings. So if you have two filters, the data

will pass through the first filter before passing through the second. So be mindful of the order in which you apply your filters. It’s that easy to create or add predefined filters to views to make sure you’re collecting and protecting the data you need.

summary, Google analytics can be a great tool in the digital market space as it will go a long way to boost the Global Market Economy.

That is all for this week, and I strongly recommend Digital Analytics and other CXL Institute courses to anyone who wants to get better in marketing.

See you next week.

By Okpuna, Ogbonna Gideon

Public Health Analyst.

Borno State Emergency Routine Immunization Coordination Centre (BOSERICC)

Maiduguri, Borno State Nigeria.

[email protected]