Do Online Technical Marketing Courses Deliver Real Value?

CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review – Part 12 of 12

Founded by Peep Laja, an entrepreneur who was voted the most influential conversion rate optimization expert, CXL Institute is an online platform offering a range of technical marketing courses designed to equip students with the knowledge they need to be ‘the best’ at their craft. 

The Institute prides itself in giving learners access to teachings from practitioners who are in the top 1% most successful in the industry.

I was given the incredible opportunity to complete and review the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree. Over the next 12 blog posts I will be sharing my opinions and learnings from the 33 courses (111h 41min) making up the Minidegree.

At the end of this journey, I hope that you will be well equipped to make an informed decision about whether or not online technical courses are worth your time and monetary investment.

Welcome to the final week!

Google Analytics for Beginners - Chris Mercer

Without the right data and the ability to understand it, you are blind when you do not have to be. Google Analytics enables you to start focusing on the right stuff and allocate marketing resources wisely.

Google Analytics is part of the Google Marketing Platform. The free version has a limit of 10 million hits a month, above which you would need to use the paid Enterprise version.

Google has done an amazing job of giving us free access to the Google Merchandise Store demo account. It shows data for their actual transactions and is a great place to familiarise yourself with the many functions of GA.

Whilst this is a broad topic, I will focus on the reports available in GA.

There are three main report types on GA namely:

Home Report 

Table Reports

Flow Reports

I will detail some of the most interesting reports you will use for your business.

Realtime Reports

The purpose of Realtime Reports is for testing. You can get a wide range of information including:

• Location
• Goals
• Pages that users are currently on
• Specific behaviours being tracked in the form of Events
• Traffic sources that users are coming through

The limitation is that you cannot see trends, for pageviews, the information collected goes out of the report after 30 minutes.

For this reason, you should not use Realtime reports to make meaningful decisions other than debugging or verifying that something is tracking the way you think it is tracking.

Audience Reports

These give you very specific answers about who your users are. You can find information about where they live, the languages they speak, age, and gender.

This information is all anonymous, you will not be looking at a specific user. There is no personal information allowed in GA. Instead GA gives you anonymized client IDs.

Acquisitions Reports 

The reports are there to answer the single question of ‘Where are my users coming from?’ You can get very specific details of where users are coming from based on the Source/Medium report, based on how you are tagging your traffic. You will be able to see which channels are bringing the most traffic.

Behaviour Reports

Behaviour reports provide answers to what actions your users are taking. You will get information about bounce and exit rates, see what pages users are seeing first, and be able to determine which landing page is generating the most in terms of transactions.

Conversion Reports

The purpose of these reports is to provide information on the results of all of my user’s actions. You can see what goals are being achieved, get a rough idea of the path that led to that achievement and you can get a specific idea of the actual steps that were required to achieve it.

When using this in eCommerce, you can see how a sale was made.

The multi-channel reports will give you an idea of how different traffic sources are working together and which ones are assisting in conversions, and which ones are the last known traffic source before the conversion.

Chris goes on to demonstrate how to set-up an account, the property and the view settings. You can customise the views with particulate filters to make sure that you have a good story in your GA. Linking other Google products to your GA can make it even more powerful. 

The GA intermediary class dives further into the functions of the platform and how you can tailor it to answer your business questions.

I would definitely recommend both these classes for an expert understanding of this powerful tool.

Google Tag Manager for Beginners - Chris Mercer

The modules on GA will mention Google Tag Manager quite a bit so I am happy that CXL Institute provides a stand alone module on it.

Tag management systems help you get greater visibility into what buttons your users are clicking, how much time they are spending on each page, and what specific behaviors they are taking on a particular page.

This information can be sent to GA. What is great about Tag Managers is that you can train them. For example, you can say, well, if somebody plays my video, and then does not buy it, then I want you to fire a pixel off to Facebook so I can re-target those people on Facebook, or even Google Ads. 

If you are using PayPal, you can use GTM to implement your PayPal script so that you don’t have to worry about going to your developer to pop code on pages all the time.

The Tag management system provides a control panel to collect and take various actions based on the behaviours happening on your site.

The Google Tag Manager is completely free and it integrates with all things Google. You can also use it with third party platforms.

GTM collects data which it then sends to GA, GA will store the information and then report on it.

You can use GTM for almost everything. The only exception is split testing scripts.

Chris goes in depth into all the elements of GTM. I will discuss a few of them below.

Tags

The tag is basically the script. The most useful way to think about this is to think of what you want GTM to do. You want your GTM to go tell this platform or that platform what is going on.

GTM is putting scripts on the different platforms at appropriate times and firing the different things that it needs to fire so that the platforms know what is going on.

Triggers

The best way to think about triggers is WHEN you want GTM to take an action. We need to give GTM direction as to when to fire tags. For example, you can say when a user plays a video on your website, GTM should go ahead and tell Facebook and Analytics that that event occured.

Variables

A variable is information that GTM needs in order to do its job. The tag is what GTM needs to do, the trigger is when GTM should take that action, and a variable is just information the information GTM will need to perform the task you need it to.

Data Layer

Sometimes as you are going through Tag Manage and as different behaviours are happening, you need to be able to temporarily store those details somewhere so that you can reference them later. An e-commerce transaction for example.

You want to be able to store details of an e-commerce transactions long enough that you can send them to all the different platforms that need to know about the different details.

The data layer is a virtual filing cabinet, a place to temporarily store details that are important to Tag Manager.

Understanding the above gives a good foundation into GTM. It is a powerful platform and this course equips you to begin applying it to your own business.

Taking this course with the GA ones prepares you to manage your data and analytics and optimize your sites for your KPIs.

This brings an end to what has been an informative and enriching journey. I have found immense value in the 33 different courses under the Growth Marketing Minidegree. 

I hope that you have an answer to whether CXL courses are a right fit for you. 

I look forward to applying this knowledge!

CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree 

Part 11

Part 10

Part 9

Part 8

Part 7

Part 6 

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1