DIGITAL ANALYTICS MINIDEGREE / CXL — BLOG 1

In the Digital Analytics Minidegree blog series, I will try to share with you what I saw while learning with CXL’s Digital Analytics mini degree. Each week, I will post a blog post that explains my journey through the course content, what I have learned, and the key takeaways from the content.

About CXL

CXL Institute is one of the leading training paltform especially related with the data-driven marketing. You can learn more about CXL by navigating to this page.

About Digital Analytics Minidegree

The Data Analytics mini degree at CXL is a program to learn in depth skills for the Google bases analytics tools to become a data-driven specialist who can set up any needed tracking and turn data into insights and actions to make website / application better. You can learn more about the mini degree by navigating to this page.

Let’s start the course!

Topics Explored in Week 1:

1. Analytics in general
2. Google Analytics 4 and it’s new abilities

Analytics in general

We will start with understanding what Analytics is actually. Analytics is about tracking the metrics that are critical to your business. It is related to find, interpret and draw patterns to get certain insights into the data that we are looking at.

For websites your top KPIs would typically be:

• Conversion rate
• Revenue per visitor
• Revenue per visit
• Average order size
• Average items per cart completed
• Checkout abondonment rate

If you want to create a robust and successful marketing strategy by looking to the historical and real-time data, analytic tools help you in that way. Google Analytics is one such tool that we would discuss in this post.

Google Analytics in perspective

For someone who owns an online e-commerce website or maybe a blog should be interested to know who is visiting the websites, what sort of interactions they have and how they behave on the pages. A visitor’s journey from a simple google search to buying a specific product on the website can reveal great insights that can be used to optimize business processes. Google Analytics is a tool that can help us capture, store and analyze this type of information.

In the first step of the CXL Digital Analytics mini degree program, the changing face of Google Analytics meets a course trail about GA4. Google Analytics is a part of Google’s Marketing Platform. The Marketing Platform has various tools that can be used — like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, Surveys etc. GA, GTM and GDS when made to work together can prove to be very beneficial for a company’s web analytics.

At 2020, Google Analytics has released a new version, they left the Universal version it has been working on for years. Thanks to this course, we see that there are many differences in this version compared to Universal Analytics.

We will talk about GA4 and it’s capabilities in this blog. But before starting I want to explain the working system of Google Analytics.

How does Google Analytics work?

Google Analytics puts lines of tracking code into the code of your website which records various activities of the users when they visit a particular website and captures different attributes like age, gender, interests etc. It would then send all that information to the Google servers. This data would then be aggregated in multiple ways and can be accessed from the Google Analytics account.

What Is New In GA4?

In this section, I will briefly talk about the changes and features of GA4 in the course.

Universal analytics was measuring only pageviews by default but GA4 measures lots of features by default such as pageviews, downloads, clicks and other events. GA4 uses a new event driven data model which is going to require you to add new tags on your website.

At universal analytics, typically you can only measure users by the default client ID or with first party cookies. For cross devices you have to implement your own user ID. GA4 will use your user ID first, and if it’s not available it falls back on your client ID.

When we compared the realtime overview GA4 has lots of features according to the universal analytics. One of the best feature for GA is Debugging Mode. With this mode you can see your changes at the same time with the preview mode from GTM or with the Google Analytics Debugger extension.

Reporting

Universal analytics has a standard report schema with the graph and table. But for GA4 there is not a standard for reports, some of them have just tables and some of them have just a table. But you can customize the visualizations according to your strategy. Universal analytics reports start sampling you whenever you want to add a second dimension. However, with GA4, sampling only takes place in the analysis module.

Universal analytics has a limit like 10M hits for a month but GA4 is limitless and free.

All the attribution models for GA Universal are last-non direct,however you can change your attribution model with the GA4 for all of your models.

Analysis Module

One of the best parts of GA4 is the analysis module for funnels, paths and segmentation. If you want to measure something with funnel there are lots of options with default templates. For now you can’t create a template but I hope they will support this in the future.

On the funnel, paths and graphs if you make right click you can view users and create segments. On the analysis tab you can have multiple tabs at the same time. There is a new option for funnel and it is called open funnel. With the open funnel users can enter your funnel on any step and you can change this feature just by a toggle.

Elapsed time shows the average time on specific steps. If you wonder about the next step after your specific event you can make it on. And you can look at your funnel, path analysis by backward. You have the option to undo or redo your changes.

Segments & Audiences

Segmentation is a way of grouping the data. Basically, it’s the subset of the data based on the criteria that you set. If segments are not used, the user would view the data in its entirety. GA4 has a new feature called Audience Trigger. And it allows you to create an event when users enter the specific funnel. With GA4 you can create specified segments and use them in any report.

• You can create audiences from audiences page.
• You can create ad-hoc analysis from analysis hub.

For example, segments for an e-commerce website:

a. Users who added a product to the cart, but did not make a purchase

b. Users who completed a purchase

c. Sessions that included a view of a specific page lets say the product catalogue.

From the data collection area you can enable Google signals. Data collection helps you to personalize your advertisements. After 2 months, raw event tables are not available for GA4, that’s why you need to change that time according to your strategy.

GA4 is quite new for now, but it excites me with its different features. I think that in the coming time, Google will cut its support for universal analytics and focus entirely on GA4 and that all digital analytics will occupy a big place in the Google world.

The following sentence is from the course, but I liked it very much and I would like to share it with you.

Always keep in mind that when looking at a metric, ask yourself, “what will I do differently based on this information?”.

1. Look at the data per segment.

2. Look at distributions

See you next week,

Mert Kolay