Conversion Optimization Minidegree at CXL — Review Part 6

This week I will cover three courses that are part of the Conversion Optimization Minidegree at CXL:

1. Using Analytics to find conversion opportunities (Jeff Sauer)
2. Google Analytics 4 (Charles Farina)
3. Google Tag Manager for beginners (Chris Mercer)

As you can see from what they’re called it was all about Google Analytics this week. Instructors and information in their courses are all great, but I have realized that these subjects aren’t my passion (yet?), and my ability to learn and fully understand them isn’t as good as I am used to when learning something new. One night I even had a nightmare that students were tested and every single one passed except me :). Anyway, back to being more serious now.

Welcome to the 6th review of my 12-week journey at CXL learning conversion optimization. I will cover the above-mentioned three courses one by one.

Using Analytics to Find Conversion Opportunities

Course duration is about an hour and it consists of 9 lessons:

1. Getting started: using goals to quantify outcomes
2. Evaluating traffic quality
3. Metrics that matter (and some that don’t)
4. Secondary dimensions and advanced segments
5. Spotting conversion opportunities
6. Building advanced segments
7. Custom segments
8. Event tracking
9. Auditing your analytics

I’d say this course is very practical. My notes mainly consist of steps on what to click in GA, what to look at, what it means and some of Jeff’s insights like this one below.

When it comes down to conversion opportunities, everything is one. What page people land on and how it’s structured is a an opportunity. Finding out if there’s a problem with shopping cart is also an opportunity.

Overall it’s a good and very useful course. I loved it.

Google Analytics 4

The course duration is about 4 hours. It consists of 8 lessons and an exam.

The promise is that this course will teach you everything you need to get started with GA4 properties by providing hands-on experience. I am happy this course is part of the Conversion Optimization Mini Degree because I had a look at the new version of Google Analytics earlier and knew I’d need some training. It is very different from the current version of GA.

During the course, I constantly had questions “do I really have to know this” and “but why” :). I understand I’ll have to give it time to practice using the new version. Usually, or so I thought, I’m quick to pick things up, but conversion optimization is a combination of disciplines and I guess it’s not possible to be a natural at them all? Or maybe it is, but it turned out that most likely I’m not one of those people.

About the content and what you will learn

It covers a lot of topics. At the start Charles explains the differences between the current (or now the old 3rd version of GA) and the new version, how to set it up and in general I’d say there’s a deep introduction.

Then there are four lessons about the setup. The instructor shows how to implement GA4 on a real website, how to set up the Admin section, what to pay attention to, how to set up events, conversions, and other components like BigQuery.

After that, there are three lessons about reporting. Standard reporting in GA4 is completely different than in GA3 and one of the lessons is dedicated to cover it. There’s also a lesson dedicated to Analysis. The instructor introduces it as one of the most exciting features of GA4. I personally feel more excited about Segments and Audiences. Since GA4 has brand new functionality for building audiences it was interesting to learn about it and about advanced features, which there was no access to before.

Google Tag Manager for Beginners

The instructor of this course is Chris “Mercer” Mercer. I have talked about how his teaching style is perfect for auditory learners in one of my previous reviews. So besides the fact that Analytics isn’t my superpower he really helped to get the most out of the information he presented. I also hope what he said is true:

It feels really technical and hard. And then you do it once or twice and you see how easy it really is. And all of a sudden, there’s no more intimidation, you understand kind of what’s going on.

Some facts about the course. The length is 7 hours and it consists of 20 lessons and the final exam.

In every lesson related to Google Analytics (outside this course), instructors mentioned that Tag Manager is the way to go about it and I am glad CXL has this course included in Conversion Optimization. I understand why Tag Manager is better in many cases than using GA to collect the data, but I am not so sure if it’s really worth the hustle to set it all up. It might be that I am not convinced, because I don’t feel confident working with it yet. So I’ll see how it goes :)

7 lessons are dedicated to familiarising with it: tags, triggers, variables, data layers, organization, preview mode, and workflow.

3 lessons are dedicated to tracking engagement: clicks & time, scrolls, and Youtube videos.

Then there are 2 lessons about the data layer. I have many questions about why it can’t be automated to the level I wouldn’t even need to think about it :)

There’s a lesson about tracking e-commerce, 3 lessons diving into cross-domain tracking, tag sequencing, and formatting variables.

The last lesson is a wrap-up. Mercer mentions Google Analytics expert Simo Ahava so many times that I will definitely start reading his blog regularly.

Now when you need help, now, this did not say, if you need help, this says when you need help. Everybody needs help. Everybody needs help. I need help from time to time. Guess where I go when I need help? Simo Ahava.

I hope I didn’t sound skeptical. The reviewed courses are great, instructors are true professionals. I just personally don’t feel fully confident in these subjects, so I will dedicate some more time to practice, and also I will think about how to use Mercers advice:

Teach it to other people. Cause when you teach it, you really understand things. And so that’s another great thing to do as well.