Statistics and Intro to Google Analytics (Review)
While continuing my journey of learning growth marketing through CXL Institute, during the last week I went through the fundamentals of statistics for testing and am about halfway through Google Analytics for Beginners courses. This will be my review of what I’ve thought about this course thus far and my overall impressions.
Statistics Fundamentals for Testing
This course was taught by Ben Labay and it was a pretty simple fundamentals rundown of statistics principles that you should know for A/B testing and what you should be looking out for. Some of the ideas that Ben went over included 1st principles like what is power, variance, standard deviation, and more. I won’t be going over the content of the course since it was a quick 30-minute presentation, but in my honest opinion — I learned more in these 30 minutes about power and standard deviation than I did in my entire course on statistics in college. Ben did a really good job explaining everything in simple terms. The videos were broken down into 3–5 minutes each and went over different principles that you should know to understand the next. Very straightforward.
The only critique I have so far isn’t related to this course in particular, but rather the overall structure of the growth mini degree. I personally feel like it would make more sense to go through the Statistics Fundamentals course before diving into A/B Testing mastery since it gives you a clearer understanding of what the theory is behind the lessons in A/B testing mastery.
Getting into it — Google Analytics
The third section of the mini-degree program is focused on Data & Analytics the the first course is all about Google Analytics. I’m about halfway through the first course with Chris Mercer and so far, this is possibly one of the best introductions to Google’s suite of programs I’ve ever seen. The way that Chris lays out the lesson and walks through each part of the course makes a lot of sense. So far, the way that it has been introduced is just getting familiar with what Google Analytics is and does. One of the best things I think that Chris does is that he makes sense that you can follow along with Google’s Demo Account on Google Analytics (which I had no idea existed). Another thing he does is go into his own account and show you things that you can’t see through the Demo account.
Breaking it down, the way Chris presents the content is in sections that are individual parts of GA. So in this case, he goes over the basics, using reports, admin, real-time reports, audience reports, acquisition reports, behavior reports, and conversions reports. In total this course runs about 9–10 hours but the way that it’s presented makes it feel like it’s going by much quicker than that.
Before going into it, Chris gave a really nice introduction to the distinction in Google’s products (Google Analytics, Google Tags Manager, Google Data Studio) and what purpose each of them serves. Going into it, I always wondered what the differences here were and I never quite got it until Chris drew a visual that showed each of them as having a function. The way that he broke it down was that Google Tags Manager is best for collecting information, Google Analytics is best for storing it, and Google Data Studio is best for making reports and analyzing that data.
As you’re going through all of the parts that Chris is talking about, he’s also showing each of these sections in the video. This makes it super simple to follow along on your own demo account. It’s also interesting to compare and contrast how the data has changed over time, but it also gives you a good hands-on experience of the platform. Chris also reinforces this by encouraging you to go and play around with the section that was taught every time.
After a rundown of each section, we then continue on into how to set up each of the parts in your own account and what some best practices are. For example, one of them mentioned was creating a “dummy” GA ID and using the second one you create as the actual ID. This avoids spam and bot using your ID.
One of the other parts I really like (overall) about the Growth Minidegree is that Chris mentions that one of the best ways to collect information is through Google Tags Manager. So, while this course is strictly about Google Analytics, one of the next courses in the roadmap includes Tags Manager (which will make a lot of the functions that analytics isn’t great at, available).
Overall Impressions
My overall impressions of this course thus far continue to stay the same as before, to be honest. I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the content up to this point and I only expect it to be better from this point forward.
As I was going through these individual courses, I realized that this was something I wish I had seen in college. A practical, up-to-date (in the marketing world) course of how to actually use the tools that marketers use on a day-to-day basis and make decisions. Thinking back to getting a degree in Marketing in school, I don’t recall having any real useful and immediately applicable courses taught there, and everything was wrapped in “theory” rather than application.
It’s courses like these from CXL Institute that honestly make me consider the changes that have to happen, especially in higher education. When such high-quality products are available and taught by some of the best and most experienced professionals, how will higher education compete?
Closing
Simply put my experience with what Ben and Chris teach over the past week has been nothing but positive, easy to understand, and fundamentally well constructed. The way that the content is structured is easy to understand and makes it very approachable to get a handle on some of the most complicated tools like Google Analytics without having to gather scattered information from 15 different videos on YouTube to understand one concept.
