Digital Analytics Scholarship @ CXL Institute — 3rd Week Review

It was my third week in the program and I had to listen to tips from Jeff Sauer. He is one the most known google analytics tutors and I don’t know why I haven’t learned things from him. It is needed to say that I have watched this course before and am watching it again to find out if I am wrong on this. Let’s dive in.

3- Using analytics to find conversion opportunities by Jeff Sauer

• The first thing that you need to pay attention to is traffic sources. Simply go to the acquisition report and check if the incoming traffic makes sense. If you are paying a lot for paid search or facebook advertising, you have to see them in the reports.
• Just take a loot at the data and ask yourself this simple question: does it make sense? You know what is funny? I’m watching the course from Jeff Sauer and I’m mentioning things that I’ve learned from Chris Mercer.
• Jeff told us that if we don’t have access to a website in order to install google analytics on it, we can use the demo version that is related to Google Merchandise Store.
• Mr Sauer says that the most valuable report in google analytics is the Source/Medium report. He is not the only one who says this, because I have heard this from Annie Coushing and Chris Mercer as well. I have one simple question? Why do they all think the same way? Are they copying from each other? I don’t know.
• Jeff said that you have to first look at the data and see which channel is converting better than the others. It is a good indicator to understand whether a channel is performing well or not.
• And after that, you have to look at the average and compare each channel to the average. Is it performing below the average or above it. Knowing about all of this will help you make better decisions.
• Some metrics are important and some are not, but you have to always put everything in a context and only then decide how you should think about them.
• Almost everybody thinks that a high bounce rate is bad for websites. But is it? Is it inherently bad? The answer is no. for example somebody arrives at your dictionary website and finds the meaning of a word. What do you expect of him or her? The question has been answered and he / she doesn’t have anything else to do on the website.
• But low income is something that is inherently bad. Everybody knows that 100 dollars is less than 200 dollars. So when you know this, check the monetary value of your pages and see what you can do to make them perform better. Find the worst pages and look for ways that might result in better performance. I know that this might be simple in words and difficult in action, but we need to think about these things constantly.
• Raw data might be valuable, But segmented data is valuable for sure. Data should speak to you and it won’t, unless you put it in a context. Whenever you look at the data, you need to be able to compare their performance from different angles. Nobody can do that without segments and filters.
• Google analytics is full of resources that let you play with data and make it more meaningful. You can use primary and secondary dimensions in order to understand things like top landing pages, best campaign sources, devices that outperform others by type and a lot of other things.
• And after that, you have something great at your disposal named segments. With segments, you can look at the data with even more granularity and extract more interesting data out of them. Using system segments and the ones that you can personally create, no data and number will remain meaningless in google analytics.
• Your website has multiple goals that need to be met. Usually these goals consist of micro conversions and these micro conversions are supposed to eventually result in a macro conversion. You need to understand that these steps should be looked at in order and as a funnel.
• Every funnel has certain steps and sometimes, these steps may result in a leaky funnel. Sometimes a lot of people will enter your funnel and very few of them find their way down the funnel. This is what we call a leaky funnel.
• Every marketer including you and me should be able to distinguish between the steps that lead to a conversion and try to understand what steps have the most amount of friction.
• Setting goals and measuring funnel steps are key to measuring a successful website.
• How much do you know about segments in google analytics? I personally know that they are very powerful and capable of doing a lot. But whenever I try to use them, they look and feel not intuitive. They are kinda not my type!
• But we can compare for example mobile and desktop traffic with each other to find out what devices are performing better than the others. But as you might know, this is also doable using secondary dimensions. But what about converters vs. non converters? Can you compare them with secondary dimensions? I don’t believe you can.
• And we can build our own segments as well as the ones that are predefined. It is a very powerful part of google analytics and lets you segment your users based on a hell lot of things. When you are building segments, you have to know the differences between dimensions and metrics. You need to know exactly what you want to know about and then go after it.
• In the process of segmentation, you might see that your data has been sampled, meaning that only a part of your data has been used for measurement. It means that your data has a huge scale and free version of google analytics can’t handle that kind of big data.
• Event tracking is kinda the heart and soul of google analytics, in my opinion. It is something that isn’t in google analytics in the first place, but you can add it to the GA very easily.
• Events help you understand how your users are interacting with your pages and their content. Events are very good in tracking user behavior and you can know about their scrolling, clicking, time spent and a lot of other things.
• When you are using event tracking, you can impact your bounce rate. Some events are non interaction and others are interaction based. Please consider this when you want to implement event tracking.
• The last part of this course was about auditing google analytics accounts, meaning it was pretty much the same things that Fred Pike told us in previous courses. Jeff told again that filters, goals, dimensions and admin settings must be checked for any anomalies. Simply put, I didn’t learn anything new in the last part of this lesson.
• So that’s it. Now we have known a little bit about Jeff Sauer and his way of thinking.