CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree Review #12

It’s been 12 weeks and I’ve finally reached the end of the digital analytics program. I have finally received my degree and I’m really satisfied and happy about it. For months, I’ve been looking to learn digital analytics. It was hard and I couldn’t find any good courses on web/digital/marketing analytics. Somehow I miraculously stumbled up on CXL’s scholarship program for the digital analytics course. I signed up and got into it and the rest is history. I always wanted to learn about data and marketing. I always had an interest on how marketing data works. How to obtain our data. and how to use it. How can we get insights from our data and take actions upon it. I wanted to learn design, marketing strategies and analytics. This program has taught me a lot of stuff. I need to review and practice everything again.

Being a data driven and analytical marketer is something that I’ve always struggled with. I didn’t know where to start and this degree program has taught me all the basics of web & digital analytics. It gave me a good start. This course had intermediate and advanced level things like Google Analytics tag manager, big query. There are alot of courses in this program and I’ve spent more than 50+hrs in watching the videos and taking the quizzes. The exams were challenging and made me have to go back to my notes and rewatch the videos. I really had to put effort and study to pass the digital analytics degree.

There were parts in the course and 13 courses.

1. Google Analytics

• Google analytics for beginners and intermediate Google Analytics taught by Chris Mercer. Learned everything from filtering, Regex, cross domain tracking, segmenting, ecommerce, conversion tracking, plus many more.
• Google Analytics Audit taught by Fred Pike. Learned on how to audit, diagnose and fix Google Analytics issues for websites. Learned how to audit websites and see what companies are doing in tracking their web visitor’s actions.
• Using analytics to find conversion opportunities by Jeff Sauer. Was able to identify conversion opportunities with GA. Somethings that I’ve learned in this section were setting conversion goals, filters, segments, event tracking and evaluate traffic and audience.

2. Presenting Data- Here I learned how to present insights from data.

• Excel & Sheets for marketers by Fred Pike. This course was wonderful for me since I’ve been out of touch with sheets and excel. I was able to learn on how to find actionable marketing insights and see what marketing opportunities are there for growth. I was able to use both excel and sheets to go deep into Google Analytics and search console data.
• Google Data Studio by Michele Kiss- I learned to create impressive, insightful and time saving reports with this free tool. I learned how to create dynamic dashboards for marketing reports. Very flexible and there’s so much you can do with the data.
• Big Query by Krystyna Grynko- Learned how to automate insightful reports with Google’s analytics data warehouse. This required some SQL knowledge and was challenging to understand. I’ll need to learn and practice SQL.
• Facebook Analytics by Chris Mercer- Learned the basics of Facebook analytics and how to create funnel reports, figure out LTV and measure outcomes from Facebook posts. Learned some good info here. I’m a bit more comfortable with running facebook ads now.

3. Google Tag Manager- The most challenging section I woud say.

• Google tag manager for beginner by Chris Mercer. Learned the fundamentals of Google Tag Manager. Learned how to do basic trackings and 3rd party script implementations.
• Intermediate Google Tag Manager by Chris Mercer. Learned more advanced data measurement capabilities of Google Tag Manager.
• Advanced Google Tag Manager by Simo Ahava. Definitely to most confusing and hardest course to understand and do. Highly advanced level of GTM that requires development skills and knowledge to do more advanced level GTM tracking. I still need to learn javascript before I can go deep into this stuff.

4. Attribution- Learning more about what attributes to an organizations marketing.

• Attribution by Russell McAthy. This course helped me understand what data we have and how to understand consumer behavior and drive value for organizations. This course goes over customer life cycle, actions and lifetime value. It goes deep into what causes customers to convert. I learned different attribution models that show how and what emphasis there should be when tracking consumer actions.

5. Final Exam

This is the final exam that covers everything that I’ve learned throughout this program. There’s a lot of questions and took me a few tries to finally pass and get my certificate. Now I’m finally proud receiving it. I’ve put it in my LinkedIn profile. Hopefully that’ll make me stand out as a top 1% marketer. I want to be comfortable with digital analytics and use my skills and knowledge that I’ve learned in future projects and even in jobs. I still need to practice and hone my skills. I want to be able to help businesses generate more conversions and sales for their company. This is just a starting point. I’ve learned the basics and some intermediate and advanced level stuff.

I would say Chris Mercer has been to most engaging and easy to follow through. All the instructors were good but Chris definitely had to most energy and I felt he went through a good pace. Fred Pike as well. My goal is to someday become knowledgeable like these instructors. They have done some amazing stuff. I’m still early in my career and I’m still learning a lot. I have ways to go in order to become a digital analytics expert but now I have the foundations of becoming one. I’m going to go over everything I’ve learned and put everything into practice. I thank Peep Laja and CXL institute for this learning opportunity. I’m glad they exist and it has helped me a lot.

My goal is to be able to help small, medium and enterprise level companies with their analytics. I want to be able to analyze and help e-commerce stores and mobile apps get more users, sales, etc. by using the knowledge that I’ve learned in these courses. I still need to learn programming languages like JavaScript, SQL, and get better with Sheets & Excel to go to the next level. My ultimate goal is to become a product marketer/digital analyst & conversion optimizer.