If you have a website or blog, chances are you have looked at Google Analytics.
It can be exciting looking at the page views and how many readers use desktop or mobiles. There’s even a map of the world showing where your audience is.
But however fascinating it can be to see which are the most popular pages, how useful are all these numbers, graphs and charts really?
How can we use Analytics to build up our audience or, for a commercial site, increase sales?
Enter Google Analytics for Beginners, a short course consisting of four videos of around an hour and a half each. Also included were downloadable PDFs, documents and PowerPoints with helpful links. At the end is a quiz of 19 questions. You need a mark of 90% or more to receive a certificate, which translates to only being able to get one question wrong. On the upside, you can attempt the quiz as many times as you like, with a 24-hour delay between attempts. While I found several questions easy, some were surprisingly tricky, although they were fair and the answers were all there in the course materials.
Videos
Although the videos take about six hours, I took much longer to complete the course. The videos were presented at a fast pace. During many courses, I can speed the videos up so my mind doesn’t wander. With this course, I had to frequently pause the videos to make notes, and in one section I actually slowed the speed to 0.75 so I could take in the lesson properly. Listening to it made me wonder if the videos had already been sped up.
Each video had about an hour of lecture followed by a Q&A session. They were obviously first distributed as live webinars, then the videos packaged up as a pre-recorded course. Each video had an interactive transcript. The transcript scrolled through as Chris Mercer spoke, occasionally skipping ums, ahs and repeated words or phrases. I found, though, when I searched for particular words or phrases in the videos, that clicking on the interactive transcript did not always take the video to that spot.
UTM Builder/Traffic Tracker Template
Another included resource is a UTM Builder and Traffic Tracker template. This Google Spreadsheet allows site owners to track the sources of traffic to their site and work out the best traffic-producing sources. Which ad led to the most clicks and sales? What email or article brought more new subscribers to your site? What pages do your visitors leave most often (in other words, when do they leave your site and go elsewhere)? Do people abandon the shopping cart mid-purchase? Inspecting these statistics can show you where user problems might be occuring. You then have the chance to rectify any problems and boost both time spent by visitors to your site and sales.
Not a Free Course
Released by CXL Institute, this paid course has no free components. When I signed up on February 26th, I was able to enroll in the single course, which I can still access. Recently, CXL Institute has changed to a subscription basis, with all courses available for a fixed monthly price.
I am glad I took this course, although already some details have faded from my memory.
A Final Thought
I will revisit the course again, so I can keep applying the knowledge to boost both Online Learning Success and Class Central.
By Pat Bowden, published June 11, 2019.
