Conversion XL — CRO Minidegree Review Week 11/12

This is my 11th week in the Cro Minidegree program as you can see from the title. It’s been rough so far especially since I lost 3 weeks of study due to some events that had happened.

This week I have passed a couple of exams which are Google Analytics for Beginners, Product Messaging (finally!!), and Landing Page Optimization.

I’ve also completed the following courses which I’ll write about in this post and they are:

1. Using Analytics to find conversion opportunities
2. Fast and Rigorous user personas
3. Heuristic analysis framework for optimization audits ( I have to review this one as it has a lot of valuable info in the course )

4. Google Analytics Audit

So let’s get started.

Using Analytics to find conversion opportunities

This course is broken down into:

• Using Goals to quantify outcomes
• Evaluating traffic quality
• Metrics that matter
• Secondary dimensions and advanced segments
• Spotting conversion opportunities
• Building advanced segments
• Custom Segments
• Event tracking
• Auditing Your analytics

Overall the course was great although you will learn some of the information in Chris Mercer's course which is Google Analytics for beginners.

But it supplements his course to some extent as well. In the course, you’ll learn how to set up conversion goals, evaluate the quality of the traffic, use segments, event tracking, and even how to audit your analytics so you get proper data.

Although auditing analytics is covered in Fred Pike’s Google Analytics Audit course in great detail and I’ll talk about it later in the post.

What I learned is that you’ll touch mostly the source/medium portion of the google analytics to understand how users are coming to your site.

The goal of the course is, as the title suggests, to teach you how to identify conversion opportunities.

You can do that by going through your analytics and checking the page performance and whether the page is bringing in the revenue.

If not, you’ll go ahead and analyze the page to figure out the problem if the page is getting enough traffic.

You’ll also get familiar with the subject such as Funnel Visualization, drop-offs within the funnel, and how to spot conversion opportunities there.

Which metrics are important and which metrics are not important. You need to make sure that the data you track is valuable and actionable for your business. You can have all the data in the world but if you don’t know what to do with it, it won’t help you.

Another thing you’ll learn is the use of segments and why are they important and specific use cases for segments.

Now, I’ve used GA in the past as a part of my job but I did not touch the subject in great detail. I can say for sure that even their beginner courses are suitable for someone who is already accustomed to using Google Analytics.

I remember in Chris Mercer's course that I’ve learned various use cases for filters that I haven’t used in that way before.

2. Fast and Rigorous Personas

This is a great course if you wish to develop personas faster.

They share the framework of building out the personas along with examples of already built personas.

What you’ll learn in this 1-hour lesson is amazing and I love how they shortened it out, although I’d personally prefer a bit of behind-the-shoulder recording.

You’ll learn how to write questions, build your surveys, recruit respondents, validate your data and organize your responses.

And that’s just Part 1 of the course :)

In the next part of the course, you’ll learn how to simplify your data, analyze your data via statistical clustering as well as how to build archetypes from your clusters.

Even though the course is 1 hour long, you’ll definitely need to revise the course again and soak everything up and build out the framework on a piece of paper.

At least that works for me to remember stuff.

3. Google Analytics Audit

Honestly, I loved this course and Fred Pike is an amazing instructor.

You’ll get an excel spreadsheet with an audit checklist and what’s amazing is that Fred will guide you through the checklist with real examples + google merchandise store examples.

The way he presents things and shares an excel audit spreadsheet makes things to remember easily.

You’ll learn how to audit Account and Properties, how to audit the views, and figure out if page views are being sent to Google Analytics correctly.

Haven’t occurred to me in the past to check if page views are being sent correctly. That’s a nice thing to learn.

Next, you’ll touch on the subject of Hostname filters, Ip filters and these have already been covered in GA for beginners to some extent.

Now beware, because the test is a bit tricky. I thought I remembered it all but I’d have to revise the test again in order to pass it or I might be tired and made some mistakes as it’s evening here and I’ve been studying for 8 hours straight.

Since I lost a couple of weeks I’d have to cram up everything next week in order to achieve the CXL degree. Hopefully.

You’ll learn about PII and that you can actually track those. Not sure how he tracks the name I’d have to read up on it. But beware as google might delete all your data if it finds that you’re tracking PII.

Examples of PII tracked are names, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, and others. It’s best to check google help Docs for these.

I loved the second section of the courses as it’s more hands-on experience but now, looking back I realize why foundations were more important and more valuable. You can learn most of these through various videos but it will take you longer.

However, the way they laid out the foundation portion of it was so much information that you’d just need 2–3 weeks to learn all of that.

Next week I’ll have to cram up a major portion of the courses in order to achieve the CRO Minidegree, it will almost be impossible as I’m behind a lot.