Back again — CXL Institute Minidegree Review #1— Digital Analytics

5 min readMay 23, 2021

After successfully completing the CXL Institute Minidegree in Digital Psychology and Persuasion last year, I took a chance at applying for another CXL Minidegree program in Digital Analytics. I was extremely hesitant that I would be accepted for another program, but a few days after completing the application — I received my scholarship acceptance email. Excited at another chance to dive into the lessons and apply them to my daily work.

How to apply for the CXL Minidegree

Applying for the minidegree is rather simple — the hardest part is deciding which minidegree to choose. Currently, there are seven minidegree options:

Conversion optimization — Learn how to run successful experiments and convert website traffic into customers

Customer acquisition — Use paid and organic channels to acquire more customers

Digital analytics — Set up tracking and analytics using the Google suite of analytics tools and learn to turn that data into insights

Digital psychology & persuasion — Learn the skills to understand the behavior and psychological frameworks to improve your website

Growth marketing — Experiment, optimize and scale the growth of your business

Technical content marketing — Advance your content marketing skills

Technical marketing — A comprehensive course on the technical skills and tools required for today’s digital marketer

Each program varies in length, so be sure to select one that will allow you to meet the time demands required. After you select the program best for you, complete the application. There is a 500 word “essay” section where you explain your interest in the program and what you plan to gain.

Be prepared for the program requirements, while there is not cost for the CXL Minidegree scholarship, you will be required to put in time and effort for the program. Participants are required to submit twelve weekly 1,000-word blog posts reviewing the program. Most of the lessons also have test at the end of the section where you must score 85% or more to pass that section.

I’ve taken quite a few online digital marketing courses over the past 3 years and those that require a test or written assignments offer more benefit to the student. I’m able to retain more information, work on my writing skills and apply the lessons to my career.

If you are looking for an online digital marketing course and have limited financial resources but want to learn from some of the best in the industry and apply what you learn, then I highly recommend the CXL Minidegree program.

Why Digital Analytics?

After working my way through the Digital Psychology and Persuasion Minidegree last summer, I decided to focus on analytics this time. I’m confident in my skills with the Google Analytics Suite, but I wanted to advance my skills and develop my skills to perform a deeper analysis of digital analytics and gain insights from the data. Part of advancing in my career from a junior to more senior role, I must move beyond pulling reports and discover ways to use data to improve help shape digital marketing campaigns: what channels are more effective, how can we optimize spend to increase conversions, what should we be measuring on the website to show how users are moving through the funnel.

I also want to build the business case, that everything that can be measured isn’t worth measuring. If colleagues are putting a lot of work in developing trackable QR codes linked to campaign advertising, and after a few reports, I notice that we very little traffic — then I’m able to make the recommendation to remove this extra piece of work from their workflow. Their time is better spent working on tactics that drive results.

I also want to build the business case, that everything that can be measured isn’t always worth measuring. If colleagues are putting a lot of work in developing trackable QR codes used in ad linked to campaigns, and after a few reports, I notice that we very little traffic — then I’m able to make the recommendation to remove this extra piece of work from their workflow. Their time is better spent working on tactics that drive results.

Moving Past Vanity Metrics

As a digital marketer, it’s easy to get caught up in click through rate, open rate, pageviews and other metrics that don’t always equate to profitable campaign results. It’s my goal to use the minidegree coursework to move past these vanity metric analytics into analysis.

First Course — Google Analytics 4

With all the fanfare with the launch of the newest edition of Google Analytics, GA4, I’ve yet to start using it on any of the web properties I manage. I was excited to see it offered as part of this course. The instructor, Charles Farina, has over ten years’ experience in the Google Analytics platform and is obviously knowledgeable of the platform through his presentation of the material.

The entire GA4 course is a little less than 4 hours and broken into easily digestible chunks of 25–40 minutes. This is a perfect amount of time to fit lessons into any schedule. The flow of course works well for persons who haven’t used GA4 yet and Farina devotes ample time to all the items needed to get up and running in the platform.

If you are already a user of Universal Analytics (GA3), you will enjoy the way Farina calls out the differences between the GA3 and GA4. The walkthroughs help you see the platform in action and make the lessons easier to retain. With each lesson he recaps the previous lesson, provides highlights for the lesson to come and points out differences to watch out for.

This course was filmed in October 2020, close to the initial launch of GA4 and Farina notes that since the platform is new, things may change as updates to the UI and functionality of GA4 are made.

See you next week

All in all, a great start to the program, but if you are new to Google Analytics, you may be a bit lost here. If you are new, you would benefit more by switching the order and doing the Intro to Google Analytics lesson first.

I’ll be back next with a review for the first part of Intro to Google Analytics.