The Measurement Matrix: CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree Week 11

I’m coming to the close of my CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree and wow, has this been quite a journey.

If you are a technical marketer looking to refresh your skills, this is the learning track for you.

If you are new to digital marketing and want to dive in on all the technical things at once, this is the track for you.

If you are a practicing digital marketing who wants to deep dive in the technical aspect, this is also the course for you.

Basically — any digital marketer would benefit greatly from taking this course. If price is an issue, there is a scholarship program. The scholarship program requires a brief application and short essay. Your submission will be quickly reviewed and, if approved, you will gain access to the course work. As part of your requirements, you will also need to complete 12 blog posts over the course of a 12-week period. But you will find that the blog posts add the extra benefit of helping you understand, comprehend, and explain the content. It’s also a way to improve your writing skills.

With most of the lessons, you will be required to take a test to show your comprehension of the course content. They aren’t easy! So, you will really need to pay attention to the content. Have your laptop or PC available for most of the lessons so you can practice the skills as you go over them. You may also want to allocate some time to practice the content from the applicable lessons to aid in your retention of the material.

Never go into Google Analytics Unarmed.

This week was a short, but essential five-lesson course: “The Measurement Matrix,” with CXL fav, Chris Mercer. The course promises that participants will: “Learn a framework that shows how planning, building, reporting, forecasting, and optimizing work together in implementations.” If you have watched any of Mercer’s lessons, you know that he doesn’t only focus on the technical parts of digital analytics — he also focuses on the philosophy in a sense. This course is where he really gets into the weeds of having a measurement plan based on the five pillars of your measurement journey.

“Knowing ‘what you don’t know’ in measurement is tricky. But when you know the Measurement Journey AND your place in that journey, things get much easier. Get out of the cave, through the valley, dashboard through the hills and reach the summit step by step.”

To improve your implementation, you must go through this process. It will help you formulate better questions and start to ask even bigger questions. This is a crucial course when you are looking to mature in your digital marketing and use the technical skills to improve performance and drive results.

Planning — What’s important to know and how you’ll use the answers you get.

Don’t try to do too much too fast, as Mercer would put it, if you do too much you just “end up building a helicopter in a cave.” Just because you’ve learned all these new digital management tools, doesn’t mean you need to try them all at once in your implementation.

There is nothing wrong with being on the journey! The more that you plan and the better you plan, the easier your build will be. Planning gives you a better than average chance to build things out so that you can eventually get answers from a report. Then you can take those actions that will ultimately help you optimize.

Start planning by being curious and asking basic questions.

What page gets the most pageviews?

Which social channel drives the most traffic to the site?

QIA

Mercer shares his simple three framework process to guide your measurement planning process.

Question — what are we trying to answer?

Information — what do you need to get the answer?

Action — what will you do with your answer? This is the most important step of the planning process. Data is an impetus for action.

Building — Get the information required so you can answer the questions.

Start turning things on. Start using Google Analytics, maybe even turn on GA 4 if you aren’t using it yet. Get Google Tag Manager going and start firing some tags. The out-of-the-box functionalities may be all you need, but if not, these analytics tools are customizable and you can build them out to answer your questions. If you need help and want to know more about building them out, look into the CXL Institute Digital Analytics Minidegree for a deep dive.

Just remember — your implementation needs to be strong enough to support the questions you are asking. Build your stages as you go. As you start to learn the tools and ask more complex questions, build your implementation out to answer those questions.

Reporting — Turning plain information into useful answers.

Reporting is basically about visualizing your data. It’s taking information that might have been disconnected in the past and presenting it in a way that answers questions that lead to action.

At this stage you begin to connect the dots — your reports are setting up and telling you a story of what’s happening.

“This is the one that people mess up the most because they think that they’re at a higher level, but really they’re just providing a bunch of data. Then they get a dashboarding tool like data studio and they just make the data prettier, right? So, you got pretty data, but it’s still just information, pretty information, but it’s still just information and the stakeholders don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t lead to any sort of action. It’s not telling any sort of story.”

First get comfortable with informing and then start to use the data and reports to connect the dots. Your reports should lead to a natural action and not require a lot of analysis. They should inherently lead to an action when done right.

Forecasting — Use the answers as a reference to plan for the future.

Forecasting is where you start to take all this information and begin to say — knowing what I know about how my data has been, there is a trend. You will start to be able to predict your near-term results based on the feedback you get from your setup.

“The truth is in the trend; the power is in the pattern.”

Mercer notes that this is the hardest step because when you start out, you don’t have a lot of data.

But when you get to this stage, you will be able to know how the actions you take as a result of your reports will impact future performance.

Optimizing — Based on meaningful data, take action to improve your results.

This is the step everyone wants to race to. I will admit to being guilty of this too. Optimize is a buzz word that we all like to throw around in meetings and reports, but are we really setting up the pillars successfully to get to this step?

If you don’t plan properly, optimization is going to be difficult. But, if you put in the work on the previous four pillars, optimization is actually the easiest pillar of all.

“Optimization in unbelievably simple when you properly measure.”

You optimize for the end result you are trying to achieve. When you measure against your forecast, that’s how you know what to optimize.

Wrapping up

This was one of my favorite courses in the Digital Analytics Minidegree because it provides the framework to start turning your data into actual insights. Even if you can’t totally get into the technical parts of digital analytics and would prefer to leave those things to a developer or agency — the measurement matrix and developing your level of data maturity are a must for everyone.