Do You know what is so great about doing marketing in 2021? — CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Review (part 11)

You can be wrong.

Imagine back in the Don Draper days.

You didn’t have a proper way to measure anything. Marketing was expensive, and it required big pockets. Like big big pockets.

You couldn’t test your offer by coming up with the idea in the morning and launching FB ads to test it in the evening.

And if you lacked research or your assumptions were wrong, you lost all the sums of money you invested.

Luckily, the info pollution was at a much smaller scale, and even if a campaign was a poorly done one, it might have still brought in some dollars.

And, of course, research was expensive. You didn’t have the greatest database in your pocket all the time.

It was one by one, meeting with real people.

However, David Ogilvy already back then emphasized how this is the most important part of advertising.

Doing photography or shooting videos was also extremely costly. The only place you could’ve taken them was TV, radio, or newspaper.

Expensive.

So advertising was much riskier, and when you failed, failing was more painful.

Luckily these days, even with a small budget, you can do damage.

And You can measure everything.

I’ve written how fantastic Google Analytics course was part of the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree (Google Analytics for beginners + GA Intermediate.)

I’ve written about how amazing and the teacher Chris “Mercer” Mercer was.

By now, I have completed every course in the CXL Minidegree program, and I am a certified growth marketer.

I can tell that Chris Mercer was the greatest teacher in there.

I bet he could teach anything to anyone.

If he did a course about CSS programming, I would take it immediately because I would know, what he talks about actually sticks with me.

But back to measurement.

By default, Google Analytics can’t tell you much, and it can tell too much.

The most important rule with Google Analytics is, never go in without question.

And a secret rule is never let the people who don’t really know how GA works use GA. (Read management who haven’t taken any course about it). They will start misinterpreting vanity data.

But by default, GA can’t answer all of your questions. You have to set up custom tracking for it.

And it might seem hard, but actually, there is an excellent tool for it, Google Tag Manager.

Which makes it soooooo easy.

Oh, and Chris Mercer also lectured the “Google Tag Manager for beginners” course in the CXL Growth Marketing Program. So it was absolutely fun to learn.

If You are creative enough, you can measure absolutely anything with the help of GTM.

I also wrote about Google Tag Manager when I studied it, but I really didn’t make use of it.

Mainly because there wasn’t a need at the moment.

However, during last week I set up some things for a friend in GTM, and I was awed, how great of a tool it is.

Also, I started with the CXL Technical Marketing Minidegree program, which again started with GTM and Mercer ;).

First of all, it saves you a lot of time.

A friend of mine often has to wait behind their website developers to add simple things to the website — read FB pixel took a whole week to add.

With GTM, I added the Google Ads pixel to their site within 30 minutes.

As it was my first time, it took a bit longer, but it was because I revisited my GTM materials and re-checked everything 115X times.

Also, it makes the site faster. There is less code on the site, meaning there is less code to load, meaning the site loads faster.

So it saves your customers time. And don’t make them enraged because you added all these lovely pieces of code to track what they do.

Secondly, as mentioned before, you can track everything.

But You shouldn’t.

You shouldn’t collect every piece of data because it will pollute the data that matters. So you will start measuring the wrong metrics, and there is just too much info to eat through.

Back in the day, when you came up with an idea, that this would be interesting to track, you would’ve had to work with developers to develop custom code for the website,

However, not anymore.

Now you get a question, then you need to validate whether this should be measured or not.

And then create a Tag in GTM and BOOM measure it.

So how do you set up tags.

At first, for me, it was confusing to understand how to do it.

There are triggers and events.

The trigger is what triggers an event.

For example:

Trigger — page loads
Event — Page View

Trigger — Thank You page loads.
Event — Purchase.

Trigger — person loads 25% of the page down.
Event — Engaged person.

One example I can immediately bring is using a page scroll Tag.

Let’s say you build a long-form Landing Page and drive traffic to it.

So it would be interesting to know how many people actually engage with the content.

I don’t mean hitting the CTA, but actually reading or at least skimming what’s on there.

So you can create tags based on how much of the page they scroll. Later, you can retarget all the people who scrolled at least 50% but didn’t hit CTA with a retargeting campaign.

Or you can measure how many pictures the person watched on your product page.

Of course, there are many other things you can track, and when you get a question that you need to measure, GTM is the way to get an answer to that question.

So I don’t care in what position you are in marketing or even in management. Every person should take Chris Mercer’s course about Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

It helps you understand all the possibilities you could do and inspire you to ask better questions about your business.

And actually, find answers to them.