GA4, To Be or Not to Be? | Digital Analytics Minidegree by CXL Institute <> Review

This is Part 1/12 of learnings that I gained from CXL Institute’s Digital Analytics Mini degree.

I’m grateful for the CXL team that is still offering scholarships despite the COVID crisis. I was fortunate to gain access to the Digital Analytics Minidegree. This article is based on some new things that I picked up in week #1

A brief on What is CXL Institute?

CXL Institute is one of the leading sources for advanced level marketing training, with world-renowned practitioners and trainers as instructors. The CXL Institute is your chance to learn from some of the world’s most talented marketers, in fields like conversion optimization, growth hacking, marketing automation and more. CXL helps you develop a deep understanding of advanced marketing skills and best practices.

Digital Analytics Mini degree Quick Overview

• Total Sections: 5
• Number of Courses: 15
• Total Hours of Video Content: 57h 13min
• Bonus: access to CXL Conference videos, not all but the important ones that are related to the Mini degree.
• Access to exclusive forum that’s hidden behind the paywall. To earn the VIP status you need to hold a Mini degree certificate.

Google Analytics 4 | Charles Farina

Mini degree kicks off with the course on latest Google Analytics 4. BTW it just release a few months ago and CXL already has a course on that, an absolute value bomb.

Instructor walks you through a complete overview of the GA4 in the first part. Unlike the previous intro to GA this isn’t just theoretical as it brings practical element with a tutorial that you can follow along with the instructor.

Key takeaway:

• Everything is changed. GA4 is Web + APP combined, with a lite GTM. Remember how you had to set up too many things in Universal analytics (Previous version of GA) as in conversions, scroll tracking, and such things? Now with GA4 its all done automatically.
• So in GA4, they have taken the core functionalities of Firebase and implemented it, thus as a result we get a fusion of web and app analytics under one roof. Which could simply lead to more advanced cross platform user tracking.
• Here we get something called streams and the concept of views is slightly dismissed. Previously it was all with website views as in hits but now you configure and setup streams to collect the data. Consider it as a more of an event driven analytics rather then view driven.
• Now its way easier to connect google ads data with GA4 its just agreeing to some terms and conditions and you’re good to go.
• Previously in universal analytics you didn’t get much features related to creating funnels and track conversions but with GA4 all of those missing features, which where proprietary to analytics 360, a premium version of GA (Universal) is made available in GA4.
• Furthermore, it has a brand new material UI which looks better than the previous one. Huge changes in UI for real-time reports are seen, plus you get more user data available in real-time reports.
• Apart from this, previously if you were tracking users with User-ID then it used to show up in another section and the anonymous users where in different section which was a bit annoying. But now with GA4, we get both of these data under single report. It uses Google Signals to get User-ID across devices. When enabled it first uses User ID if available, then Google Signals and at last it will track from client side i.e., device.
• Also, they made debugging a lot more easier. All you need is one extension to enable the debug mode and you’re good to go.
• Custom audience builder with membership duration, new event scoping option, time-based sequencing, and even excluding users temporarily is all possible with the new GA4. Doing this always gave a small hiccup to the marketers and the guys with shiny tool (adobe analytics) always laughed at the GA guys for this, too bad now they don’t have a say all thanks to the new GA4, it’s time to bully marketers with adobe analytics.
• And there’s one more thing, trended funnels. You create a funnel and then GA4 gives you something of a funnel as per how your user behaves which is quite revolutionary. Furthermore, there are open funnels where users can enter from any of the entry point and go down in the funnel which is completely awesome.
• Now you can even know how much time users are taking to complete a step in the funnel. This way we know how your company is bleeding money and what you can do to make it not bleed anymore. This can be a nice alternative to session recording for heuristic analysis that you usually do while doing UX optimization.

So must you use GA4 now instead of the Universal Analytics?

Answer to this is Yes and No. There are still number of things that aren’t available in GA4 plus you don’t get your previous data back if you start using GA4 which is a big red flag for most of the organizations. So here’s something that you can do, install both the tags and reap the benefits of both analytics tool at once.

GA4 is totally blowing the competition apart with the new incorporated features. It feels like this update is made for the seamless experience for the users.

So Intro to GA4 is a great course that will teach you fundamentals of GA4, setting up, and a bit of hands-on. Plus huge benefit here is that you get a glimpse on Google Tag Manager. Additionally, no knowledge of GA is required whatsoever, which is the best part.

It’s best suited for anyone trying to change their profession, for anyone to get upskilled in GA4, maybe you own a startup and want to start tracking viewership but are confused from where and how to start then this course is for you.

Believe me you won’t find this anywhere as the instructor has shared some of his resources as in templates that you can directly use it in real world scenarios to get a head start.

You can signup individually or get your employees skilled in the arts of digital marketing. Get to know more about GA4 from CXL.com

I will be posting such articles every other week and I will provide some of the not so common and valuable insights that you won’t probably find anywhere else unless you own a CXL all access pass :)