Statistics Fundamentals and Google Analytics Review
Growth marketers should have different skills in order to be successful. If you want to become a growth marketing specialist, being resourceful in analytics skills is one of the fundamental skills that you should have to identify problems and answer your questions.
One of the most important things is with understanding statistics and Google Analytics you can easily optimize your growth marketing process, hitting your goals, or come up with better hypotheses.
In this week's article, I want to talk about what I have learned from watching Statistics Fundamentals and Google Analytics courses in CXL. By the way, I’m currently studying in the CXL growth marketing minidegree. If you want to become a growth marketing or level up your marketing skills, you’d check out this mini degree from CXL.
Let’s get started to get to know a little bit about Statistics Fundamentals.
Statistics Fundamentals
Simply put, if you want to be really good at analytics skills and review data in the right way, you need to understand the fundamentals of statistics. In this way, you’ll have a better understanding of how you can improve and have better ideas.
As CXL said:
If you don’t know basic statistics then you can’t properly evaluate test results or even case studies of A/B testing. This course is an overview of the statistical concepts that every digital marketer and certainly every CRO should know.
In this course, Ben Labay explained what is Population, Mean, Variant, Sample Mean and Sample Size. Knowing the meaning of all of these words will help growth marketing when they want to digging into quantitative data and doing A/B testing. Because in the analytics and also A/B testing tools you maybe see this word and with understanding deeply their meaning, you can easier find the answer to your question in Google Analytics.
For example, the population means the entire pool you’re measuring. Imagine your target customer is people who want to start a small business, so your population for A/B testing or getting feedback from them is all of the people you want to invite to the test who want to start a small business.
Like most things, there are also a ton of traps and mistakes that you can fall into and make when you dealing with statistics. For example, Ben Labay points out the stopping too early is the number one mistake that people make.
They’re stopping A/B testing too early to keep their good results and doing more experiemnt. But this is will lead to false data and false claims. Instead of shutting down the testing too early and reach a conclusion, you’d start investing time for each A/B testing (about 4 weeks and even more) in order to know the true numbers. Because the more time you spend, your sample size will be increased and this is will help you to gather more data from more people.
One of the other mistakes that people make in statistics is they using too many variants at once. The more variants you have, the probability the errors will be increased and this is will lead to false data and you cannot reach a conclusion about your A/B testing. This is exactly that’s why you’d limit your variants in order to gather the true data and also this way you can optimize a better conversion rate.
One of the most important things that I learned from watching the CXL statistics fundamentals course was in statistics you should first define your main KPIs and piorities. Focus always important and by choosing and focusing on the right KPI you can reach a better conclusion and optimize your process. Otherwise, you just wasting money and time measuring a lot of KPIs and in this way, for sure you‘ll be confused. So, before even going for A/B testing a landing page or a button, make sure you have the main KPI.
One of the other things is about A/B testing using statistics fundamentals is you’d know when you uncertain about a test, you’d run that experiment for a longer time. For instance, imagine you want to test a copy on the main page, after 3 weeks you gather a lot of data, but you don’t sure about the result and data, in this situation you’d run that A/B testing for a longer time to gather more data. And bear in mind, the more data you have, your conclusion and report become much more accurate.
Google Analytics
As a growth marketer, we’d always digging into quantitive data and tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics to have a better understanding of what people doing in our website and apps. In this way, we can optimize the conversion rate and answer people’s questions.
Many businesses don’t know how they make money, they put some content and product in their product, and then they generate money. But if you want to know what user is doing on your website, you have to start with Google Analytics.
One of the most important lessons that I learn in the Google Analytics course at CXL is you shouldn’t just look at the numbers. Numbers are just represnative are what happending on your website. You need to look at the trends and compare numbers with each other to have a better understanding of your users.
The other thing about numbers is they don’t tell you why people doing a specific behavior. You’d always remember, you need qualitative data alongside reviewing data in Google Analytics to know why people doing these things on your website.
Another lesson about Google Analytics is this tool is great at storing data. But if you want to truly collect data from the different events on your website and also get amazing reports, you need to use tools like Google Tag Managers and also Google Data Studio.
One of the most important things about Google Analytics is about first asking a question and then looking for answers. Just openning Google Analytics without having any questions and just for getting insight, could be a waste of time, and even after a few hours, you’ll get nothing from it.
So, before even going to using Google Analytics, you’d know what question do you have, what steps you need to take to answer that question, and if you found the answer, what changes do you want to implement on your website.
