Honest CXL growth marketing minidegree review. Part 4/12
Hello there. If you land on this article looking for opinions about CXL, there is something you should know before. First of all, welcome. I was in the same situation as you are, and I know how hard it is to find genuine reviews in this magic world. I will be 100% honest with you.
Please read the following disclaimer to better understand the reason behind my review on CXL.
If you are seeking quick answers, this is not the right place. This is goint to be a long review hopping to answer most of your questions.
And I am obsessed with The Office. You see how honest I am.
Disclaimer
This article reviews just the CXL growth marketing minidegree (not all the CXL courses). The review is written by an actual user, me (Diego). BUT… it is not entirely bias-free. My experience with CXL is due to them granting me a scholarship (yes 100% courses). We know that in this capitalistic world nothing is for free and there is always a bilateral exchanging. Santa Claus does not exist, and it is not a drama only for children. Instead of money, the CXL scholarship program asks you to write 12 posts sharing your learning outputs and impressions with the mini degree. So yes, this review is biased but just for the fact that I am grateful to CXL. As a broken AF graduate (like me) trying to start a marketing career, it is very stressful to gain useful knowledge for free. Giving back to the community by delivering free education to people unable to afford expensive courses is per se a great reason to buy CXL products.
You can find more about the CXL growth markeing minidegree here:
And more about the CXL sholarship here:
A little bit of contextualization. CXL growth marketing minidegree is a 111h long course (111h 42min to be fair) composed of 9 modules. In this article, I am going to review the second part of the third module: Data and Analytics. I usually review one whole module per article but I did not have the time to finish this one in just one week. I had to prepare three interviews and I am quite confident to say that I land these interviews because of the credentials earn through CXL. For the review of previous and following modules have a look at the bottom.
I would like to take a more unusual review by talking about people instead of contents. Growth marking video courses are approximately the same all over the industry. What really matters is how growth marketing has been taught, depending on teachers, not contents. So, today I am going to talk about a person already mentioned in previous articles, Chris Mercer aka the guru of Google Analytics, and about a new person whose name is Russel McAthy.
Chris Mercer talking about Google Tag Manager for Beginners
The Google Tag Manager for beginnes course is the natural follow-up of the previous courses by Chriss about Google Analitycs reviewed oin the previous article. Theefore, if you don’t know Mr Mercer and it’s approch, I strongly suggest to have a quick read at the article about him. Link below.
Chris very simply explains why is fundamental to use Google Tag Manager. While Google Analytics can collect, store and report data, it is only very good at storing. That’s why Google has introduced two other tools to take care more professionally about the collection and the report of data. These two tools are Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio. In particular, about the data collection, it is very true that the more and better information we have at our disposal the more effective and efficient decision we can make. Although Google Tag Manager deserves a lot of studies and practices, in this course Chris gives you all the basics to move into the next steps. The course starts with some lectures about the tool itself, just to get acquainted with it. These are very useful lessons especially for people, like me, that haven’s had the opportunity to use Google Tag Manager. Then the course will jump into some basics setting and data tracking. Honestly, these “basics” stuff already can give you a lot of more insightful information. With zero experience you can easily optimize your data analysis process and know way more things about your users.
Very interesting takeover from this course, it is that Christ will give you all the extra resources and steps to continues the journey of mastering Google Tag Manager. Having a clear path when you are taking a learning journey is very fundamental to optimize your time and energy. Chris’s approach, as I already said in the previous articles, is not only about teaching you something but also on how to learn more and better later. Learning is a marathon and you have to be fast all the way through.
Russel McAthy talking about Attribution.
Russel is an expert about attribution as all the CXL teachers are in their proper thematic. I was a bit unsure if this course is a masterpiece of something not so useful. I am saying that because the topic is crucial to bring your data analysis to a pro-level, but at the same time, the course is just potential since no practices whatsoever are involved. Nothing to blame, but I had a sort of bitter taste when I completed the course. Russel’s ability on convincing you how powerful is to adopt an attribution model for your data analysis is excellent. But all it is about theory and no actual implementation of the model is explained. So, although I completely share Russel’s approach to data analysis through attribution, I still feel unable to perform that approach to a decent level. The only practice I found in this course is the application of standard attribution models in Google Analytics. And, although this is a great step forward, it would have been better to have more info about the creation of a custom attribution model. Know that you can do a lot more but you can’t due to lack of knowledge is very frustrating.
Similarly, Russel does not give you any additional resources to move on on the learning curve as Chris does.
Nevertheless, I still consider this course fundamental for pro marketers: just being aware of attribution and its implications can already boost the way you do analysis.
And that is pretty much my comments on the second part of the second module of CXL growth marketing minidegree. If you want to know more, please read review part 1,2, and 3 here:
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