Week 4
Measure performance success
You will learn the importance of measuring results and common metrics to track. You’ll also examine how digital marketers and e-commerce specialists use data to assess and improve performance and tell stories with data. You’ll end the course by participating in optional content if you’re interested in preparing for a job search.
Dedication to study
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Videos: 28 min
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Leitura: 1 h 50 min
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Teste: 1 Teste com avaliação
Learning Objectives
- Understand the practice of performance marketing and its goals.
- Understand the importance of data for e-commerce.
- Identify how data interpretation helps businesses make decisions.
- Understand the basic elements of data storytelling and their importance.
Content
- Mesasure marketing performance success
- Use data insights to improve a strategy
- Pursue your new career
- Review: Measure marketing performance sucess
- Course review. Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce
1. Mesasure marketing performance success
Welcome to week 4
Video. Duration: 1 minute
Welcome back. Earlier in the course, you learned about the relationship between digital marketing and branding. You also explored the different parts of a digital marketing and e-commerce strategy, including research, goal-setting, and selecting the right channels and tactics. Lastly, you found out a little about some of the channels and tactics like SEO, SEM, social media, and email marketing. This part of the course is all about data, how you measure it, how you interpret it, and how it can make your strategy better. We’ll explore the concept of performance marketing and examine some ways you might be working with data in an entry-level digital marketing or e-commerce role. We’ll discuss how data can help you find out what’s working well and how to adapt to necessary change. We’ll also go over some ways to demonstrate those findings through data storytelling. Measuring the success of your marketing efforts may be the most important thing you’ll learn in your digital marketing or e-commerce career. No matter how carefully you plan your strategy, measuring your results can always help you make it better, from building your brand, to engaging customers, and maximizing sales. The first time I really worked with data and digital marketing was when I began running paid advertising for my own e-commerce store. I wanted to understand if the effort I was making was worth the extra cost. This made me realize that there was a whole world of measurement beyond the paid campaigns I was running. I can measure the health of my whole store through different dashboards and analytics resources. This is where e-commerce and digital marketing really gets fun because you can actually prove that your tactics are helping you reach your goals. You’re almost to the end of the course, and I’m so excited for you to cross the finish line. Let’s get back into it.
Measure progress with performance marketing
Video. Duration: 3 minutes
Throughout this course, we’ve emphasized how important it is to measure the results of digital marketing tactics, campaigns, and strategies. In fact, these activities are so important that there is a special term to describe them: performance marketing. In this video, we’ll explore what’s involved in performance marketing, and how it allows businesses to set goals, track results, and improve on their work. Let’s get started. Imagine this: It’s 1985, and you work for a marketing agency that’s promoting a new breakfast cereal. You run some focus groups to learn about your target audience and what they like. You use those interviews and your past experiences as a marketer to create memorable ads for newspapers, billboards, and televisions. And then you wait. Your sales go up. The campaign works! But what you don’t know is which ads were most effective and how many of the new customers found the product through your campaign. That doesn’t mean your ad strategy is all guesswork— just that there’s limited information you can gather. You can keep going with that same successful strategy. Now imagine you’re running that same campaign today, only online. With digital marketing, there are dozens of ways to measure the success of your tactics and campaigns. So if you place an ad for cereal online, you can track the things that just aren’t possible with billboards, like how many people encounter and engage with your ad each week. Collecting and evaluating all of that information can help you rethink a weak strategy or make a good one even stronger. That’s performance marketing. It’s the process of using concrete information about customer behaviors to plan and refine marketing and sales strategies. It focuses on measurable results like clicks and conversions. Performance marketers set specific goals and use metrics to find out if they’ve reached them. You’re already familiar with some performance metrics like the number of impressions or cost per click on paid ads. Another performance metric is customer lifetime value, which refers to the average revenue generated by customers over a certain period of time. There’s also ROAS, or return on ad spend. ROAS is how much revenue is gained versus how much was spent. So if you spend $100 on an ad, but made $150 as a result of that ad, the ROAS would be 150%. So for the cereal example, if you were to set a goal of increasing overall revenue, ROAS might be one of the metrics used to measure success. There are so many ways to measure performance at every stage of the marketing funnel, and those measurements are critical because the average customer journey takes about six touchpoints. That number has doubled more than twice over a 15-year period. Performance marketing lets us gauge how each of those touchpoints contributes to our goals, which helps us reach and engage with customers more effectively. Time to review. Measuring results with performance marketing is one of the most important things you can do to ensure success. By tracking metrics like ROAS and customer lifetime value, digital marketers can reach their goals and refine their strategies over time. Up next, you’ll learn more about performance metrics and working with the data they produce.
Common metrics for success
Reading. Duration: 10 minutes
Typically, when you set goals, you track your progress to see how close you are to reaching those goals. If you set a goal to finish a book every month for 12 months, you will probably check on your progress every now and then to see if you are accomplishing that goal. You may count pages with excitement as you go from book to book, or keep a checklist of book titles. The same practices can be applied to measuring marketing campaign effectiveness.
In this reading, you will learn the importance of measuring success. You will get an understanding of what you may want to track to measure success, and you will be reminded of what a metric is. Then, you will see where various metrics fit into your marketing funnel.
Introduction to metrics
As you go through this certificate program, you will learn a lot about metrics. For now, know that a metric is a quantifiable measurement that is used to track and assess a business objective. Metrics help determine the success of marketing initiatives and campaigns.
Why track metrics?
Tracking metrics helps digital marketers gauge how close they are to meeting goals. Each metric measures something specific, and therefore each metric tells a marketer something different about their campaign. Metrics can reveal important information about marketing campaigns, such as return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), cost per sale, and online and sales revenue.
Metrics in the marketing funnel
You will apply different tactics to track metrics based on which stage of the marketing funnel you are operating in.
For instance, in the awareness stage, you’ll gather audience data and develop user personas. This helps you get to know who your customers are.
During the consideration stage, you will consider metrics like cost of acquisitions and click through rates.
During the conversion stage, you will track and analyze sales conversion rates, average order values, and cart abandonment rates.
And finally, during the loyalty stage, you’ll want to consider customer retention rate and customer lifetime value.
There are other factors to consider throughout the marketing funnel process, and these may not be familiar terms yet, but for now, this is a good place to start.
Key takeaways
Tracking metrics is critical to a campaign’s success. Metrics help digital marketers gauge effectiveness and audience contentment while a campaign is happening. They also help marketers gain information and insights they can use for future campaigns.
Working with data
Video. Duration: 4 minutes
Performance marketing generates a lot of data, from impressions and clicks at the top of the funnel to conversion and sales numbers at the bottom. Data is critical throughout the whole marketing and sale cycle. Data is a collection of facts or information. Your company’s total number of social media followers, how many hours a team spends on a project, or total year in revenue, all of those numbers are data. Marketing data can help you answer questions in a concrete way by drawing on real customer behaviors and interactions. The insights are useful for planning campaigns, predicting future behaviors, and finding out whether your activities are helping you reach your KPIs. You’ll recall that a KPI, or Key Performance Indicator, is a measurement used to gauge how successful a business is in its effort to reach a business or marketing goal. Your KPIs could be certain metrics, like ROAS. But if you find that you aren’t reaching your goals, you might need to prioritize different KPIs instead. To know if you’re meeting your KPIs, you’ll need to collect and interpret the relevant data. The process of monitoring and evaluating data to gain actionable insights, is called data analytics. It’s one of the most important skill sets you can develop for a career in digital marketing or e-commerce. That doesn’t mean you need to be a statistics expert to work in these fields. What it does mean is that most entry level roles you’ll encounter involve working with data in some way. Let’s go over a few of the main data analytics responsibilities you might have. Pulling, reporting, and analyzing data. Data pulling is the process of collecting data from analytics tools and putting it into a spreadsheet or database, making it easy to access and work with. For example, you might have campaigns with similar goals running on different platforms like Facebook, Bing, and Google. To make it easier to compare and analyze your data, you’ll need to bring it all together. One way to do that is by pulling the data from each source, and organizing it into a spreadsheet. Data reporting, also called performance reporting, involves organizing and summarizing data to track performance across marketing and sales efforts. This process makes it easier to identify trends and spot unexpected results more quickly. For example, if you’ve pulled data from multiple sources, reporting makes it easier to tell if one has a higher ROAS than another. Quality reporting provides a clear picture of the raw numbers. It should help you shape questions that can be answered through analysis. Data analysis is the process of examining data in order to draw conclusions, make predictions, and drive informed decision-making. If reporting is the what, then analysis is the why. It helps you develop insights that explain the reported results and make suggestions for next steps, like shifting your budget or prioritizing different KPIs. You’ll learn lots more about working with the data later in the program. But I hope you feel like you’ve got a better understanding of what data is and why it’s so important for marketing and sales success. Now, let’s recap. The data produced by performance marketing is an incredibly valuable resource for understanding how well your strategy is meeting its goals. In an entry level role, you may find yourself pulling, reporting or analyzing performance data. Through data analytics, you can find out if you’re meeting your goals, anticipate customer behavior, and make plans for the future. Coming up, we’ll get into some ways to interpret data and present it to others.
Data ethics
Reading. Duration: 10 minutes
In a previous video, you learned that performance marketing requires a lot of data. Data can contain information about user interests and behaviors and even individual customer purchases. This reading introduces you to data ethics. Knowing how to work with user data responsibly and legally is critical to the integrity of your organization, role, and projects.
Data ethics
Data ethics is the study and evaluation of moral challenges related to data collection and analysis. When it comes to data, businesses apply ethical practices so they can:
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Follow regulations
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Demonstrate trustworthiness in protecting customer data
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Ensure the use of customer data is fair and without bias
Follow regulations
Many countries have laws regarding the generation, recording, curating, processing, sharing, and use of personally identifiable data. Personally identifiable data (PID) is information that can be used to directly identify, contact, or locate an individual. Make sure you are aware of your organization’s data security and privacy protocols. Data privacy refers to the proper handling of data. How you collect, process, analyze, share, archive, and delete data should be in accordance with the data privacy laws of the countries where your customers reside.
Protect customer data
One important way to protect customer data is data anonymization. Data anonymization refers to one or more techniques to mask or remove personal information from data to protect the identities of people. Data anonymization is often performed on data coming from multiple sources. After the data has been anonymized, it can be more widely and freely shared in an organization. Types of data often anonymized are names, telephone numbers, email addresses, photographs, account numbers, and purchase transactions.
Use data fairly and without bias
Another ethical data practice is making sure that the data you collect and use is for legitimate business purposes. Fair and reasonable use of data also means that you don’t use the data in a biased manner. Data bias is a type of human error that skews results in a certain direction. Note that data bias isn’t the same as selecting data from a target audience. For example, let’s say you want to review historical data from customers between the ages of 21 and 45. That’s not data bias. What would be considered data bias is if you exclude the data from customers who returned products because you don’t consider them loyal to your brand. However, even when including all available data, you’re not always free of bias. This is possible if historical data was from an audience that wasn’t representative of all potential customers. If you create future ad campaigns based on previous customer behaviors, you could unknowingly perpetuate a bias.
Pro tip: To minimize the risk of data bias, ask for peer review of critical data that you intend to use so you can incorporate different perspectives right away.
Key takeaway
Data ethics is important because it promotes the responsible use of customer data. Always be careful to follow the data privacy laws in your country and the countries where your customers live, protect customer data, and avoid data bias.
Test your knowledge: Measure marketing performance success
Practice Quiz. 4 questions. Grade: 100%
2. Use data insights to improve a strategy
Attribution models for digital marketing
Video. Duration: 4 minutes
All right. You’ve set your strategy, picked your channels, planned your content, and measured your results. Now what? You know all that data should tell you which channels and content are performing well. But what does good performance actually mean? Is it when an ad gets a lot of clicks? When a Tweet goes viral? What about increased website traffic? With so many different touchpoints and channels shaping customer brand interactions, how do you know where to start? In this video, we’ll explore how businesses use reporting data to find out which of their marketing and sales efforts are the most successful. Success can mean different things depending on your particular marketing and business goals. But every digital marketer wants to know which touchpoints are getting customers to take action. Say you’re running a campaign for a company that sells art supplies. If tons of people are clicking on an ad for a new line of paints but only a few of them eventually make a purchase, that ad might not be so successful after all. In order to optimize a strategy, you need to know which touchpoints are influencing customer decisions the most. Of course you can’t know exactly what your customers are thinking. All you have to go on is what they do. But those customer behaviors can tell you a lot about where your efforts are succeeding and where they’re falling short. The process of determining which content and channels are responsible for generating leads, conversions, or sign-ups is called attribution. This isn’t something you need to determine on your own. Most analytics tools include features that can use your data to find out which touchpoints and keywords customers interact with before taking action. You’ll get some practice with these tools later in the program. By accurately attributing success to specific marketing and sales efforts, businesses can make informed decisions about where to invest their time, budget, and resources. Now, some people assume that the last touchpoint should get all the credit, and it makes sense, right? People often think that the touchpoint right before a purchase must be the one that convinces a customer to take action. But that isn’t always the case. You know that the average customer encounters six touchpoints on their purchase journey, and that the path isn’t always straightforward. Say someone is shopping for a new computer, and they decide which model to buy after the second touchpoint but then they put off actually making the purchase. Maybe they’re waiting for a holiday or for the computer to go on sale. Maybe they just get distracted. It might take another touchpoint to remind them of the purchase they already planned to make. Both of those touchpoints deserve some credit, and attribution is how they get it. Businesses have some choices when it comes to attribution models. We won’t go over all of them here— just a few to give you a sense of how they attribute success: data-driven, first click, last click, and linear. Data-driven attribution measures customer engagement with marketing content across channels to understand what’s motivating them to take action. It assigns credit to each touchpoint based on statistics like which ads or keywords most often lead to conversions. Data-driven attribution draws on real customer behaviors to assign credit. But if you don’t have enough meaningful data for this model, they have other options. Here are a few examples: First click attribution assigns all the credit to the first touchpoint that eventually leads to a conversion. Let’s go back to our art supply store. If a customer’s first interaction with the brand is a social media ad for oil paints, all the credit for their purchase will go to that ad, even if it takes a few more touchpoints for them to buy something. Last click attribution assigns all the credit to the last known touchpoint before conversion. If our art store customer makes a purchase after the fourth or fifth touchpoint—maybe a promotional email—last click attribution would give full credit to that email. Linear attribution assigns equal credit to each touchpoint along the customer journey. So for our art store customer’s journey, the social ad, promotional email, and all the touchpoints in between share credit for the eventual conversion. Attribution isn’t an exact science, but it can give you a better idea of how customers are interacting with your content and what’s leading them to take action. Using models like data-driven, first click, last click, and linear attribution, businesses can put their resources in places that will maximize customer conversions. Up next, you’ll learn about communicating the insights you get from your data insights to other people.
Data storytelling basics
Video. Duration: 4 minutes
Working with data isn’t just about the numbers. You know that the process of data pulling, reporting, analysis, and attribution, produces valuable insights that can change the course of a project or strategy. But how do you turn those insights into action? How do you persuade key people that something needs to be done, by using your data to tell a story. Without a story, data is just numbers. Those numbers can tell you what happened, but they can’t tell you why it happened, why it’s important, and what you can do about it. That’s where data storytelling comes in. Data storytelling is the practice of conveying data insights to a specific audience using a clear and compelling narrative. Data has a lot of stories to tell, and no two people will tell exactly the same one. Everyone brings their own perspectives, experiences, and biases to data storytelling. And you’ll find out about navigating some of those challenges in a bit. For now, let’s think about how to create stories with data. A data story has three main components, the data itself, a compelling narrative, and clear visualizations. Together, these pieces should engage your audience by explaining what you learned, and how you can use that information to take action. Let’s take them one at a time. First, data. Think of your data points like the characters in a play. If they’re all on stage at once, it can be hard to know where to focus your attention. So you need to be selective about which numbers you highlight. The most important data points are your lead characters, while others could play supporting roles, and some may not need to be in the scene at all. To decide which data points are important, it’s crucial to understand the questions you’re trying to answer. For example, maybe you work for a toy company that’s measuring the results of a new social media campaign. Your question could be as simple as asking whether this new campaign is more efficient than the last one. For that question, your main data point might be return on ad spend. But remember, you need to understand the question you want to answer to know what data to use. Being clear about your questions and the data you can use to answer them is also the first step in planning your next piece of your data story, the narrative. The narrative is like the plot of a play, it’s what happens in the story. A well-structured narrative is engaging, memorable and persuasive. Once you’ve picked the data points and insights that answer your questions, you can start building a narrative that conveys them effectively. In the toy company example you’d explain how the ROAS data you’ve gathered compares to the previous campaign and how those results can impact your future efforts. In other words, your data story should explain not just what your insights mean, but why they matter to your audience and what they can do about them. That doesn’t mean you need to have all the answers. In fact, some of the best stories create space for discussion. But appealing to your audience with a strong narrative can draw attention to your insights and encourage others to take action. You’ll learn more about how to create an effective narrative in just a bit. Now that we’ve explored a simple narrative structure, let’s get into the last element of data storytelling: visualizations. Data visualizations are graphic representations of data that convey information. Data visualizations are like the costumes, lightings, and stage set of a play. They focus attention and help the audience understand what’s happening in the narrative. Visualizations can take the form of charts, graphs, infographics, or other illustrations. A well-placed visualization clarifies trends and expresses relationships between data points. Returning to the toy company example again, we could choose to represent the ROAS data as a series of numbers. But if what we want to do is compare the current campaign to the last one, it’s a lot clearer to convey that relationship with a bar graph. It gets the point across quickly and clearly. You’ll learn more about visualizing data and making presentations accessible to different audiences in a later course. Data storytelling is a powerful tool, and one that’s in high demand for digital marketing and e-commerce roles. Using data, narrative, and visualizations, we can engage audiences, communicate insights, and influence big decisions. Up next, we’ll explore more about how to structure data stories.
Story structure
Reading. Duration: 20 minutes
In a previous video, you learned that without a story, data is just numbers. Data storytelling is the practice of explaining data insights to a specific audience using a clear and compelling narrative. Formulating a story from data is a very important piece of digital marketing. Each time you tell your compelling data story, it should be structured using three elements. In this reading, you will learn the importance of identifying story elements from data.
The three-part data story structure
Before you can tell your data story, you will need to analyze the data to determine the story hidden within the data. In data storytelling, always remember that there are three elements to every story: context, complication, and resolution. When you’ve thoroughly analyzed your data to determine each element, you’ll be able to tell the whole story.
Context
Creating context is an important part of storytelling with data, because without context, you have no starting point for your story. Think of your context as the framing of the situation. For example, imagine your company had a decrease in both sales and their customer base last year. The company’s goals are to maximize profits and grow their customer base this year. Those goals may be the context of your story.
Complication
Next, you need to identify the complication in your story. This is typically the reason the situation requires action. A complication isn’t always bad, but rather an explanation of how the situation has changed based on your data. For example, if your company’s goals are to maximize profit and grow their customer base, and the data shows you are on track to meet the first goal but not the second one, that is a complication. Any kind of change in metrics would be an example of a complication.
Resolution
Finally, like any story, it should end in a resolution. The resolution of your data story is the necessary action taken to solve a problem or leverage an opportunity. It answers the questions: How did the story end? What were the results of the complication? What do your results tell you about the campaign? For instance, if the results show that you are maximizing your profits but are not driving new customers, explain the data-driven action you will be taking to change that.
Example story
Now, review an example data story. Using the graphs above as a reference image, recall the toy company example from a previous video. Recall that in the video, you measured the results of a new social media campaign for your toy company.
The context of the data story may be your past social media campaign’s performance. In this past campaign, you aimed to increase sales by 5% over a three month period through the use of paid social media ads. Unfortunately, you didn’t reach that goal during your last campaign, and you want to review the data of your current campaign to see if it is performing better. Now, you’ve set the context for this data story.
When you take a look at your past return on ad spend (ROAS) and conversion rates to compare them to this campaign’s numbers, you notice an increase in both ROAS and conversion rates. That increase is the complication of your campaign. Remember that although complication sounds unfavorable, this won’t always be the case.
Finally, the resolution of your campaign tells the story of why ROAS and conversion rates are soaring. Did the ROAS and conversion rates increase because you changed the copy, switched out the images, ran a promotion in your ads, or something else? Your findings are your resolution.
Key takeaways
Data isn’t just numbers and figures. Data tells a story that can be integral to your company’s future successes. To create effective campaigns, you have to find the stories in the data. Identifying your context, complication, and resolution will help you get there.
Explore: Data storytelling
Ungraded Plugin. Duration: 10 minutes
Foundations of data storytelling
Select the label in each infographic to understand how each step is vital for a data-driven presentation.
1. Context
Juan knows the importance of giving relevant context. He explains the question he posed: Why aren’t rain jackets meeting their ROAS goal? Then he gives some metrics he examined to answer it: CPC, conversion rate, and average order value.
2. Complication
Juan compares rain jacket metrics to winter coats. The conversion rate and CPC are similar, so he thought the ROAS should be similar, too.
Using a bar graph, he explains the complication: rain jackets have a lower average order value.
3. Resolution
Juan explains that they were tracking the wrong metric. Low average order value for rain jackets means they can’t reach their ROAS target. He advises shifting some budget to coats to raise the overall ROAS. Then he takes audience questions.
4. Review
Using data storytelling elements and a three-part story structure, Juan crafted a compelling presentation that was clear, relevant to his audience, and action-oriented.
Test your knowledge: Use data insights to improve a strategy
Practice Quiz. 4 questions. Grade: 100%
3. Pursue your new career
Prepare for your job search
Video. Duration: 1 minute
Hi again. Remember me? My name’s Erica and I’m a people consultant at Google, known elsewhere as an HR business partner. The last time we were together, you had just started this course and now here you are, almost at the end. Congrats on your progress so far and on taking meaningful action to advance your career. Now that you’re wrapping up the first course, I wanted to let you know about some of the great career building activities and resources you’ll encounter in the rest of this program. In the next course and those that come after it, you’ll have the chance to complete a number of hands on activities based on real world marketing and e-commerce scenarios. They’ll let you put what you’re learning into practice and help you discuss your skills with hiring managers in a concrete way. Be sure to save your work from these activities. They’ll be useful to you as you near the end of the program and start thinking about the next stage of your digital marketing or e-commerce career. When you get to the last course in the program, we’ll go in depth on preparing for a job search. We’ll cover how to find and apply for jobs that interest you. I’ll also share some tips to help you prepare for the interview process, so you’ll know what to expect going in. You’ll learn how to put together an online portfolio that will help you demonstrate your knowledge and experience. You’ll also complete a scenario based project, from beginning to end, that you can put in your portfolio and use to present your thought process to potential employers. Just like a customer journey, your career journey will be unique to you. But whatever path you choose, the knowledge and resources you gain from this program will give you a strong start. You’ve accomplished so much already and there’s so much more to come. Good luck on the next part of your journey. I’m excited to meet up with you again soon.
How to find job opportunities
Reading. Duration: 20 minutes
As you make your way through this program, you’ll want to consider which tasks you enjoyed or felt you were successful at. Even though you are at the beginning of the course, it’s a good idea to begin considering which roles you may want to apply for in the future. If you’re changing industries, this can be a daunting task—how can you know which roles are the right ones for you? This reading provides you with an overview of how to find job opportunities and what considerations to make when you find them.
Tips to find the right job
There are several steps you can take to get you closer to your desired job. Change can be difficult. Switching industries and pursuing new opportunities takes time, dedication, and organization. Be patient as you complete the tasks below, and aim to keep any notes or relevant documents in one place so you can always refer back to them.
Search job boards and analyze job descriptions
There are many job boards available on the internet. Sites like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor are all trusted job boards, and they allow you to find employment in whichever industry you’re interested in. Visit these sites and search using phrases like “digital marketing” or “e-commerce specialist.” If you’re searching for an entry-level position, include words in your search such as “associate,” “assistant,” “coordinator,” and “entry-level.” As you read job descriptions, take notes on which tasks and roles intrigue you the most.
Pro tip: As you comb through job descriptions, write down the words that seem most commonly-used by companies, as they will come in handy later.
Take a professional inventory
Now that you’ve browsed job boards and know what employers are looking for, take a professional inventory of yourself. Taking your professional inventory involves considering the traits and qualifications necessary to perform digital marketing and e-commerce jobs and determining which ones reflect you as a professional. Are you organized? Are you a natural leader, or maybe a natural innovator? Do you have a knack for all things social media? Do you excel at communication and reporting to stakeholders? Think about projects, moments, and incidents at work that you felt were successful—which of your skills contributed to that success?
Include anything about yourself that feels relevant. The format of your notes’ document is completely up to you, but it could look like a journal entry, a list, or something else entirely.
Refine relevant documents and online presence
This is perhaps the most important task in this reading. You’ve already jotted down common words in job descriptions, so now it’s time to use those words to refine your resume, cover letters, and social media pages.
Start by reviewing your resume and cover letters. Make sure to highlight your skills and experience that are relevant to digital marketing, even if you don’t have a lot of experience. You can also use the common words you identified to help you choose the right keywords for your social media profiles.
This is especially important if you’re switching industries. By refining your online presence, you can show potential employers that you’re a great fit for the digital marketing job, even if you don’t have a lot of experience.
After you’ve tailored your resume and cover letter, create a LinkedIn profile, if you don’t already have one. If you do, give it a makeover just like you did your resume.
Visit the profiles of other digital marketers and e-commerce specialists for inspiration.
Leverage your personal network
Leveraging your personal network can be a great way to get in front of employers. Sometimes companies offer referral programs to current employees, encouraging them to refer people they know for open jobs. Reach out to old friends, colleagues, and people you know who may give you advice on the industry or even refer you for positions. This step will probably occur after you finish this certificate program, but you can start networking at any point.
Acknowledge the little victories
Before you complete these milestones, you may want to create a spreadsheet to celebrate each step of the way. Tracking your progress is a great way to hold yourself accountable while acknowledging your accomplishments.
You’re embarking on an exciting and inspiring journey—make sure you give yourself credit where it’s due!
Elle - Build confidence
Video. Duration: 4 minutes
Hi, my name is Elle, and I’m the Vice President of the Mastery Team. My role is to support Google’s business organization with great learning experiences. One of my core values is curiosity, and my favorite part of my job is that I get to support the curiosity of our entire business organization with great learning experiences that help people learn, grow, and develop and bring their whole selves to work every day. You have moments through this program and throughout your journey when you don’t feel confident, and confidence is so important. I’m going to tell you a story about a moment that I lacked confidence and what I did to pick myself up. It was about ten years into my career, and I was sadly let go from my job.
I was devastated. I completely lacked confidence, and I had no idea how I was going to pick myself up and find my next job. And so I went to a quote that I often think about in moments like this. And that quote is:
“It’s not about how you fall. It’s how you get back up that counts.”
And I surrounded myself with a support system to help me rebuild my confidence. And there are two types of people that I highly recommend that you surround yourself with. The first is a cheerleader. This is a person that completely believes in you because they’ve seen that you have capabilities and that you could do this. They hold up a mirror, and they describe to you moments that they’ve seen evidence of you displaying these capabilities. If you’re not clear where you could find your biggest cheerleader, that person can be anyone in your life that has experience and exposure to you in all aspects of your life. A quick example is my sister. For me, my sister was reentering the workforce, and I had an opportunity to support her and cheer her on as she looked for whether or not she had the skills to apply for a job. And I reminded her of all of the moments that she displayed key skills that would set her up for success in that job. All right, the second person that you can surround yourself with is a practice partner. So, find a practice partner—somebody that can hold you accountable and support you as you practice. That can come from this program.That can come from any aspect of your life, as well. All right, so as you think about embarking on this program, two things: Find yourself your biggest cheerleader, and find yourself your practice buddy. Because there will be times where your confidence is shaken, and confidence will be so important. I didn’t enter the marketing or e-commerce world until about midway through my career when I was choosing to make a pivot. And this certificate program didn’t exist back then, but I wish it did. I’ll give you a couple of tips about how I started to learn more about the marketing and e-commerce space. The first thing I did was I created a search campaign. A friend of mine was selling her condo, and so I created a campaign that really helped promote her condo, and I learned a lot about search marketing through that experience. The second thing I did was I decided to learn more about websites and decided to create a blog. And something I’m really passionate about is yoga. So I created a blog all about my yoga journey, and then I applied analytics to the blog and started to see who was accessing and reading my blog and saw people from India, all parts of Asia, that were accessing and reading this, and it was so much fun to learn through doing in both of those experiences. And so my tip for you: Engage with the hands-on practice experiences through this program, and potentially, experiences that you might have access to outside of this program. But the main point is that we learn the most through doing, so find opportunities to practice. There will be people in your life that may try to define for you who you are and what your career should be. Some may even put doubt in your mind that you could complete this certificate and potentially create and/or pivot your own career. And I’m here to tell you, step back, trust your gut, and believe that you can define who you are and who you want to be.
Explore your possibilities
Discussion Prompt. Duration: 10 minutes
Consider the strategies you have learned in this course for uncovering job opportunities and requirements by using job boards.
For this discussion prompt, respond to the following questions:
Have you visited any job boards this week? If yes, which ones?
What job descriptions have you researched so far?
What have been the 2–3 most common requirements for the roles you have researched?
What concrete steps can you commit to take in the next week to advance your job search?
Which job search strategies are you excited to try?
What do you hope to accomplish by using these job search strategies?
Submit two or more paragraphs (100–200 words total). Then, visit the discussion forums to read what other learners have written, and respond to at least two posts.
Prompt
This week, I’ve actively visited popular job boards such as LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor to explore job opportunities in the Digital Marketing and E-commerce sectors. In my search, I’ve researched job descriptions for roles like Digital Marketing Specialist, E-commerce Manager or Coordinator, and SEO Analyst / Specialist. Through my exploration, I’ve noticed that the most common requirements for these roles include a strong grasp of digital marketing tools and platforms, proficiency in data analysis and SEO optimization, as well as excellent communication skills for crafting compelling marketing content.
In the coming week, I am committed to refining my resume and tailoring my cover letters to align with the specific requirements mentioned in the job descriptions. Additionally, I plan to expand my search to niche job boards and professional networking groups to discover more specialized opportunities. I am excited to explore job search strategies like informational interviews and networking events within the Digital Marketing and E-commerce communities.
By leveraging these strategies, I hope to gain valuable insights from professionals in the field, expand my professional network, and ultimately secure a position that aligns with my skills and aspirations.
Through these efforts, I aim to land a fulfilling role in the Digital Marketing or E-commerce domain, where I can contribute meaningfully and continue to learn and grow in my career.
4. Review: Measure marketing performance sucess
Wrap-up
Video. Duration: 59 seconds
You did it. You’re almost done with this section in the whole first course in the program. Before we wrap it up, let’s recap what you’ve learned in this part of the course. First, you found out about the importance of data and how performance marketing can help businesses succeed at every stage of the marketing funnel. You heard all about collecting, organizing, and interpreting data in order to reach marketing and sales goals. You discovered how businesses use attribution models to find out which touchpoints are most effective at getting customers to take action. You also learned about the power of storytelling and how conveying insights through stories can help businesses make informed, data-driven decisions. Finally, you explored some skills that can help you adapt to change when you really need to adjust your course. You’re so close to the end now and I know you’ll finish strong. Just a little bit further and you’ll be on your way.
Glossary terms from module 4
Reading. Duration: 20 minutes
Link to: Glossary Digital Marketing & E-commerce
Module 4 challenge
Due, Nov 5, 11:59 PM WET. Quiz. 10 questions. Grade: 85%—
5. Course review. Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce
Congrats! What’s coming in Course 2
Video. Duration: 1 minute
Congratulations on completing the first course. You’ve come so far and learned so much about what I personally think is a really exciting industry. Before you move on, let’s take a minute to celebrate and reflect on all you’ve learned in this course. You started out with the basics: exploring what digital marketing and e-commerce are in a few of the many different roles and opportunities you might find in these fields. Next, you learned about how customer journey maps and marketing funnels can help a business reach their target audience and turn them into loyal customers. Then you examined what goes into creating a digital marketing strategy, how to use digital channels for brand-building, building relationships, and driving sales. Finally, you explored how measuring and interpreting performance data can improve a campaign in progress and help you plan for the future. I hope you’re proud of the work you’ve done so far. No matter what you end up doing, whether you’re a digital marketing coordinator or an e-commerce analyst, a social media manager or something else. Everything you’ve learned up till now will lay the foundation for the next phase of your career. And as you move through this program, you’ll have the chance to hone your skills even further. In the next course, you’ll learn from my fellow Googler, AK, about how to attract and engage customers using SEO, SEM, and display ads. You have some great instructors coming up in this program and I can’t wait for you to meet them. I’m so glad I got to be here for the beginning of your journey. You’re off to a great start. I hope I’ve helped you gain the knowledge and confidence you need to move your career forward and recognize the skills you already have that can make you a great marketing or e-commerce specialist.
Course 1 glossary
Reading. Duration: 20 minutes
Link to: Glossary Digital Marketing & E-commerce
Your learning journey
Discussion Prompt. Duration: 10 minutes
Now that we’ve given you an overview of e-commerce and digital marketing, reflect on the program so far. Are you surprised by anything you’ve learned? Are there concepts that were more interesting than others? What do you hope to learn more about? What was the most unexpected thing you learned? Write 5–10 sentences answering these questions, and anything else you may want to share.
Then, visit the discussion forums to read what other learners have written, and respond to at least two posts.
Prompt
This fundamentals of e-commerce and digital marketing course has been quite enlightening. While I had some prior knowledge in these areas, the depth of insights and the way various aspects have been explained surprised me. What stood out most is the dynamic nature of digital marketing, where metrics, algorithms and consumer behaviors are in constant flux. The strategies and tactics that worked yesterday may not be effective tomorrow, and this dynamic landscape keeps changing. Concepts like SEO and SEM have been particularly fascinating. The intricate art of optimizing websites for search engines and leveraging paid search advertising to drive traffic and conversions is like solving a complex puzzle. The data-driven approach and the emphasis on content quality are critical aspects that I look forward to delving deeper into. One unexpected learning was the significance of email marketing in the digital landscape. I was pleasantly surprised to see how effective and relevant it remains in engaging and nurturing leads, and it has made me appreciate the art of crafting compelling email campaigns. As the program progresses, I hope to learn more about the nuances of SEO, data analytics and the psychology behind consumer behavior. Understanding the metrics that truly matter and how to interpret them will be key in making informed marketing decisions. I also look forward to exploring the evolving trends in the e-commerce industry, especially as technology and consumer preferences continue to shape the digital marketplace. Overall, the program has been a valuable journey, and I’m excited to keep expanding my knowledge in the fascinating world of e-commerce and digital marketing.
Get started on Course 2
Reading. Duration: 10 minutes
Congratulations on completing the first course in the Google Digital Marketing and eCommerce certificate! In this course, you were introduced to the job fields of digital marketing and e-commerce. You explored entry-level jobs in digital marketing and e-commerce, and identified the roles and functions that those jobs play within an organization. The course also introduced you to the topics that will be covered later on in the program.
The entire program has seven courses:
Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce – Explore entry-level jobs in digital marketing and e-commerce and identify the roles and functions that those jobs play within an organization. Be introduced to the marketing funnel and how it shapes the customer journey. (This is the course you just completed. Well done!)
Attract and Engage Customers with Digital Marketing – Learn how to use search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and display advertising to attract and engage customers.
From Likes to Leads: Interact with Customers Online – Explore social media platforms and identify which platform is the most appropriate for specific business needs. Learn how to create content for social media using graphic design principles for marketers and how to manage a social media presence.
Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing – Learn email marketing and cover topics such as creating an email marketing strategy, executing email campaigns, and measuring the results of those campaigns. Also learn how to use mailing lists and utilize automation and workflows.
Assess for Success: Marketing Analytics and Measurement – Explore marketing analytics practices such as A/B testing and return on ad spend (ROAS). Learn tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and spreadsheet features.
Make the Sale: Build, Launch, and Manage E-commerce Stores – Learn how businesses and individuals sell products online, including using popular platforms such as Shopify.
Satisfaction Guaranteed: Develop Customer Loyalty Online – Explore strategies for building customer loyalty in e-commerce using tools to develop and maintain relationships.
Now that you have completed this course, you are ready to move on to the next course: Attract and Engage Customers with Digital Marketing.
END! - Week 4 - Course 1
Final Grade of this course: 93.35%