Introduction to Access for success: Marketing analytics and measurement

You will learn about marketing campaigns and how marketers set performance goals. You’ll also explore media planning and practice creating your own media plan. Finally, you’ll be introduced to common tools used in marketing analytics and how they work

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Dedication to study

• Videos: 42 min

• Leitura: 3 h 10 min

• Teste: 1 Teste com avaliação

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Learning Objectives

• Define media planning and strategies.
• Plan and allocate the spending of marketing budgets.
• Explain how business objectives, marketing objectives, performance goals, and key performance indicators (KPIs) are related to each other.
• Describe the unique role of performance goals and KPIs in marketing campaigns.
• Describe how tools like Google Analytics and Google Ads are used to measure website and ad campaign performance..

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Content

1. Getting started with the course
2. Media planning
3. Performance goals
4. Introduction to tools for marketing analytics
5. Review: Introduction to Access for success: Marketing analytics and measurement

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1. Getting started with the course

Introduction to Course 5

• Video Duration: 2 minutes

Hi there. It’s great to have you here. In this course you’ll learn all about what marketing analytics are, how to measure them and what you can do to use them effectively. Marketing analytics and measurement is the difference between hoping a marketing campaign turns out well and using real time data to make sure that it does. Before we get started let me introduce myself, my name is Michael and I’ll be your instructor for this course. I’m currently a senior account executive supporting small and medium sized businesses. I help these businesses develop digital customer acquisition strategies using Google products and services. I know firsthand how critical marketing analytics is to grow an e-commerce business. Supporting e-commerce businesses is a passion of mine and has been a focus area for me during my time at Google. I found my passion for analytics and measurement when I launched my nonprofit Hands for Harmony in New Orleans, Louisiana. I used tools like Google Analytics to understand how users were finding my website. It was extremely valuable to have this data when I started a marketing campaign to raise the public’s awareness of the organization. It doesn’t matter if your goal is to raise brand awareness or increase sales revenue. If you measure and monitor performance goals, you can maximize the return on investment or ROI for any marketing campaign. This course will introduce you to practices and tools for marketing analytics. You’ll get an idea of just how helpful analytics software can be on the job as a marketing specialist or an e-commerce associate. You’ll create media plans and set performance goals. You’ll also learn to use metrics from Google Analytics and Google Ads to monitor marketing campaigns and the customer cycle. With results from A/B tests, you’ll learn how marketers make decisions about target audiences, direct response ads, and where to focus their attention and dollars during a campaign. And finally, after you try your hand at analyzing performance data, you’ll practice creating visualizations and presentations of insights to share with others. At the end of this course, you’ll be prepared to work on and contribute to a variety of digital marketing projects. You’ll also be able to monitor important metrics at different stages of customer acquisition. And as you’ve already learned, customer acquisition is a driving force for e-commerce.

Course 5 overview

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

You are now beginning the fifth course of the program, Assess for Success: Marketing Analytics and Measurement. By the end of this course, you’ll understand how media planning and performance goals play a large part in marketing campaigns by helping to achieve overall marketing goals and business objectives. You’ll learn how Google Analytics and Google Ads are used to view performance metrics and evaluate the success of campaigns. Finally, you’ll create data visualizations of metrics in spreadsheets and create presentations to share campaign insights with stakeholders.

Course progress

The entire program has seven courses. Assess for Success: Marketing Analytics and Measurement is the fifth course in the series.

1. Foundations of Digital Marketing and E-commerce —(current course) Learn about the fields of digital marketing and e-commerce and the skills needed for associate-level roles.

2. Attract and Engage Customers with Digital Marketing —Apply the marketing funnel concept to stages of the customer journey, including engagement, conversion, and loyalty. Learn methods for search engine optimization so potential customers find your products or services.

3. From Likes to Leads: Interact with Customers Online —Learn how to create marketing content and ads on social media platforms and evaluate their effectiveness using social media analytics data.

4. Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing —Learn how to execute email campaigns, use mailing lists, and automate customer communication and workflows.

5. Assess for Success: Marketing Analytics and Measurement —Learn how to collect, monitor, analyze, and present data from marketing campaigns using analytics and presentation tools.

6. Make the Sale: Build, Launch, and Manage E-commerce Stores —Learn the process to create a new e-commerce store and drive traffic to the online business through advertising campaigns.

7. Satisfaction Guaranteed: Develop Customer Loyalty Online —Learn strategies to build customer loyalty in e-commerce and use specific tools to help develop and maintain client relationships. This course also closes out the program with professional development topics to help you prepare for a job search.

Course 5 content

This course has regular assignments. You can complete them at your own pace; however, the assignments are designed to help you finish the program in six months or fewer. Refer to the information below about progression for this course.

Module 1: Introduction to Assess for success: Marketing analytics and measurement

You will learn about marketing campaigns and how marketers set performance goals. You’ll also explore media planning and practice creating your own media plan. Finally, you’ll be introduced to common tools used in marketing analytics and how they work.

Module 2: Use metrics from Google Analytics and Google Ads

You will learn about key metrics and data sources from various platforms. You’ll learn how to use the metrics in Google Analytics and Google Ads to gain insights for marketing campaigns. You’ll also learn how to link data from Google Ads to Google Analytics and export data from both platforms for further analysis.

Module 3: Measure the success of marketing campaigns

You will investigate the metrics and outcomes that define a successful marketing campaign. You’ll examine different metrics that help you determine the ROI or ROAS of a marketing project so you can make adjustments to improve returns. You’ll also learn how to plan for and conduct an A/B test to optimize a marketing campaign. Finally, you’ll examine what a successful marketing campaign looks like and what makes it successful.

Module 4: Share metrics and insights with stakeholders

You will learn how to work with stakeholders by anticipating their needs and communicating progress or results from a campaign. You’ll explore how to analyze, filter, and prepare metrics and insights to share with them. You’ll also practice creating visualizations, presentations, and a dashboard to clearly summarize insights for stakeholders. Near the end of the course, you’ll apply what you’ve learned by presenting a set of practice insights to stakeholders.

What to expect

Each course offers a series of lessons with many types of learning opportunities. These include:

• Videos for instructors to teach new concepts and demonstrate the use of tools

• Readings to introduce new ideas and build on the concepts from the videos

• Discussion forums to share, explore, and reinforce lesson topics for better understanding

• Discussion prompts to promote thinking and engagement in the discussion forums

• Self reviews to practice tasks and check your results for accuracy or correctness

• In-video quizzes to help your comprehension of content presented in videos

• Practice quizzes to prepare you for graded quizzes

• Graded quizzes to measure your progress, give you valuable feedback, and satisfy program completion to obtain a certificate—Following program guidelines, you can take a graded quiz multiple times to achieve a passing score of 80% or higher.

Tips for success

• It is strongly recommended to take these courses—and go through the items in each lesson—in the order they appear because new information and concepts build on previous knowledge.

• Participate in all learning opportunities to gain as much knowledge and experience as possible.

• If something is confusing, don’t hesitate to replay a video, review a reading, or repeat a self-review activity.

• Use the additional resources that are referenced throughout the program. They are designed to support your learning.

• When you encounter useful links in a course, remember to bookmark them so you can refer to the information later for study or review.

• Understand and follow the Coursera Code of Conduct to ensure that the learning community remains a welcoming, friendly, and supportive place for all members.

Helpful resources to get started

• Reading: Duration: 20 minutes

As a learner, you can complete this course only. However, to obtain a certificate, you must complete all the courses in the program. This reading describes what is required to obtain a certificate and best practices for you to have a good learning experience on the platform.

Course completion to obtain a certificate

To receive your official Google Digital Marketing and E-commerce Certificate, you must:

• Pass all graded assignments in all 7 courses of the certificate program. Each graded assignment is part of a cumulative graded score for the course, and the passing grade for each course is 80%.

AND one of the following:

• Pay the course certificate fee,

• Be approved for Coursera Financial Aid, or

• Complete the certificate through an educational institution, employer, or agency that’s sponsoring your participation.

Healthy habits for course completion

Here is a list of best practices that will help you complete the courses in the program in a timely manner:

Plan your time: Setting regular study times and sticking with them each week can help you make learning a part of your routine. Use a calendar or timetable to create a schedule, and list what you plan to do each day in order to break your work down into achievable goals. Create a quiet place to watch the videos, review the readings, and complete the activities so you can really focus on the material.

Work at your own pace: Everyone learns differently, so this program has been designed to let you work at your own pace. Although your personalized deadlines start when you enroll, they are just a guide. Feel free to move through the program at the speed that works best for you. There is no penalty for late assignments; to earn your certificate, all you have to do is complete all of the work. If you prefer, you can extend your deadlines by returning to Overview in the navigation panel to click Switch Sessions. If you already missed previous deadlines, click Reset my deadlines instead.

Be curious: If you find an idea that gets you excited, act on it! Ask questions, search for more details online, check out the links that interest you, and take notes on your discoveries. The little things you do to support your learning along the way will take your knowledge even further, open more doors in this high-growth field, and help you qualify for jobs.

Take notes: Notes are useful-to-remember information that you think might be important in the future, especially as you’re preparing to enter a new job field. In addition, taking notes is an effective way to make connections between topics and gain a better understanding of those topics.

Chat (responsibly) with other learners: If you have a question, chances are, you’re not alone. Reach out in the discussion forum to ask for help from other learners in this program. You can also visit Coursera’s Global Online

Community: Other important things to know while learning with virtual classmates can be found in the Coursera Honor Code and Code of Conduct.

Update your profile: Consider updating your profile on Coursera. This link appears in the menu when you click on your name at the top-right corner of this screen. When classmates find you in the discussion forums, they can click on your name to view your profile and get to know you more.

Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations for course activities

To complete certain activities in the program, you will need to use digital documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Marketing professionals use these software tools to collaborate within their teams and organizations. If you need more information about using a particular tool, refer to these resources:

• Microsoft Word: Help and learning: Microsoft Support page for Word

• Google Docs: Help Center page for Google Docs

• Microsoft Excel: Help and learning: Microsoft Support page for Excel

• Google Sheets: Help Center page for Google Sheets

• Microsoft PowerPoint: Help and learning: Microsoft Support page for PowerPoint

• How to use Google Slides: Help Center page for Google Slides

Course glossary

This course will cover a lot of terms and concepts, some of which you may already know and some of which will be new. To remind yourself about what a term means, or to help you review concepts for graded quizzes, refer to the Glossary for this course.

Course feedback

Providing feedback on videos, readings, and other materials is easy. With the resource open in your browser, look for the thumbs-up and thumbs-down symbols.

• Click thumbs-up for materials that are helpful.

• Click thumbs-down for materials that are not helpful.

If you want to flag a specific issue with an item, click the flag icon, select a category, and enter an explanation in the text box. This feedback goes back to the course development team and isn’t visible to other learners. All feedback received helps to create even better certificate programs in the future.

Meet and Greet

• Discussion Prompt Duration: 10 minutes

Earlier in this course, Michael shared how he grew in his role at Google with his passion for analytics and measurement.

Now it’s your turn to let your peers get to know you a little better.

Your post should be 5–10 sentences.

If you don’t know what to write, here are a few suggestions:

• What interests you about media planning?

• Are you coming into this course with any former knowledge or experience in media planning? If yes, please explain.

• What are you most looking forward to: planning, coordinating, or monitoring a digital campaign? Please explain your answer.

• What have you learned so far in this program that excites you the most?

Then, visit the discussion forums to check out what others shared about themselves and respond to at least two posts.

Answer

“I’m thrilled to embark on a new journey by attending the ‘Media Marketing’ course. Interacting with the world of digital marketing has always fascinated me. As a web developer based in Lisbon, Portugal, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the transformative power of digital marketing in our rapidly evolving tech landscape.

My decision to enroll in this program is driven by a firm belief in the essential role that media marketing plays in today’s digital age. With my background as a web developer, I’ve seen firsthand how these skills enhance user experiences and foster meaningful engagement. I have high expectations for this course and am eager to gain valuable insights into effective marketing strategies and the latest trends in the digital realm.

Looking ahead, my goal after the course is to seamlessly integrate these newfound skills into my web development projects. I aim to create websites and platforms that not only have great visual appeal but also possess the ability to convert visitors into devoted, loyal customers.

I’m genuinely looking forward to learning from each of you and exchanging ideas as we navigate this course together. Please feel free to connect and share your thoughts. Together, let’s make the most of this incredible learning experience!

Wishing you all the utmost success in your endeavors!”

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2. Media planning

Welcome to week 1

• Video Duration: 41 seconds

In your everyday life, you’ve probably experienced how good planning makes a difference in how things turn out. In marketing, campaigns also require planning for the best outcomes. In this part of the course, you’ll learn how to create media plans for campaigns and set performance goals so you can measure their success. There are many software tools to manage these types of campaigns and help monitor their performance. You’ll be introduced to the reporting capabilities in Google Ads and Google Analytics and how you can use the metrics in these tools to monitor campaign performance. You can tell if your campaign is a success by the metrics or the numbers. Move on to the next course item to learn more.

Media plans and performance goals

• Video Duration: 2 minutes

Hello. It’s great that you’re here to learn. For me, learning new skills is like working on a construction project, continuous progress is made as a tall building rises. In this video, you’ll be learning about media plans and performance goals. In construction, architectural plans help people visualize a building before it’s built. In marketing, media plans help people understand what’s in a marketing campaign before it’s run. And just like how architectural plans have dimensions like height and width that are used when a building is constructed, media plans have requirements, like number of impressions and number of clicks, that should be met when a campaign is run. The number of impressions is how many times an ad is displayed, and the number of clicks measures responses. These are examples of performance goals. A performance goal is a target that has a measurable numeric value. Performance goals can apply to marketing goals or specific campaigns in a media plan. When performance goals apply to marketing goals, they are sometimes called marketing objectives. Here’s a real example of the power of a media plan with a clear marketing objective. Google had a marketing goal to reach Black and Latinx audiences in the United States. Google’s media plan called for 15% of Google’s brand campaign budget to be spent on culturally-relevant media. That was the performance goal. As a result, campaigns are more inclusive. One campaign targeted media events with high viewership among Black audiences. It delivered a 13% increase in brand advocacy among Black adults, 35 to 49 years old. Another campaign to sponsor the Latin Grammys resulted in a 14% increase in Spanish speaking adults, 18 to 49 years old, likely to consider the purchase of a Pixel 5 phone. The media plan was the starting point to achieve these campaign results. You can go to the thinkwithgoogle.com website to read the full article called Inside Google Marketing: Our Approach to Inclusive Media Planning and Buying. Now, let’s think about performance goals for specific campaigns. The most important performance goal for an ad campaign is return on ad spend, often called ROAS. ROAS is a number calculated as the ratio of revenue generated to the amount spent on advertising. ROAS is a performance goal that you’ll often include in media plans. Now that you understand the importance of media plans to successful campaigns, you’ll appreciate choosing media for a variety of marketing budgets and setting performance goals. For best results, always create a media plan. When you do this, you’ll be building your knowledge and skills too.

Additional resources

If you’re interested, read the Think With Google article mentioned in this video. Click the link below: Inside Google Marketing: Our approach to inclusive media planning and buying

What is media planning?

• Video Duration: 5 minutes

Get ready to learn more about media planning. But first, you need to know what a media plan contains. A media plan contains details about where, when, and how often an ad will appear across all media channels, including radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, paid search, and social media. Because this program is for digital marketing, your media planning will focus on digital media. To remember this fact, you’ll refer to your media plans as digital media plans. When you create a digital media plan, you’ll need to consider who your target audience is. Ask yourself, whom do I need to reach? You’ll also need to consider how much you can spend, or the budget, which channels get how much of your budget, or the media mix, and how long the campaign will run, or the duration. Finally, you’ll need to figure out what the key performance indicators, or KPIs, are and the performance goals and metrics you’ll use to measure how you’re reaching the targeted performance. Let’s review previous definitions for business and marketing goals and KPIs because performance goals are created from these. A business goal is a desired aim, achievement, or outcome for a business. Examples of business goals include growing revenue, increasing profit, gaining market share, and improving customer service. A marketing goal is a specific objective in a marketing plan or strategy that supports a business goal. Examples of marketing goals include raising brand awareness, increasing web traffic, generating new leads, and increasing customer value. A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a measurement used to gauge how successful a business is in its effort to reach a business or marketing goal. Since KPIs are numeric, they often serve as performance targets for marketing goals. However, because they aren’t specific enough for individual campaigns, you normally would create an additional performance goal for each campaign. These campaign level performance goals would be included in your digital media plan. When you create performance goals for campaigns, they should factor into a performance measurement for an overall marketing goal. In fact, if there is good alignment, campaign level performance goals should clearly leap back to a marketing goal and even back to a relevant business goal. You learn that return on ad spend, or ROAS is a performance goal that is often included in digital media plans. Let’s walk through an example. Suppose a business goal to grow revenue is a priority. You might hear that your organization has been given a green light to move ahead with plans to grow revenue. A marketing goal that provides direction and supports the business goal could be a targeted marketing effort across a mix of media. A ROAS performance goal may be set at this level. If you’re working on three digital ad campaigns as part of the marketing plan, you could set a performance goal for each campaign. As you monitor the ROAS for each channel, your measurements would contribute towards meeting the ROAS set for the overall marketing effort. Up until now, ROAS has been referred to as a number, but without an actual value assigned. Here’s how to calculate ROAS. To keep it simple, let’s use an example of a business that sells a single product. ROAS can be calculated as the number of products sold times the cost per unit divided by the ad spend. If it costs $80 in advertising to sell three units of $100 product, the ROAS is 3.75. For every dollar they spend on advertising, they make $3.75. ROAS is often reported as a ratio, so for this scenario, the ROAS would be 3.75:1. You may also come across ROAS as a percentage. For this scenario, it would be 375 percent. To summarize, the same ROAS can be expressed as a number, ratio or percentage. We can now add some numbers to the previous example. If the business goal is to grow revenue by 10 percent and a 5:1 ROAS has been set for the marketing goal, you can assign individual ROAS targets for each channel. For example, you could start with a 3:1 ROAS for search ads, a 4:1 ROAS for display ads, and a 2:1 ROAS for social media ads. People typically use results from previous campaigns to help set ROAS targets for a new campaign. A common choice is to set the ROAS to the same or slightly below the value achieved in previous campaigns. If historical data isn’t available, you can make your best estimate and adjust the targets after you view some of the initial metrics from the campaign. Dynamic changes are allowed. The relationship between performance metrics and marketing goals demonstrates why it’s important to include performance goals in digital media plans. The path from one to the other should be clearly mapped out. In the example, all individual ROAS targets would work together to achieve an overall 5:1 ROAS. You’ll get an opportunity later to practice creating a digital media plan that includes target audience, budget, marketing mix, duration, KPIs, and performance goals.

Michael - Gaining understanding through analytics and measurement

• Video Duration: 3 minutes

My name is Michael, I’m currently a senior account executive at Google on our e-commerce and director consumer team. And my role is specifically designed to partner with C level executives that we are working with on their e-commerce and digital marketing strategy. I really found my path for digital marketing and getting a chance to work with small and medium sized businesses specifically when I was an undergrad undergraduate in college in New Orleans. My senior year in particular was very wondering what I was going to do after college, and I remember during one of my business classes that our professor had outlined that there was an internship specifically Google was coming to town. Is that how they that’s how they framed it to us? And so, I thought it was an amazing opportunity and signed up and I got a chance to work with small and medium sized businesses and help them on board. Specifically in setting up Gmail Google plus a lot of our our free types of solutions and just getting an opportunity to see just a whole new world opened up to these businesses was truly eye opening and amazing in particular because this was a time, a bit after a few years after Katrina. So, to see these businesses really find an online voice that they could tell the world. Their story was truly rewarding for me and something that I, I latched onto immediately and realized that this was going to be a path for me moving forward. My sort of headline is always be listening to me. It’s so much more about listening and asking more deep, impactful, thoughtful questions as opposed to diving deeper or going straight into selling. It’s gone by super quickly. I tell folks all the time. Some days, I can’t believe it’s been almost nine years, but when I first originally joined google, I was, I joined us in associate account strategist, which essentially just is very much, getting a chance and opportunity to work on the ground floor. I was very fortunate to work with businesses and business owners that were new to google specifically new to utilizing google ads and our digital marketing solutions. It was such an amazing experience because I really understood how critical the dollars that these business owners were bringing to google how critical those dollars were. So, a business owner that were spending $5 a day with us, that meant Just as much, maybe even more than some of the companies that were spending, over 5000. In this course, you’re going to learn about marketing measurement and analytics and it can feel quite daunting in the beginning. I know I experienced quite a bit of self doubt as I was even starting to learn more about this subject, but it it’s so critical and it’s just something you will continue to use every day in your role. One of the most valuable parts of just digital marketing and e-commerce is just really understanding the numbers and being able to pinpoint what’s helping your business grow. That’s ultimately going to come from by being able to look at analytics, specifically google analytics, understanding your measurement strategy as more of consumers today shop online and they go through different touchpoints in their overall consumer journey. Being able to use and have a key strategy like analytics or measurement, will only help you further and really help you understand your overall consumer and how they’re arriving at your business and shopping from you.

Choose a media mix to reach fellow learners

• Discussion Prompt Duration: 10 minutes

Lately, you’ve been focused on how to create media plans and set performance goals. Now it’s time to bring this knowledge into your everyday life to practice thinking like a digital marketer.

For this discussion prompt, think about what content is most popular to you and your fellow learners. Then, consider the following questions:

• How would you create a digital media plan to reach the audience of your fellow learners? Remember, a digital media plan contains details about where, when, and how often an ad will appear across all digital media channels including paid search, display, video, shopping, and social media ads.

• How would the content most popular with your fellow learners impact media decisions you would make?

Submit 5–10 sentences (100–200 words total). Then, go to the discussion forum and, applying what you’ve learned, comment on at least two posts from other learners.

Answer

To create a digital media plan to reach the audience of my fellow learners, I would begin by understanding the content that’s most popular among them. This could involve analyzing the types of discussions, forums, or social media platforms they frequently engage with. I’d consider the following steps:

1. Audience Segmentation: I would segment my fellow learners based on their interests, demographics, and online behaviors. This would help me tailor the media plan to specific audience segments.

2. Content Alignment: I’d closely align the content of my ads with the popular topics and interests of my audience. If discussions about digital marketing or specific courses are common, my content would revolve around these topics.

3. Platform Selection: Depending on where my fellow learners spend their time online, I’d choose the most appropriate digital media channels. This might include social media platforms, online forums, or educational websites.

4. Frequency and Timing: I’d consider when and how often to display ads. If certain discussions or forums are more active at specific times, I’d schedule ads accordingly.

5. Performance Goals: I’d set clear performance goals, such as increasing engagement, click-through rates, or conversions. These goals would guide the measurement of campaign success.

The content most popular with my fellow learners would heavily influence my media decisions. By tailoring the ads to their interests and preferences, I’d have a higher chance of engaging them effectively. It’s essential to create relevant and engaging content that resonates with the audience to maximize the impact of the media plan.

Steps for media planning

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

This reading provides more information about the contents of a digital media plan and the general steps to create one.

Digital media plan contents

You learned in a video that a digital media plan contains details about where, when, and how often ads will appear across digital media channels, and includes the following information:

• Target audience

• Budget

• Media mix

• Duration

• Key performance indicators (KPIs)

• Performance goals and metrics

Here are descriptions of each, along with the purpose they serve in a digital media plan.

Target audience

A target audience: is the group of people most likely to purchase the products or services being advertised. Sometimes, a target audience is defined by a combination of customer personas that help marketers determine how to reach people using the right messages, offers, and products. A digital media plan should leverage customer personas as much as possible. A digital media plan can also include audience demographics, such as age, income, devices used, and preferred media for the content consumed. However, demographic information might not be available from all customer personas.

Purpose: A target audience is documented in a digital media plan for purely economic and strategic reasons. You want to spend a limited campaign budget on the people most likely to make a purchase.

Budget

Campaigns usually have a fixed budget allocated from a larger marketing budget. Spending more than what is budgeted for a campaign often requires further justification and approval.

Purpose: A budget is documented in a media plan to help prevent over- or under-spending for a particular channel during a campaign.

Media mix

A media mix specifies how much of a budget will be spent across each media channel in a campaign. If actual amounts are unknown, you can specify percentages of the budget in the media mix. For example, you could assign $20,000, or 30% of the budget to social media. Either is acceptable in a media plan.

Purpose: A media mix is critical to a media plan because it enables the right content decisions to be made based on an allocated budget for any particular media channel.

Duration (flight)

Duration, also referred to as flight, is the length of a campaign and is easy to document. But if you’re running a campaign using a pay-per-click (PPC) model, duration becomes trickier because you’ll need to ensure your budget is sufficient for the entire duration of the campaign. For campaigns like these, duration is heavily influenced by budget.

Purpose: Duration, or flight, in a digital media plan specifies how long the campaign will run.

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

A key performance indicator, or KPI, is a measurement or metric used to gauge how successful a campaign is. It’s important to include KPIs for each media channel in a digital media plan so you can measure the success of a campaign at that level. For example, in another video lesson, you learned how each channel can have its own return on ad spend, or ROAS, as a measure of success.

Purpose: KPIs in a media plan document how you will measure campaign success for each media channel.

Performance goals and metrics

A performance goal is a target that has a measurable, numeric value. Performance goals help define success. If metrics meet or exceed a performance goal during a campaign, the campaign is successful. Clickthrough rate (CTR), the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, is a popular metric for ads.

Purpose: Including performance goals in a media plan allows you to consistently measure the performance and success of each media channel during a campaign.

Steps to create a digital media plan

Assuming that business and marketing goals have already been created, here are the general steps to create a digital media plan:

1. Confirm business goals: Assuming that these have already been established, identify and confirm what they are.

2. Confirm marketing goals: Assuming that these have already been created, identify and confirm what they are.

3. Conduct market research: (Optional) If a target audience isn’t clearly identified, market research can help you determine what it is. For example, market research can determine both customer personas and target audience.

4. Define campaign goals: Be clear on what the campaign should achieve. Campaign goals usually have a relationship with a higher-level marketing or business goal. For example, if sales growth needs to occur in a particular region, a campaign’s goal can be to increase brand awareness through ads directed at users in that region.

5. Select the media channels: Media channels selected for a campaign should align with the media preferences of the target audience. A media mix can then be created after identifying which channels have the highest priority.

6. Determine and document all media plan items: After you have determined the required items for a digital media plan, you can use a document or software media planning tools to help you create the plan.

Format of a digital media plan

A digital media plan can be created in many formats. You can use documents, spreadsheets, or even specialized media planning tools. Remember that the format of a digital media plan isn’t as important as its contents.

Digital media plan templates

If you use a document for your digital media plan, media planning templates are widely available. You can also create your own organization format. Below is an example of a basic table that can assist with media planning. Sample content is in italicized text.

In a digital media plan, you can also include a reference image of a marketing funnel to map performance goals and metrics to the relevant stages of the funnel. This helps people visualize what your campaign is trying to achieve at any given stage. The illustration below is an example.

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Media planning tools

If you use media planning software to create a media plan, there are many tools to choose from. A HubSpot blog article identifies twelve available media planning tools in their Essential Media Planning Tools list.

12 Essential Media Planning Tools: Provides website links for several media planning tools

Key takeaways

A digital media plan contains details about where, when, and how often an ad will appear across digital media channels. Documenting KPIs and metrics for each channel is essential for measuring campaign success. Media planning can be achieved using documents or specialized media planning tools. The organizational format of a media plan can vary, and many templates are available.

Test your knowledge: Media plans

• Practice Quiz. 5 questions. Grade: 100%
  • Acess Quiz

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3. Performance goals

Set performance goals

• Video Duration: 4 minutes

You learned that a performance goal is a target that has a measurable numeric value. Performance goals and their associated metrics define success. Without them it’s simply a feeling or guesswork on how a campaign is actually benefiting a business. This video has three examples of how performance goals are based on business and marketing goals. Suppose a business goal for an e-commerce store is to improve customer acquisition by 20% over the next three months. Customer acquisition is a marketing term for the process of gaining new customers. Customer acquisition for an E-commerce store depends on traffic to the site. The more traffic coming to the site, the greater the chance of acquiring new customers. A campaign is planned to help generate more traffic to the site to improve customer acquisition. For the campaign, you set an initial performance goal of a 20% increase in weekly new visitor counts to match the desired business goal. To determine whether you’re meeting your performance goal, you monitor the metrics for new visitors to the site and compare them to the previous baseline numbers. Once you reach a 20% increase, you’ve met your performance goal. But, it may take more than one performance target to satisfy a business goal. In the previous scenario, what if new visitors come to the site but leave without taking action? That’s called bounce. The bounce rate is the number of bounce sessions divided by the number of total sessions. If you increase your new visitor count but have a high bounce rate, you might not reach the business goal of improving customer acquisition by 20%. Try setting a second performance goal to reduce the bounce rate by 50%. Then, monitor the performance metrics for new visitor counts and bounce rate. You can observe that weekly increases to new visitor counts aren’t offset by bounce rate that is too high, and the number of returning visitors is holding steady, or increasing along with an increase in the number of new visitors.

In the second example, a business goal is set to achieve $50,000 in incremental sales over the next month. A marketing goal follows to increase the marketing return on investment, or ROI, by two times its current value. To determine a performance goal an additional budget at a campaign level, perform a couple calculations. First, determine how many more orders need to be placed to generate an additional $50,000 in incremental sales. For this calculation, you can use the average order value, or AOV. AOV is the sum of individual order amounts divided by the number of orders. Let’s assume the AOV is $148. Divide the target incremental sales of 50,000 by the average order value of 148 to get the number of additional orders or 338. So the performance goal is an additional 338 orders. Next, if the current marketing ROI is two and the marketing goal is to double it, you can assume a 4 to 1 ROAS to be aligned. You can then calculate the incremental budget you need by dividing the incremental sales amount by the return on ad spend. Divide the incremental sales amount 50,000, by the target ROAS 4. You will need to request $12,500 of additional campaign budget to drive additional sales.

In the last example, the marketing goal is to increase the conversion volume from social media by 25% over the next six months. Conversion volume is the total number of conversions or total monetary value of conversions over a period of time. A conversion happens when a potential customer takes a desired action. If you’re measuring conversion volume by the total number of conversions, you can set a performance goal for an individual channel. For example, over the next six months you could try to increase by 10% the number of conversions and sessions referred from Instagram. If you’re measuring conversion volume as a monetary value, you’ll need to assign monetary values to different types of conversions, such as leads or purchases. This can normally be set up and monitored in tools like Google Ads. A performance goal in this case would be a certain monetary amount by the end of the six month period. For example, $100,000 attributed to conversions and sessions referred from Instagram. Congratulations, you made it through learning how to create performance goals from business and marketing goals. These examples are quite detailed, so feel free to replay the video as a review or for help to complete other course activities. You’ll practice creating performance goals on your own. You’ll also get a chance to work in the reverse direction, too. Given a report from a completed marketing campaign, you’ll be able to view the performance metrics and identify related business or marketing goals.

Angela - Make data, analytics, and metrics work together for performance

• Video Duration: 2 minutes

My name is Angela, and I am a Digital Strategy Lead at Google. I partner with different small- to medium-sized businesses and help them grow their business and revenue through Google Ads. I love that I get to work with so many different types of clients every day. I get to really understand the business model, how they make money, their product margins, and even get to be a part of some of the product development that clients do based on the data that I helped them collect and analyze. They then take that information and expand their market. Performance goals are essentially goals that the client cares about what the customer or the user does when they arrive at the website or when they arrive at the store. It’s that interaction or that action that we measure to know if certain things are working in the marketing world. Performance goals can vary from client to client, depending on how they make money and what their goals are with marketing. One client, maybe an e-com, is trying to sell products, so our performance metrics would be add to cart or purchase action on the website, as well as even product page views. E-com clients definitely have hard numbers that they need to hit or return on ad spend that they need to hit. And so typically, we will measure the purchases, the purchase value, as well as impressions and clicks to understand if that campaign was successful or not. Another client in this space could be an app client where they are just trying to get installs, and so we have a different metric around that which is called app installs, downloads, first opens. The goal of performance measurement is to really understand—with all the different data points that come in from digital marketing—what works. And the data never lies, right? So as long as you have good ways of measuring and attributing credit from different ads channels, your performance marketing goals will help you measure and attribute success from marketing to the business revenue. So my advice to people who are just starting in digital marketing is to really understand different business models— whether that is an e-com client and what their profit margins look like and how do they make money, to a lead gen client where they need phone calls and then they have a sales team dedicated to working those leads. Every nuance of how clients make money factors into their marketing budget and what they do with digital marketing, so it’s very important that you understand first how the client makes money, and then from there you can give them sound advice for marketing.

Cost-related performance goals

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

The video in this course that covered performance goals focused on how to use return on ad spend (ROAS), but there are many other kinds of cost-related performance goals to consider. This reading describes performance goals for bidding strategies that were introduced earlier in the program. Smart Bidding enables Google Ads to monitor goals to ensure that strategies are optimized to reach those goals. Both Smart Bidding and manual bidding use targets or performance goals for metrics like

• Cost per acquisition (CPA)

• Cost per click (CPC)

Note: With Smart Bidding, you can use Target CPA and Enhanced CPC strategies. An Enhanced CPC strategy combines manual CPC bidding with Target CPA or Target ROAS.

Lower CPA to improve campaign value

Note: Performance goals will vary by campaign. Cost-related information provided below is for illustrative purposes only.

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is the average cost paid for each conversion. If you have comparative data from historical campaigns, you can use the average CPA value as a performance goal. You can then optimize your campaign to try to achieve a lower CPA to improve the value of your campaign.

If you don’t have historical campaign data, you can try using an industry-average value as a starting point. Industry averages are typical values found across an entire industry. CPA for search ads for the auto industry, CPA for Facebook ads for the clothing industry, and CPA for e-commerce are a few examples.

Imagine you’re working for a real estate firm but don’t have historical campaign data. You research and find that the industry-average CPA for real estate search ads is $41.14, so you set your target CPA at $40 (red line in chart below). Your budget for search ads is $10,000 so you’ll be aiming for at least 250 conversions to meet or exceed the target CPA of $40. Any number of conversions below the red line would exceed your target.

Number of conversions for improvement = Budget / CPA = $10,000 / $40 = 250

If a conversion is defined as a potential customer requesting information about realty services, you’ll need at least 250 people to take that action after seeing your search ads. If more than 250 people take that action, you will have improved your campaign’s value above the industry average for real estate.

Use daily spend to manage CPC

Note: Performance goals will vary by campaign. Cost-related information provided below is for illustrative purposes only.

Cost per click (CPC) is a metric used in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. One way you can control cost is to manage CPC on a per-campaign basis. You can allocate more budget to the PPC campaigns that are the highest priority.

Going back to the example of working at a real estate company, if you’re running national search ads for multiple regions, but the northwest sales region has a higher priority than the southwest sales region, you can spend more of your budget on the PPC campaign for the northwest region. Assuming the maximum CPC is $0.50 for both regions, you can allocate a daily spend that’s higher in the northwest to achieve more clicks in that region. If you assume a daily spend of $200 for the northwest region and $100 for the southwest region, the following calculations apply:

Number of clicks in the northwest region = Daily Spend / CPC = $200/$0.50 = 400 clicks **Number of clicks in the southwest region **= Daily Spend / CPC = $100/$0.50 = 200 clicks

Based on the difference in the daily spend, the number of clicks you are willing to pay for in the northwest region (darker blue datapoint) is greater than the number of clicks you are willing to pay for in the southwest region (lighter blue datapoint). You can control the daily spend during the campaign to manage performance outcomes in each region.

Key takeaways

Understanding CPA, ROAS, and CPC helps you manage campaigns. Daily spend or CPC adjust to maximize the number of conversions. With Smart Bidding, an Enhanced CPC strategy combines manual bidding with a target CPA or target ROAS.

Activity: Set performance goals

• Practice Quiz. 1 question. Grade: 100%

On Step 1: Access the template

• Link to template: Performance goals

Activity Exemplar: Set performance goals

• Reading. Duration: 10 minutes

Here is a completed exemplar along with an explanation of how the exemplar fulfills the expectations for the activity.

Completed Exemplar

To review the exemplar for this course item, click the link below and select “Use Template.”

Link to exemplar: Performance goals

Assessment of Exemplar

Compare the exemplar to your completed performance goals template. Review your work using each of the criteria in the exemplar. What did you do well? Where can you improve? Use your answers to these questions to guide you as you continue to progress through the course.

Review each calculation:

Conversion rates are calculated using the following formula: Conversions / Total Clicks x 100 = Conversion Rate Percentage

Therefore, Baba’s Q3 conversion rates are calculated using the following equations:

• E-mail: 90 / 1,200 x 100 = 7.5%

• Social media: 30 / 900 x 100 = 3.33%

Click-through rates are calculated using the following formula:

Total Clicks / Total Impressions x 100 = Click-through Rate Percentage

Therefore, Baba’s Q3 click-through rates are calculated using the following equations:

• E-mail: 1,200 / 80,000 x 100 = 1.5%

• Social media: 900 / 90,000 x 100 = 1%

Let’s review the criteria for Q4 performance goals:

• Each performance goal includes conversion rate or click-through rate—metrics that are relevant to both the business goal of increasing revenue and the marketing goals of increasing conversion and click-through rates.

• Each performance goal indicates the desired increase to either the conversion or click-through rate, so it’s clear how the goal will be measured.

• Each performance goal targets an attainable increase to conversion and click-through rates , based on both industry benchmarks and Q3 performance data (for example, a 0.5 to 1.2 percentage point increase).

Note: that your performance goals may differ somewhat from those in the exemplar. The performance goals you wrote are acceptable if they are relevant, measurable, and attainable.

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Note: also that your Q4 performance goals need not add up to the desired percentage point increase across all channels. Because you were asked to set goals for two out of possibly many other channels, your performance goals can contribute toward a combined marketing goal without necessarily satisfying it. For instance, for CTR in the exemplar, the Q4 performance goals for email and social media are increases of 0.8 and 0.6 percentage points, respectively. Adding these results in a combined 1.4 percentage point increase, but this is less than the five percentage points specified in the marketing goal for all channels. Other channels would presumably contribute and make up the difference to meet the overall marketing goal.

Test your knowledge: Performance goals for digital marketing

• Practice Quiz. 5 questions. Grade: 100%

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4. Introduction to tools for marketing analytics

Marketing analytics skills

• Video Duration: 3 minutes

Hi, there. You’re making good progress in this course. Keep it up. When you began the program, you were introduced to the skills that are in demand for digital marketing and e-commerce. If you are taking the courses in this program in the recommended order, you’ve worked on skills to contribute to marketing and ad strategies, create search, display, and social media ads, run e-mail campaigns, expand customer reach, raise brand awareness, and engage customers with content. Some additional skills can be classified under the category of analytics. These include how to set and monitor campaign performance, analyze metrics, identify trends, optimize customer engagement, and gather insights for future campaigns. Marketing analytics can be applied to a customer journey, website, application, or marketing campaign. They all depend on a process to monitor desired KPIs and performance goals. During a campaign, your team might set goals, run tests, monitor metrics, make adjustments, and then repeat the process until the desired goals are met. Software tools are required for marketing analytics. In this course, you’ll mainly use Google Analytics and Google Ads to monitor metrics and measure campaign performance. You’ll also learn how tools like Google Ads can be used to run tests on pages, ads, and target groups, and how tools like Google Optimize can plug in to a website to test content options. These kinds of tests are called A/B or split tests. An A/B test, also known as a split test or bucket test, is an online test of two variants that determine the better performing option. Here’s how it works. Suppose you have two versions of a direct response. One goal of an A/B test might be to test which page and which response performs better based on the number of clicks. During the test, traffic is equally split between the two pages. In other words, 50% of traffic is randomly directed to one page and 50% of traffic is randomly directed to the other page. One direct response outperforms the other by receiving more clicks. As a result of the test, you deploy the direct response ad that got more clicks. Teams choose their tools based on capabilities, features, and cost. Some tools are designed for monitoring of events, like click analysis, monitoring of visuals and graphics, or displaying dashboards. Other tools are designed for more sophisticated analytics. The tools you use will often depend on a combination of organization, team, and project needs. Be open to using tools that you haven’t used before. No matter which tools your team uses, you’ll also want to be aware of what the tools can or can’t do before you use them. Understanding the capabilities of the tools you use will enable you to choose the metrics that work best for your project. I remember the first time I used Google Analytics, there were so many reports to explore and I didn’t know where to begin. Over time, I became more comfortable using some key reports and learned from my customers which metrics were important to them. I asked questions to understand how they use analytics to expand their e-commerce business. As you gain more experience with tools like Google Analytics, you can become someone who can answer those questions too. Reporting the right metrics will enable you and your team to learn and share the most useful insights.

Introduction to Google Analytics

• Video Duration: 5 minutes

There are a lot of software tools for analytics use. This video will introduce you to the Google Analytics demo available to everyone with a Google account. Think of This as a guided tour of the reporting capabilities before you explore them on your own. The demo contains live data from the Google merchandise store and flood it, a gaming app in Google Play. When you access the demo, you must choose a property to view. In Google Analytics, a property is a website, mobile application, or web page that is associated with a unique measurement ID to enable metrics collection. A Google Analytics account contain one or multiple properties. A single property can contain combined metrics for a website and app, but multiple properties are useful if a business has multiple websites and apps or has very distinct user segments on a single website or app. When you create a new property, you specify the website, app or page, so that a new measurement ID can be established and metrics collected.

To follow along with the instructor, click this link: Access the demo account. The link takes you to the same page the instructor will be on to sign in to the Google Analytics demo account. You must have a personal Google account to sign in to the demo account. If you don’t have one, follow the instructions to create a Google account before you continue.

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Note: If you are denied access to the demo account, open the page in an incognito browser window and sign in again.

Let’s sign into the demo account from the demo account page by choosing the Google Analytics 4 property for the Google merchandise store. No matter which property you initially choose for the demo, If you click the drop-down for your current view, you can display all the properties associated with the demo account and click “Open” to switch to a different property. At this time, there are UA properties and GA4 properties. UA properties are for an older version of Google Analytics that collects website metrics only. Because Google Analytics 4 collects metrics from both websites and mobile apps, new account should use GA4 properties. There’s also an attribution project for them, Google merchandise store in the demo. Attribution is the act of assigning credit for conversions from ads, last clicks, or other touch points along a user’s path to conversion completion. In other words, attribution gives credit where credit is due. A conversion can be a macro conversion or a micro conversion. A macro conversion is typically a completed purchase transaction. A micro conversion is a completed response that indicates that a potential customer is moving towards a macro conversion. Micro conversions are referred to as other touch points in the previous definition for attribution. Attribution projects provide organization for both macro and micro conversions. Now let’s view some of the reports in the GA4 property for the Google merchandise store. Beginning at the reports snapshot at the top, you can click the tabs to view summary information about all users, new users, average engagement time, and total revenue. Let’s scroll down. You can see insights, user and traffic acquisition, user trends, top campaigns, most page views, top events, top conversions, top selling products, and conversions by platform. What’s interesting are the automated insights. These will change as measurements vary, but you can monitor when there are spikes or unforecasted changes. For example, you might see an unforecasted spike in conversions. The real-time menu displays current user activity on the website. You can view users by device and geography. You can view users by source, audience and page, and you can view events and conversions. The life cycle menu displays information for the customer life cycle. The acquisition sub-menu has details about user and traffic acquisition. Click “Acquisition overview” to view a summary. The engagements sub-menu has details about events, conversions, pages, and screens. Interestingly, if you click “Conversions” and scroll down, you can view the numbers for the begin checkout and purchase events to get an estimate of how many users leave products in the shopping cart without completing a purchase. The monetization sub-menu has details about website and in-app purchases. And finally, the retention sub-menu has information about user retention and lifetime value over a 120-day period. User retention measures how many new users returned to the website over a period of time. Customer lifetime value is the average revenue generated by customers over a certain period of time. The user menu breaks down demographics and devices for engaged users on the website. Click “Demographics overview” to view users by country, city, gender, interests, age, or language. Click “Tech overview” to view users by platform, operating system, device, browser, screen resolution, app version, and mobile device model. This completes the highlights of the GA4 reports for the Google merchandise store. You should now be familiar with how to locate and navigate to various metrics in Google Analytics. In other course activities, you’ll use the demo account, again, to examine metrics more closely.

Resources to learn more about Google Analytics

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

In this course, the video introducing the Google Analytics demo account provides an overview of Google Analytics’ features and monitoring capabilities. To learn more about using Google Analytics, review the resources for online training described in this reading. The listings in this reading are for free online training. You can look up additional training opportunities online if you’d like, but they may cost money to access.

Free online training

Read the following descriptions to find the training that’s right for you.

• Note: The free training resources listed are for Universal Analytics, Google Analytics 4 (GA4), or both. As more organizations migrate to Google Analytics 4, more training will be added for the newer version.

Google Help Center Analytics Training and Support

• Google Help Center Analytics Training and Support. This website contains a list of important topics and resources to browse. This is a useful resource to bookmark in your browser for reference. Some resources to check out include:

• Google Analytics Academy: (Universal Analytics only) Google Analytics courses for beginners, advanced users, and power users

• Google Analytics YouTube Channel: Videos and product help for Google Analytics

• Google Analytics Blog: Current articles about Google Analytics

• Google Marketing Platform Academy (Google Analytics 360): Live and on-demand webinars and tutorials for Google Analytics

Skillshop

• Skillshop: is Google’s self-paced training platform for Google’s tools and solutions. When you sign up, you’ll be able to access online courses at any time, and complete them at your own pace.

• Skillshop training for Google Analytics: Learning paths for Google Analytics 4 or Universal Analytics

• Google Analytics Individual Qualification: Qualification track covers basic and advanced Google Analytics concepts

Paid online training

Examples of training courses that charge a fee for access are:

• Udemy Google Analytics Courses

• LinkedIn Learning

Activity: Familiarize yourself with Google Analytics

• Practice Quiz. 1 question. Grade: 100%

• On Step 1: Access the template

To use the template for this course item, click the link below and select “Use Template.”

• Link to template: Metrics for January

• On Step 2: Access the Google Analytics demo account Click this link, Access the demo account, to display the page in a new browser window.

Activity Exemplar: Familiarize yourself with Google Analytics

• Reading Duration: 10 minutes

• Link to exemplar: Metrics for January

Introduction to Google Ads

• Video Duration: 3 minutes

Google Ads is Google’s online advertising platform. Using Google Ads, a marketer can create online ads to reach specific audiences interested in the products or services their business offers. If this is your first introduction to Google Ads, this video will provide a guided orientation. When you’re working on a campaign in Google Ads, you’ll need to know what you can view in the dashboard, how to find a campaign, and it’s metrics, how to access, and act on recommendations that Google Ads provides, and how to view reports. When you sign into Google Ads, you’ll see a dashboard, or overview of all campaigns. You should be able to find your campaign listed in the draft campaigns card or the campaigns card in the dashboard. Active campaigns are listed with links. Click an individual link to view the settings for a single campaign. The overview page is a high-level view of how your campaigns are performing. This is where you would look for things like overall trends, click volumes, top keywords searched, and top-performing ads. You can also click to start a new campaign. You can also see the data for all campaigns by going to the campaigns page. All campaigns are listed along with their metrics like clicks and conversions. You can adjust the time frame for the metrics to increase or decrease the period for which you’re evaluating the metrics. One important column check is the budget column. This is where you would monitor budget spent, and any campaign limitations you have in the budget. If you go to the recommendations page, you’ll see a percentage that serves as an optimization score. The closer the score is to 100 percent, the better your advertising is performing. You can review the recommendations on this page to potentially take action on one, or more of them to help improve the optimization score of your advertising. If you have more than one campaign, the optimization score is cumulative for all campaigns. Each recommendation is shown as a scorecard with a predicted impact. If a predicted impact is something you think would benefit a campaign, you can click to view the details of the recommendation. From there, you can choose to apply that recommendation to that campaign. The final page for this orientation is the reports page. The reports page is where you can pull reports for a campaign performance. You can use predefined templates for reports, or build a custom report by choosing the metrics you want to include. Click to open the template you want. For example, the landing page report shows performance metrics, conversions, days to conversion, and more for each landing page. These performance metrics are extremely helpful for ad placement. This completes the orientation for Google Ads. You should now be familiar with viewing the dashboard for an overview of campaigns, viewing the metrics for individual or all campaigns, applying recommendations to campaigns to improve the overall advertising health score, and using the reporting feature. You’ll learn how to monitor specific metrics later.

Resources to learn more about Google Ads

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

In this course, the video introducing Google Ads provides an overview of Google Ads’ features and campaign performance monitoring capabilities. To learn more about using Google Ads, review the resources for online training described in this reading. The listings in this reading are for free online training. You can look up additional training opportunities online if you’d like, but they may cost money to access.

Free online training

Read the following descriptions to find the training that’s right for you.

Google Ads Help Center: Analytics Training and Support

We recommend bookmarking the Google Ads Help Center: Analytics Training and Support website. It contains a list of key topics to browse.

Skillshop

Skillshop is Google’s self-paced training platform for Google’s tools and solutions. When you sign up, you’ll be able to access online courses at any time, and complete them at your own pace. The training offered for Google Ads includes specifics for:

• Search ads

• Discovery ads

• Display ads

• Video ads

• Shopping ads

• Mobile app ads

• Google Ads measurement

You can watch the following video tutorials:

• Google Ads Tutorial Series: Search

• Google Ads Tutorial Series: Display

• Google Ads Tutorial Series: Video

• Google Ads Tutorial Series: Shopping

Paid online training

Examples of training courses that charge a fee for access are:

• Udemy: Google Ads

• LinkedIn Learning: Google Ads

• Coursera: Google Ads

Other tools for marketing and analytics

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

You have been introduced to Google Analytics and Google Ads as examples of marketing analytics tools and platforms. This reading lists similar tools and links to find more information about them. Except for the open source tools which are free, a variety of subscription plans and pricing is available for each tool or platform.

Note: The certificate program doesn’t promote or endorse any of the tools listed. The purpose is to provide you with a sampling of other tools that are available.

Tools for marketing analytics

Here is a list of several marketing analytics tools:

• Clicky

• Fathom

• GoSquared

• Heap

• Kissmetrics

• Mixpanel

• Oribi

• Statcounter

• Visitor Analytics

• W3Counter

• Woopra

Marketing suites with analytics

Marketing software suites that offer analytics features include:

• Adobe Analytics

• Adobe Marketo Engage

• HubSpot

Open source tools

Open source tools for marketing analytics include:

• AWStats

• Countly

• Matomo

• Open Web Analytics

• Plausible

Advertising platforms

Here are a few advertising platforms and links to learn more:

• BuySellAds

• Media.net

• AdButler

Tim - Use marketing analytics data

• Video Duration: 4 minutes

Hi. I’m Tim, and I’m a Strategic Partner Development Manager at Google for marketing analytics. Prior to joining the Google team, and before working in marketing analytics, I was an Olympic figure skater. The transition from being an athlete and then moving into the academic space was definitely a little bit scary. I think it was way out of my comfort zone at that point because during my training, I had taken a long break from my education. So it was definitely a big transition and a bit of a shock to the system. But I think a lot of what I learned as an athlete really helped me to kind of navigate those challenges. Within my role at Google, I work very closely with external parties that run marketing mix modeling, and I really act as kind of the conduit between Google and the data that we’re supplying for our external partners, and then the account teams and analysts and other folks on the vendor side that are interpreting and measuring that data. Marketing mix modeling is a statistical tool that advertisers use to measure the effectiveness of their total overall media plan. So we incorporate things in marketing mix such as TV, radio, print traditional media, as well as digital platforms such as online search, online video—YouTube, for example— and it gives advertisers kind of a rank order of how their different online and offline media channels are performing. The primary data that we use as inputs for marketing analytics are things like TV ratings, search clicks, search impressions, online and digital impressions. And we kind of roll that up generally with sales data to build a statistical model that kind of spits out how much each media and each marketing vehicle is generating for a particular brand. And I think that’s where kind of the most interesting part of the job is. And you have to kind of take that and then look at it in the context of that advertiser, try as best you can to make sense of it, and then you start going one layer deeper. Okay, well, I see that this particular number for TV is higher than this particular number for a digital channel. Why would that be? How was it executed in market? What was the target audience? That’s where you rely on your team and your manager and other people to kind of make sense of it all. Working cross-functionally to figure out, this is the data that the model gives me, how can I make it actionable? How can I make it relevant? And then, what’s the business context or other considerations that are going to drive that call to action? I’ve definitely seen examples of models where an intended output is definitely counter to what the advertiser with the end client expects. Working with a particular consumer packaged goods product that has a really sort of general broad user base, for one particular year, they had done a very targeted campaign to a specific affinity group. And it ended up increasing the cost per point of that media execution. We found out that it didn’t perform very well because they were trying to apply a very specific use case to a product that has a very general, very broad market base. And I think they just went a little bit too narrow, and as a result of seeing the model output and then looking into the underlying data, it allowed them to make a strategy that was better for that particular brand. Fortunately, when they did switch up their strategy for the following year, they did see much stronger performance than they had seen in the year where they had done the really targeted campaign. My best piece of advice for people starting early on in their marketing analytics career is: Be flexible, be adaptable, and be nimble. Marketing is an industry that evolves very quickly. While the measurement fundamentals remain the same, what you’re actually looking at and interpreting change quickly. And so just be nimble, keep learning, and, again, keep focused on the data, keep focused on the underlying data, interrogating that data and trying to make sense of the why behind the what.

Big data for marketing analytics and automation

• Video Duration: 3 minutes

Hi there. Let’s begin by asking a question. Do you ever wish you could know what the future will be like in your chosen field? Marketing is changing with the rise of Big data, predictive analytics, and AI. What could marketing be like in the future? This video introduces you to a few possibilities. Marketing professionals are noticing several trends. Two are related to analytics and two are for automation. Big data makes these trends possible. Big data refers to a field in analytics that systematically mines and extracts information from very large datasets for insights. Big data can also refer to the large datasets themselves. Financial companies use big data for risk analysis. Manufacturers use big data to optimize supply chains. Here’s how marketing organizations are using big data. The first trend is real-time analytics. Real-time analytics monitors immediate data to gain insights to respond to events more quickly. If you think about it, marketers can adjust a marketing campaign only as fast as they can monitor the data. And the more detailed the data, the better. If big data is pulled together and filtered with greater speed, marketers can respond to under-performing aspects of a campaign immediately, or in real-time. So, if real-time analytics tells them a target audience isn’t responding, the message for that audience can be adjusted right away. Big data also plays a role in what is called predictive analytics. Predictive analytics uses historical data to predict what might happen. So, if predictive analytics is applied to models created from collective browsing histories, marketers might be able to identify the right audience for successful campaign early on. Predictive analytics can also help marketers choose an optimal page or an ad without performing an AB test, saving both time and money. Autonomous marketing uses real-time analytics to automate marketing activities. For example, autonomous marketing can adjust an underperforming message automatically. This can increase the impact of multi-channel marketing campaigns. Autonomous marketing can also be highly effective to promote and maintain customer loyalty programs. Artificial intelligence, or AI for short, is a field developing intelligent machines and software that simulate human thought or work. Multi-channel campaigns are often difficult to manage because of the amount of content that needs to be created for each channel. If AI can be used to help create and personalize content, marketers can offer context-specific experiences for users. And optimized experiences in e-commerce can turn more browsers into buyers. These trends are finding their way into platforms and systems. Automation and AI are a new standard. For instance, Google ads offers automated bidding, and Google ads smart bidding uses machine learning to analyze data in real-time to show the right message to the right customer at the right time. One thing is certain. As these trends continue their growth, new roles will open up in marketing. You’d have a good chance of being correct, if you say the future in analytics is already here.

Prepare for a cookie-less future in advertising and e-commerce

• Reading Duration: 20 minutes

A cookie is a sweet baked treat. A cookie is also a small file saved on computers to store user preferences and other information. This reading describes how cookies have traditionally been used in advertising and e-commerce, and how they have also caused concerns about user privacy. You have learned that a future in marketing will rely on real-time and predictive analytics, autonomous campaigns, and artificial intelligence. What’s also certain is marketers will need to prepare for a cookie-less future as users feel more strongly about protecting their privacy. Some browsers have already implemented limitations, and many browsers have plans to phase-out the use of certain types of cookies.

How cookies are used

First developed in 1994, cookies were created to save user’s settings on websites. They can be used to monitor how visitors arrive and how they interact with a site. Cookies were initially vendor-specific and helped companies track the status of user sessions in the early days of e-commerce. Over time, cookies provided benefits to marketing and analytics as well.

Remarketing

Remarketing is the process of using ads or follow-up emails to engage with a potential customer who has visited a website but didn’t make a purchase. The user information saved in cookies on browsers allows businesses to engage with these users for remarketing.

Analytics tools

Cookies keep a record of user session and device information. Cookies enable tools like Google Analytics to collect session start and traffic source information. Events configured in Google Analytics for website or mobile app monitoring summarize and report this information. Conversion counts in Google Ads also rely on cookies to determine which ads or product lists users engage with.

Third-party data collection

As mentioned previously, cookies were originally designed to be domain or website specific. In other words, user data stored in a cookie was meant for use on a specific website only. A cookie set by the website owner is called a first-party cookie and uses the website’s domain.

However, third-party cookies used in advertising can collect and track more information about users. Third-party cookies aren’t developed by a website’s owner but are distributed by third-party tools. They use a third-party advertiser’s domain instead of the website’s domain. A third-party can deliver a cookie to users by displaying a banner ad. Because a banner ad persists across multiple sites users browse, that cookie continues to collect information. This information might not be anonymous and can be sold by the third-parties collecting the information. These third-party cookies are a major cause of concern about privacy. Some third-parties are capable of delivering literally hundreds of cookies upon a user’s first visit, and the majority of these are used to track their behaviors.

Alternatives to cookies

Advertising and e-commerce will need to evolve to operate in a cookie-less world. Technologists are rising to the cookie privacy challenge by developing alternatives. Interest-based advertising and new methods for website remarketing are under development as alternatives to cookies.

Interest-based advertising (IBA)

Interest-based advertising, or IBA, relies on generalized browsing behaviors instead of on the browsing behaviors of specific individuals for the targeting of ads.

Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC, is one proposal that presumes that a browser can group people together when they have similar browsing characteristics without using a unique identifier per browser. Advertisers can then observe the browsing behaviors of users in a cohort instead of by their individual activities. Ads could be customized based on which cohort a person is part of.

Programming mechanisms are still being developed. You will most likely read about other proposals to implement IBA until a working solution is widely adopted.

Trusted servers for website remarketing

For website remarketing, marketers must be able to create and manage preferred audiences without the use of third-party cookies. While many options are being discussed, an alternative could be a trusted server that is allowed to store certain information for a campaign bidding process.

Key takeaways

Cookies will give way to new solutions. In advertising and e-commerce, these solutions must allow marketers to selectively engage with users while still maintaining their right to privacy. Creativity and automation will help marketing organizations transition to a cookie-less future.

Resources for more information

Refer to the links below to continue learning about the topics described in this reading:

• How Website Cookies Affect Your Data Privacy: Blog article describes different types of cookies and how they are used

• Building a Privacy-First Future for Web Advertising: Blog article describes technology advances for cookie-less browsing

• Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC): FLoC primer on GitHub

Test your knowledge: Marketing analytics

• Practice Quiz. 5 questions. Grade: 100%

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5. Review: Introduction to Access for success: Marketing analytics and measurement

Wrap-up

• Video Duration: 1 minute

You have arrived at the end of this part of the course. Have you started developing an appreciation for analytics yet? The key concepts or big ideas for marketing analytics can be summarized as follows. A digital media plan documents how a marketing campaign will be run and measured on each channel. Performance goals are based on marketing and business goals. Performance metrics help measure the success of a campaign. And finally, big data and automation are changing digital marketing. In this part of the course, you also became familiar with the dashboards and reporting capabilities in Google Analytics and Google Ads. Google Analytics 4 collects metrics for both websites and apps in reports. Real-time reports display current user activity on a website or mobile app. Google Ads dashboards display campaign performance and metrics and scorecards that are easy to view and monitor. You are now prepared to set performance goals and view relevant metrics using analytics tools. You can apply these skills when you help plan, coordinate, and monitor campaigns in your current or future role. During a campaign, you will likely set goals, run tests, monitor metrics, make adjustments, and repeat the process until performance goals are met. Feel free to access the Google Analytics demo account on your own to continue exploring the metrics and the reports. Stay curious and stay motivated to complete the program.

Glossary terms from module 1

• Reading: Duration: 10 minutes
  • Access the glossary

Module 1 challenge

• Quiz: 10 questions. Grade: 100%
• Link to challenge 1

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END! - Week 1 - Course 5