What to Learn After Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is part of the Google Marketing Platform. GA collects and tracks user data, compiles it into useful reports, and provides valuable insights to improve your website or app’s performance. If you already know how to use Google Analytics, you might consider learningmore about data analytics, data science, or web development. We’ll cover data cleaning and preparation, statistics, writing and communication, and codingbelow so you can clearly understand what skill you want to tackle next. 

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (or GA) is a tool within the Google Marketing Platform that collects and tracks user data, compiles it into reports, and helps you develop strategies to improve your website or app’s performance. To use GA, you will install a tracking code onto each page of your website. Google collects information about the visitors to your website and what they do there. Google Analytics can help you understand what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to digital marketing strategy, and the best part is that it is free to use.

Google Analytics can be useful simply for yourself if you’re a business owner, or you can use it as part of a marketing team within a larger company. Google Analytics allows you to tailor the data you choose to track depending on your goals. Because digital marketing depends upon identifying a highly targeted audience, GA is the foundation of a successful digital marketing campaign.

Read more about what Google Analytics is and why you should learn it. 

What Can You Do with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a highly customizable, in-depth tool that offers insights to help your business thrive, and you can use it for free. Although it can initially feel overwhelming and complicated, the information GA provides is worth the effort.

The data that GA collects, stores, and reports on can help marketers learn what strategies are working and what aren’t. It can measure marketing efforts, both on and offline. It can help you make better, more savvy business decisions. The information Google Analytics provides can also identify specific problems or shortcomings on your website. The data you’ll get is specific, targeted information.

You can use Google Analytics to measure the customer experience from when they enter your website or app to when they leave. You can track valuable information such as how they found your site, who purchased something, what pages your visitors looked at, how they moved through the site, and so much more. And while it’s important to know where your website and business are thriving, it’s also critical to understand where you’re falling short and losing customers. Using Google Analytics can help with that, too.

Skills to Learn After Google Analytics

After you have mastered the skills necessary to use Google Analytics, you might want to add other abilities to your repertoire. Learning these skills and tools could help you move on to a different career in data analysis, data science, web development, or customer engineering.

Data Cleaning and Preparation

Data cleaning involves removing data that doesn’t belong in the dataset. Multiple datasets are often combined, and this means getting rid of any data points that are not correct, corrupted, in the wrong format, duplicated, irrelevant, or incomplete. Data cleaning also means putting all of the data in the same format so you can work with it. This is an essential skill for Data Analysts, who spend a significant portion of their time cleaning data using products like Tableau or Microsoft Power BI. 

Statistics

If you enjoy working with numbers, you might want to learn more about statistics and how different branches of science use them. Statistics is useful for data analysis, so learning more about the subject can help you progress in your career as a Data Analyst. Two common forms of Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) are SPSS and STATA. STATA is a powerful program used by researchers for qualitative data analysis in fields like psychology, animal science, astronomy, medicine, finance, and more. SPSS is mainly used for statistical analysis of surveys and marketing research.

Writing and Communication

It’s easy to get lost in numbers when you talk about data analytics, but storytelling is another vital aspect of the field. When you are presenting findings to other members of a digital marketing team, you need to do it in a way that keeps your audience engaged or even entertained. It’s much easier to get your point across if your listeners are awake. Building up your writing ability makes communication easier.

Coding

Coding is a good choice if you are looking for a skill to learn after Google Analytics. Programming languages are used in many disciplines, including web development, software development, database administration, software engineering, data science, and business analysis. Some of the most common coding languages are Python and SQL, used by Data Scientists, and JavaScript, used by Web Developers. 

Which Professions Use Google Analytics?

Once you have mastered Google Analytics, you can move in several different directions. You can start a website of your own and use GA to meet your personal goals, or you can apply for jobs that require knowledge of GA. Some common job titles in this area might be Data Analyst, Digital Marketing Analyst, or Customer Engineer.

Data Analyst

Data Analysts use tools like Google Analytics to ​​assist companies with their marketing initiatives by providing analytical support, developing strategies, working on finding the right audiences, performing competitive analyses, and optimizing channels. The primary responsibilities of Data Analysts are researching trends, collecting data, analyzing statistics, developing marketing strategies based on the data collected, and presenting the results to clients and co-workers. 

Data Analysts work in many fields, from healthcare and education to finance and entertainment. Data Analysts tend to be detail-oriented and good with numbers. They are typically well-organized multi-taskers with solid presentation skills, which allows them to regularly share their findings in a visually engaging manner.

Digital Marketing Analyst

A Digital Marketing Analyst is a Data Analyst who specializes in digital marketing. This usually involves working with companies using ecommerce to promote products or ideas. Digital Marketing Analysts work as part of a team, and it is their job to set up Google Analytics, collect and analyze data, and report their findings to the rest of the team.

Data Scientist

Data Scientists analyze extensive collections of data or content, making them understandable and useful. They need to know the difference between public and private data to keep the company they work for from breaking the law. Data science is a combination of statistics and mathematics and relies on many coding languages and analytics tools to transform raw data into a form people can use.

Customer Engineer

This is a job title that is gaining traction. It started with IBM and has spread to other companies and industries. A Customer Engineer works with agencies that contract with software companies to help customers understand how to use products and what they can do with them. Many companies like Google that create data analytics software hire Customer Engineers to help customers get the most out of their products like Google Analytics.

Learn Google Analytics with Hands-on Training at Noble Desktop

If you want to change careers and become a Digital Marketing Data Analyst, you can sign up for Google Analytics Bootcamp. This two-part class will teach you how to set up an account, know which metrics to track, and understand the Google Analytics reports. The classes also cover upcoming changes to Google Analytics when GA4 replaces GA Universal in July 2023.

Another way to prepare for a career as a Data Analyst is a digital marketing certificate course. Noble’s Digital Marketing Certificate includes the digital marketing, SEO, and Google Analytics bootcamps, plus Google Ads and classes on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter marketing, as well as content marketing with blogs.