Week 7: Digital Analytics & Data-Driven Decisions

In digital marketing, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. This week focuses on Analytics & Conversion Rate Optimization. We will look at how to read data, find the story it’s telling, and make business decisions based on evidence rather than gut feeling.

1. Pre-Work: The Fundamentals of Measurement

Before you open a dashboard, you need to understand what you are tracking.

Event Tracking vs. Pageviews

Historically, analytics focused on “Pageviews” (how many times a page loaded). Modern analytics, like Google Analytics 4 (GA4), focuses on Events—specific actions users take on your site, such as clicking a “Submit” button, playing a video, or scrolling halfway down a page.

Attribution Models

When a user buys something, which marketing channel gets the credit?

Last-Click: 100% credit goes to the last channel they interacted with before buying. (Simple, but flawed).
First-Click: 100% credit goes to the channel that first introduced them to your brand.
Data-Driven (Multi-Touch): Algorithms distribute credit across all the channels the user interacted with during their journey.

flowchart LR
    A[Facebook Ad] --> B[Organic Search] --> C[Email Link] --> D((Purchase))
    style D fill:#d63031,color:#fff

If a user follows the path above, Last-Click attribution gives 100% of the credit to Email. Is that fair? Attribution models help answer this.

2. Lab Session: The Analytics Sandbox

Today, we dive into the data. Since your individual sandbox websites won’t have enough traffic yet, we will use a pre-prepared GA4 Demo Account that contains meaningful traffic and conversion data.

Navigating GA4 & Meta Insights

We will do a live walkthrough of the interfaces:

Where to find Traffic Acquisition (Where did they come from?)
Where to find Engagement (What did they do?)
Where to find Monetization/Conversions (Did they buy/submit a lead?)

The Exercise: Find the Leak

Using the demo dataset, your task is to act as a marketing analyst:

Identify the Drop-off: Look at the funnel. Where are users abandoning the journey? (e.g., “70% of users leave on the checkout page”).
Segment the Behavior: Is the drop-off worse on Mobile vs. Desktop? Is it worse for traffic coming from Social Media vs. Search?
Formulate Recommendations: Based on your findings, what should the business do? (e.g., “Simplify the mobile checkout form”).

3. Deliverable

A one-page insight memo. Act as if you are presenting to your CEO.

Include 1-2 screenshots from the GA4 demo account proving your finding.
State clearly where the biggest drop-off/problem in the funnel is.
Provide three specific, actionable optimization recommendations to fix it.

Submit the memo before the start of Week 8.

Week 7: Digital Analytics & Data-Driven Decisions