The COVID-19 Effect
The Spread of COVID-19 has impacted all of us to some extent. Many businesses have been affected due to the virus spread leading to economic imbalance. Businesses are trying to cut down on costs in order to survive through this tough time and to minimize losses businesses are facing. The first thing which businesses usually look to cut down their costs in such times are the advertising costs.
In such times when the whole world is suffering the pandemic, where students are at home and some professionals like digital marketers are working from home. It also brings us an opportunity to hone our existing skills and develop new skills. Therefore, I decided to start with a COVID-19 lockdown learning series of blogs where I will post about various skills related to digital marketing you can develop during the lock down and utilize this time in a productive way.
5 Digital Analytics Free Certifications You Can Complete During Confinement
The reason to start with a blog post on digital analytics is because that is where I started my professional journey in this field. Also, digital analytics is the base to all the digital marketing/advertising activities carried out by businesses. An understanding of how these technologies work is a very good skill to have. A digital analyst is a person with various skills such as the Data Visualization, Data Tagging and Tracking and Data Analytics & Interpretation. Therefore, the post consists of a combination of these skills which you can learn for free. Click on the heading of the listed certifications to visit the training courses.
1) Getting Started with Google Analytics 360
The Google Analytics 360 is the premium version of Google’s web analytics platform. If you have already covered the basic Google Analytics courses and also have had hands on experience on Google Analytics to some extent, this course is the next step for you to understand how the premium version of the platform works and how is it different from the standard version. The course is spread out into 6 modules explaining the benefits of the Google Analytics 360 such as Roll-up reporting, Custom funnels, pulling unsampled reports and reporting with Google Big Query. Major part of the course explains the native integration of Google’s Advertising platforms such as SA360, DV360 and Campaign Manager which cannot be done with the standard version on the platform.
2) Google Tag Manager Fundamentals
Google Tag Manager fundamentals is a very good course to learn and understand the basics of Tag Management Systems. These are the platforms through which all the website and marketing related tags can be deployed and managed helping in avoiding the tedious on-page tagging tasks. The introductory course is divided into 4 Modules starting with an overview of the platform, planning a tag implementation strategy and deploying a basic Google Analytics code. The later modules will introduce you a bit of advanced things such as understanding data layer, tracking events on the website and passing dynamic values with the use of variables. Tag management is slowly moving towards becoming an essential skill for digital marketers to due the capabilities and ease of use of the platform.
3) Ensighten Manage Technical Training
This is another leading Tag Management Platform in the market. Though it is a paid platform, Ensighten has made sure that they keep their training content free for anyone who would like to learn. I feel it is one of the most well explained and detailed tag management courses out their explaining all the things in a detailed manner with the medium of videos. The introductory videos suggest you to have some basic understanding of client side web technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON. They have also given some resources to brush up your knowledge on these topics which is appreciable.
One of the barriers to this training course is that you will need to have access to the platform to try out the things you learn in the training videos and as it is a paid platform, you need to request for a sandbox access which could take some time. But you can start to take up the basic training classes if you have already worked on some other TMS such as a Google Tag Manager as the basic of these platforms are somewhat the same.
4) Tealium IQ Tag Management
Tealium IQ is another tag management system and is quite well known as a competitor to the top products in the markets such as Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Adobe Launch. It has a separate education section on their website which has training videos around the various products they offer. You can take the basic course which will help you navigate the platform and understand how it works. A very good thing about Tealium is that they have all the information related to their product under one roof which helps a new learner to quickly access the resources such as developer documentation, product guide and also have a community forum to connect all the users of the platform and discuss their issues or doubts.
5) Introduction to Data Studio
Data Studio is the data visualization platform by Google. It is a part of the Google Marketing Platform and Google consistently have been updating the platform regularly to decrease the limitations of the platform to make it as user friendly as possible. I would say it is a very good platform for free to develop your data visualization skills and that is why it is the only data visualization platform in my list. It obviously connects to all the Google platforms like Google Analytics, Google Ads, Big Query but also with a lot of third party data connectors, some being free and some paid.
Talking about the “Introduction to Data Studio” course, it is divided into 4 parts starting with basic platform overview and how to connect various data sources to your report to things around creating visualizations using appropriate charts and formatting and designing reports. Google Data Studio also has a YouTube Channel where you can learn some advance data visualization skills such as manipulating date dimensions, creating calculated metrics and calculated fields.
There are several more web analytics platforms such as Adobe’s Site Catalyst, tag management platforms like “Tag Commander” and “Adobe Launch” and data visualization platforms such as Tableau and Datorama which also come under the leading products in the field of digital analytics. My Top 5 list is for those digital analytics platforms out there which have easy access to learn the platform and provide a hands on practical experience which is important to develop these skills.
