Tech & AIBeginnerPreview
Marketing Analytics
A practical, evidence-driven course that teaches you to instrument GA4 properly, track campaigns with clean UTMs, choose the right attribution model, build dashboards people actually use, and turn numbers into decisions worth money.
Beginners, marketers, founders, and small-business owners who run campaigns and want to measure what actually drives revenue without a data-science background.
Course content
Workbook & downloads
Put the course into practice — a printable workbook plus editable templates you can fill in and reuse.
Preview the workbook
This workbook turns the course into a working measurement system for your own marketing. You will draft a measurement plan, lock down a UTM convention, validate your tracking, compute your real CAC, ROAS, LTV, and payback, and build a dashboard outline you can defend. Work through one section per module and keep the templates as living documents you update every reporting cycle.
What Marketing Analytics Really Measures
Separate the metrics that drive decisions from the vanity ones and write a measurement plan that gives your tracking a purpose.
Exercise: Audit your current metrics for vanity
List every metric you currently report or check regularly. For each one, apply the doubling test and decide whether it stays or goes.
- Write down the 8 to 12 metrics you look at most often today.
- For each, answer honestly: if this number doubled tomorrow, what specific action would I take?
- Mark each metric as ACTION (changes a decision) or VANITY (changes nothing) based on that answer.
- Which three metrics would you keep if you were only allowed three, and why?
Worksheet: Draft your measurement plan
Fill one row per business objective. Start with at most three objectives; a focused plan beats a sprawling one. This becomes the spec for everything you set up later.
- Business objective (plain sentence)
- Primary KPI (the one number that proves it)
- Supporting / diagnostic metrics
- GA4 events and key events that capture it
- Segments you will analyse by (channel, device, new vs returning)
- What you will deliberately NOT track
Checklist: Funnel coverage check
- I have at least one metric for the awareness/acquisition stage
- I have at least one metric for the consideration/activation stage
- I have a clear conversion metric tied to revenue
- I have at least one retention metric, not only acquisition
- Each metric in my plan ladders up to one of the three business questions
GA4 and Clean Campaign Tracking
Configure GA4 around your plan, lock a UTM taxonomy everyone follows, and validate that your tracking is actually trustworthy.
Worksheet: Define your UTM convention
Decide one and only one approved value for each concept and write it down. This document is the law for anyone building a tagged link.
- Approved utm_source values (e.g. google, facebook, newsletter)
- Approved utm_medium values (e.g. cpc, paid_social, email, organic_social)
- Campaign naming format (e.g. season_offer_year like spring_sale_2026)
- utm_content naming format for creative variants (e.g. carousel_v2)
- Case and separator rule (lowercase, underscores, no spaces)
- Where the shared link builder / sheet lives
Exercise: Build and dissect three tagged links
Create three real tracking URLs for upcoming campaigns using your convention, then confirm GA4 would attribute each correctly.
- Write a fully tagged URL for a paid search ad, a paid social ad, and an email send.
- For each, state which GA4 default channel grouping it should land in.
- Identify one link in your current marketing that has missing or inconsistent UTMs.
- Rewrite that broken link to match your new convention.
Checklist: Tracking validation checklist
- I triggered each key event myself and saw exactly one fire in Realtime/DebugView
- Event names match my measurement plan exactly, including case
- The purchase event carries value as a number and a currency
- I tested on both a desktop and a mobile browser
- GA4 revenue reconciles within a small margin against Stripe/Shopify/bank
- No UTMs are applied to internal site-to-site links
Attribution and the Metrics That Drive Budget
Choose an attribution view, then compute the unit economics that decide where your next dollar should go.
Exercise: Re-attribute one real conversion path
Pick one recent customer whose journey you can reconstruct and see how the credit story changes by model.
- List the touchpoints that customer had in order (channel by channel).
- Assign credit under last-click, first-click, and position-based (40/20/40).
- Which channel would you wrongly cut under last-click? Which would you overfund under first-click?
- Which model best matches how this purchase actually happened, and why?
Worksheet: Compute your acquisition economics
Pull last month's real numbers and fill every field. Show your working so you can defend each figure.
- Total paid spend and new customers from paid (Paid CAC = spend / customers)
- Ad revenue and spend (ROAS = revenue / spend)
- Gross margin percent (Break-even ROAS = 1 / margin)
- Total marketing spend incl. tools/salaries and ALL new customers (Blended CAC)
- Average revenue per customer per month
- Monthly churn rate (Avg lifespan = 1 / churn)
- LTV = monthly revenue x margin x lifespan months
- LTV:CAC ratio and CAC payback period in months
Checklist: Unit-economics sanity check
- I labelled every CAC as blended or paid-only
- I compared each campaign's ROAS against its break-even ROAS, not zero
- My LTV uses gross profit (includes margin), not raw revenue
- My LTV:CAC ratio is in a healthy band (near 3:1, not below 1:1)
- I know my CAC payback period in months and whether cash can sustain it
- I checked whether high-ROAS campaigns sit above or below the margin line
Dashboards, Reporting, and Honest Analysis
Turn your validated data and sound metrics into a dashboard, a reporting rhythm, and an analysis habit that resists misleading numbers.
Worksheet: Outline your stakeholder dashboard
Design top-down for one specific reader. Decide the layers before you build anything in Looker Studio.
- Primary reader and the decisions they make
- Top-row headline KPIs (3 to 5) with prior-period comparison
- Middle trend chart(s) over time
- Lower breakdown table dimensions (e.g. channel by sessions, conversions, ROAS)
- Filters/controls (date range, channel/campaign)
- Attribution model and date range label shown on the dashboard
Exercise: Write one action-driving monthly report
Using last month's data, draft a report in the headline / evidence / recommendation structure.
- Headline: one sentence stating the single most important thing that happened.
- Evidence: name the two or three charts that prove the headline.
- Recommendation: a specific next action, a budget move, and an owner.
- Annotate any swing caused by seasonality, a holiday, a price change, or one large order.
Checklist: Honesty check before you hit send
- Every reported rate is based on a sample big enough to be stable
- I checked for sampling indicators in GA4 explorations
- I confirmed my headline survives a segment split (Simpson's paradox check)
- I did not present correlation as causation
- Every chart is labelled with attribution model and date range
- The report ends with a recommendation and an owner, not just numbers
Your Action Plan
- Write a one-page measurement plan mapping at most three business objectives to KPIs, events, and segments.
- Set up or audit GA4: confirm enhanced measurement, define your key events, and mark revenue events as conversions.
- Publish a one-page UTM convention with one approved value per concept and a shared link builder, then retag live links.
- Validate every key event in Realtime and DebugView, and reconcile GA4 revenue against your payment source of truth.
- Pick a default attribution view (e.g. data-driven or position-based) and document it on every report.
- Compute Paid CAC, Blended CAC, ROAS, and break-even ROAS from last month's real spend and revenue.
- Compute LTV, LTV:CAC ratio, and CAC payback period, and segment LTV by acquisition channel.
- Build a top-down Looker Studio dashboard with headline KPIs, a trend, and a channel breakdown.
- Establish a weekly pulse, monthly review, and quarterly strategy reporting cadence.
- Before every report, run the honesty check: sample size, sampling, segment split, correlation, and labels.
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