Successfully marketing brands today requires a well-balanced blend of art and science. This course introduces students to the science of web analytics while casting a keen eye toward the artful use of numbers found in the digital space. The goal is to provide the foundation needed to apply data analytics to real-world challenges marketers confront daily. Students will learn to identify the web analytic tool right for their specific needs; understand valid and reliable ways to collect, analyze, and visualize data from the web; and utilize data in decision making for agencies, organizations or clients.
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About this Course
Learner Career Outcomes
33%
34%
12%
What you will learn
Gain hands-on, working knowledge of a step-by-step approach to planning, collecting, analyzing, and reporting data
Learn to evaluate and choose appropriate web analytics tools and techniques
Utilize tools to collect data using today’s most important online techniques: performing bulk downloads, tapping APIs, and scraping webpages
Understand approaches to visualizing data effectively
Skills you will gain
Learner Career Outcomes
33%
34%
12%
Offered by

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a world leader in research, teaching and public engagement, distinguished by the breadth of its programs, broad academic excellence, and internationally renowned faculty and alumni. Illinois serves the world by creating knowledge, preparing students for lives of impact, and finding solutions to critical societal needs.
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Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Course Overview and The Art of Analytics
In the orientation, you will become familiar with the course, your instructor, your classmates, and our learning environment. The orientation also helps you obtain the technical skills required for the course. Every analyst dreams of coming up with the “big idea” – the game-changing and previously unseen insight or approach that gives their organization a competitive advantage and their career a huge boost. But dreaming won’t get you there. It requires a thoughtful and disciplined approach to analysis projects. In this part of the course, I detail the four elements of the Marketing Analytics Process (MAP): plan, collect, analyze, report. Module 1 also explains the role of the analyst, the six mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (“MECE”) marketing objectives of analytics, how to find context and patterns in collected data, and how to avoid the pitfalls of bias.
Storytelling with Data
In Module 2, we dive headlong into the most important aspect of digital marketing analytics: transforming the data the analyst compiled into a comprehensive, coherent, and meaningful report. I outline the key characteristics of good visuals and the minutiae of chart design and provide a five-step process for analysts to follow when they’re on their feet and presenting to an audience. The goal is to equip analysts with the tools they need to tell a compelling and memorable story that “cuts through the noise” of the overwhelming amount of information audiences experience every day.
Bellabeat Case Study
Module 3 brings to life the concepts, theories, techniques, and tools discussed in the course in a business case written about Bellabeat, a high-tech design and manufacturing company that produced health-focused smart devices for women. Students will see each step in the MAP illustrated through the case.
The Future of Analytics
Data’s road from crude maps to gigabytes of multidimensional information has been a long and winding one. But it is far from over. If anything, the industry finds itself at a critical crossroads that will determine its future for decades to come. Module 4 explores this predicament while casting an eye toward what comes next for digital marketing analytics.
Reviews
TOP REVIEWS FROM DIGITAL MARKETING ANALYTICS IN PRACTICE
Thoroughly enjoyable "journey" for this course. The syllabus was great, very well structured, thus easy to follow. Each module, including honors, can easily be completed in a day if you have the time.
thoroughly enjoyed the course. A big thanks to Instructor Kevin hartman for this perfectly organized course. Materials were on point and easy to understand. Got entirely new observations on analytics.
This is one of the courses used most in the Capstone Project. The readings are useful. Look at merging this course with the Digital Analytics for Marketing Professionals: Marketing Analytics in Theory
I really enjoyed this course. I liked the professor's teaching style as well as the materials the course provided. All the knowledge I've got from the course helps me when I do research online.
About the Digital Marketing Specialization
Master strategic marketing concepts and tools to address brand communication in a digital world.

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