Teaching Digital Analytics with Google’s AEK

Advertising education is in constant evolution to better meet the needs of future professionals in an ever-changing advertising business. With the proliferation of digital media, vast amounts of user data are cumulated as a byproduct of normal media consumption, and by appropriate privacy protection, they are a gold mine for consumer insights. When users visit a website, search for a product online, make a post on Facebook, buy a product online, or use a location-based service from a smartphone, they leave their digital footprints. Such real-time data have greatly benefited the operations of numerous websites and mobile apps, the services of major research firms such as Nielsen and comScore, and the business of a new generation of data aggregators, warehouses, and analytics.

As a result, Big Data has played a greater role in the creation, placement, and evaluation of advertising, especially in the ways of consumer engagement. Consumer insights—through often-real-time digital analytics that show how consumers search for product information, what makes them like a product, what they say online, and where they buy a product—are shaping almost every aspect of advertising practice. Thus, the knowledge about and skills in collecting, processing, managing, analyzing, and reporting large volumes of consumer data have become a sought-after competency of advertising students. It is imperative to develop curricula and conduct research on Big Data-related topics such as computational advertising, social listening, programmatic buying, and advertising analytics, as some advertising programs in the US and other countries have already started.

For example, a pre-conference on Big Data for advertising research and education was held at the American Academy of Advertising (AAA) conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 27, 2014, where expert panelists from industry and academia explored how Big Data approaches could be introduced in advertising research and education.¹ During the first-of-its-kind pre-conference, panelists shared academic studies with Big Data methods, cases of using Big Data in advertising campaigns, possible topics of computational advertising courses, and perspectives on emerging issues. The large audience at the full-day pre-conference indicated a wide interest among the AAA members. As a follow-up, a pre-conference on computational advertising was planned for the AAA conference in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 23, 2017, with digital analytics as a focus for presentations and discussion.²

Early efforts indicate, however, that teaching digital analytics in the classroom is challenging, because shareable materials to build a fundamental understanding of analytics, including real world business data and the opportunity to perform a diverse range of analysis using an analytics tool, are not easily accessible to most advertising instructors and students.

The Purpose

Thus, the purpose of this article is to share our experience in developing and teaching a digital analytics course for undergraduate advertising majors. This online course covered the basic concepts of digital analytics and actual use of live data to generate consumer insights on key aspects of e-commerce. Digital analytics is a large and complex subject, and it includes web analytics, mobile analytics, and social analytics. This introductory course was designed to focus on web analytics, but it also covered parts of mobile analytics and social analytics that were directly related to web analytics. For example, traffic sources from mobile devices and social media platforms were explored, as they are becoming increasingly important in understanding multichannel users.

The course objectives were for students to acquire knowledge about the mechanism of digital analytics, the ability to organize, interpret, and report data for consumer insights, and the skills to effectively use digital analytics tools to complete assigned tasks. This knowledge, together with these abilities and skills, should prepare students for an entry level data analyst position in advertising agencies, media outlets, and client companies. Students would get access to a real e-commerce site that was equipped with Google Analytics to practice with live data, using Google’s Analytics Education Kit (AEK), an education outreach program that is to be officially released in 2017.

Analytics Education Kit (AEK)

The course was facilitated with Google’s AEK. The AEK provides a number of resources to overcome...