Case Study on Enterprise Level Implementation of Google Analytics

Overview

MetricStream wanted greater visibility over the reach and impact of their website. In particular, they wanted to segment -

Geographically: MetricStream operates globally and they wanted an overall view of how these territories were performing
Service Offerings: To better reflect their operating style we had to segment their website to reflect their business operations

Initiation

We discussed about the reporting requirements and together we came up with a format that was acceptable to the client.

The following points were covered -

Success Metrics: One of the key ways of measuring outreach to potential and existing clients
Segments: How would we divide the website and its audience?
- Geographic: The number of regions
- Business Units: MetricStream divides its offerings in many ways as Solutions, Industries, Products etc
- Finally a decision was made only to track Solutions and Industries

Implementation

After receiving the inventory, we had to create the segments which would capture the data in Google Analytics. These being: Geographical and Business Units.

1. Geographical

This turned out to be the easiest thing to do. Since all we wanted was to segregate the overall GA profile data into regional pools.

So from the Master GA profile we fed data into child profiles with the help of Include filters for the countries that belonged to a particular region.

2. Business Units

This was more complicated. None of the page URLs followed a consistent naming convention. And for reasons of SEO they were loathe to change it.

Limitations

We could not change the URLs
We could not change the Page Names

That is why we had to adopt a more complicated strategy of feeding traffic data to multiple GA profiles.

Multiple GA Profiles

We modified the GA JS code to feed data into multiple profiles, which we will review below.

Main Profile

All traffic information from www.metricstream. is captured by this profile. Captured data includes all pages, all segments and all geographies, except for certain exceptions like internal traffic etc.

Solutions and Industries Profile

All pages belonged to a particular industry and solution, therefore each page reports to 2 profiles, one each of solution and industry.

The tagging of the pages was implemented by MetricStream according to our Guidelines.

After the tagging was completed, we checked that all profiles were recording data and then we moved into the reporting phase.

Reporting

Reporting involves leveraging our tagging strategy. They are broadly classified as below -

Overall reports: This looks at performance overall, and across different segments like geography and business units
- Reflecting important metrics like Visits and Registrations across segments
Segment Level Reports: These reports look at each Geographical and BU segment more in depth
- We create a reporting format
- Depending on their needs they will report on the required segments
- Reporting on all segments, all the time may not be a feasible thing
  - Especially since not all of them have a lot of content and visitors

Goal Setting

One of the primary ways to measure success for the site was the registration process. MetricStream seeks to reach out to customers and potential customers by making a wealth of mixed media content available once they leave their contact details.

There were 3 types of registration paths, but all of them had to increment the same Goal counter. To accomplish this we had to create custom JS scripts to capture the correct information for the Goal module to work.

Transition

This consisted of -

Creation of the first set of reports
Scheduling of the raw data dumps along with helpful text to explain the context
Documentation for the important processes involved
- Especially when it comes to things that don't happen too often
- For e.g. creation of a new industry or solution profile

Conclusion

The whole project gave MetricStream visibility into their website which they didn't have earlier on. From tracking key KPI metrics, not only across the site, but also across the different areas of operation for their organization.

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