The Need
The client is one of the leading universities of North America, with a presence of over 50 years in the education vertical, across six locations. Their website is primarily used for lead generation and hence it was critical to monitor it accurately in order to increase conversion rates. The client reached out to Nabler for an implementation audit of their website.
For the past 14 years, the client was using Google Analytics for their reporting requirements. During this period, the website was redesigned in mid-2013, and was slowly overhauled to achieve a complete redesign by November 2013. With the fresh website that offered new features and functionalities, there arose a requirement for google analytics audit. The client wanted to make sure that all the essential KPIs were being tracked and monitored with complete accuracy.
About Client
Nabler helped a leading North American University optimize its investment on Google Analytics with a well-investigated tag manager implementation/re-implementation strategy through our unique Digital Analytics Evangelization Program. This helped all the client’s teams get better and more relevant results and insights from Google Analytics thereby increasing the tool usage and website effectiveness.
The Solution
Nabler is a veteran in the field of analytics, focused primarily on the digital world. We have audited multiple large, medium and small entities, managed their tag manager implementation, created and guided on some very insightful dashboards on leading platforms and helped in their analytics. Nabler quickly assembled a team of Google Analytics and auditing experts and used various tools and technologies to conduct a thorough implementation audit.
Utilizing the above process, we helped the client resolve several challenges:
PROBLEM #1
Business Case: Lack of a holistic view of analytics data and inability to answer key business questions.
Reason: Multiple teams deploying their codes on the site leading to duplication and mismanagement.
Audit Action: Creation of a unified account structure to integrate the different properties of the website hosted on various domains and sub-domains. The different properties that were used as landing pages, student portals, content pages, etc., were brought under the unified structure.
PROBLEM #2
Business Case: Gross mismatch of leads data reported between Google Analytics and the backend system.
Reason: Error in tagging one of the multiple forms on the site was causing the submission to not be measured.
Audit Action: Fixed the tagging of the Submission Form using event tracking. We also enabled the tracking of content downloads such as brochures, PDFs, etc., to understand the engagement with content.
PROBLEM #3
Business Case: Better gauge the interest of visitors with regards to degree, courses, or campuses.
Reason: Though the internal site search was tracked, the ‘Program Search’, which enabled users to filter down their search for various courses, degrees or campuses on the site, remained in the dark without any tracking.
Audit Action: Enabled tracking of the ‘Program Search’ that allowed users to refine their search results.
PROBLEM #4
Business Case: In spite of a clear identification of the user segments such as visitors, prospects, and applicants, the client was not able to leverage the information.
Reason: The use of Custom Variables was not at par with the industry standards and the maximum value out of them was not being extracted.
Audit Action: The main tool to achieve the above objective, i.e., the Custom Variables, was not being used in the best way possible, but was used to track redundant data which was already tracked in the Pages Report or was event tracked. The variables were scraped and reused to capture the user behavior.
PROBLEM #5
Business Case: No clear visibility of how the campaigns, marketing spends, and AdWords campaigns were performing.
Reason: There were multiple/duplicate/unusable campaign codes implemented on the campaigns due to lack of governance and coordination between the internal teams.
Audit Action: Deployed UTM parameters correctly and fixed the inconsistent codes. We linked the multiple Google AdWords accounts to the correct analytics account.
The Benefits
- Fast-track audit: Nabler completed Google Analytics audit in two weeks to ensure analytics accuracy.
- Integrated data and insights: An integrated view of the different profiles empowered the senior managers, who wanted to measure the performance of all the properties while also analyzing the segmented view by channels or domains.
- Gaps eliminated: With the rectification of tracking errors, the glaring gaps in the reported leads were eliminated.
- Key insights generated A treasure box of information unfolded with a great visibility of which degree, campus, or courses were the prospects searching for.
- Segmented view of visitors: The client achieved a much more segmented view of user behavior, clearly distinguishing between prospects vs. applicants.
- Clear visibility of marketing performance: Deeper and detailed information on the campaign and AdWords performance helped the client measure the campaign performance and ROI with ease.