Project Brief – Why Did Governance Come to Daneswood?
Governance came to us looking for help and guidance with their Google Analytics specifically. They had an Analytics account already set up, and it was successfully tracking visits to their website.
However, they were not sure how they should be using it, whether its settings were correct, and how to get subscription signups and online orders.
Our final brief was to get the account set up correctly including all settings, and also ensure all conversion tracking was set up on the website and Google Analytics.
Strategy & Actions
The first stage of this project was to find out what conversions the website should be tracking. We talked to Governance about what they consider a ‘conversion’ online, and for their non-ecommerce goals we specified Contact Forms, Email Link Clicks, and Newsletter Signups.
As for their ecommerce conversions we noted Subscription Signups and Book Purchases, as they had some items for sale.
Once we had a note of all the conversions that needed to be tracked, we asked Governance to grant us access to their Google Analytics account so that we could do a full review of the current setup.
We initially checked over the Account, Property and View in Analytics, and adjusted all the settings that needed tweaked. This ranged from their URLs not being quite right in the settings, to the ‘bot’ excluding settings being incorrect. We also added filters to ensure that the client’s own visits to the site were not included in their data.
We discussed with the client the several Views that they had in the Google Analytics account, and make a recommendation for a better way of laying these out, plus best practises to using these for testing.
After getting the basic settings and layout were sorted, we started working on getting the conversions tracked and the goals set up in Analytics.
The Governance website is built in WordPress and uses plugins to run the ecommerce side of the site. We needed to find a way to get these plugins to fire off ‘events’ whenever someone bought a subscription or book.
Once we’d done this, those events allowed us to integrate with Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, meaning that every time someone paid for a subscription or book, Governance can see this purchase and the revenue in Google Analytics.
We tested all of the tracking to ensure the events were triggering and the correct revenue was showing in the Analytics account.
Finally, we worked with them to ensure that the regular newsletters sent out had links that would track properly in Google Analytics, and so now they know exactly which newsletter generated which sale or subscription signup.
We had several video calls throughout this work to talk through what we were doing and our recommendations, and to ensure they were confident with the new data being collected.
Results
Ultimately this means that Governance are able to see the accurate amount of revenue generated from any form of marketing that is leading traffic to the site. For example, they can view revenue information from each newsletter they send out and analyse to see if different titles or offers work better than others.
This enables them to report completely accurate ROI information from their marketing efforts, work out weak links, strengths, and identify exactly where to put more effort or budget to get more sales and signups.
Governance were very happy with their new overhauled Google Analytics account and their fresh grasp of all the data they needed, and have been busy getting this to work for them to improve sales and subscriptions. In 2023 we also supported them by converting their Google Analytics over to the new version of Analytics – GA4 – and moved all their goals and ecommerce tracking to this new system, plus assisted them in backing up their historical data to ensure they maintained seamless marketing data for the future.