Challenge
A popular financial and technology news publisher deployed both Google Analytics and a CMS traffic reporting system to guide management toward the goals of growing audience, deepening engagement, and driving subscriptions to newsletters, RSS feeds, and paid content.
Approach
Empirical Path consultants audited the Google Analytics implementation to ensure that visitor behavior data was correctly captured and clearly communicated to decision-makers. Consultants first interviewed management to understand website goals, marketing efforts, and current reporting workflow and usage. We then ran an automated scan of the website’s half-million-plus pages to ensure that Google Analytics Tracking Code was properly installed on each page, identifying a small number of pages that were not tracked.
Next, consultants tested nearly a dozen website goals to ensure that all conversions were tracked as Goals or Content within Google Analytics; most were not due to non-unique confirmation page URLs, referrals to outside sites, or use of Flash or AJAX technologies, so Empirical Path recommended fixes for each using Events and URL query parameters. We also proposed Custom Variables and Filters to allow the client to study unique Profiles for each of its titles, as well as excludes internal traffic. We evaluated email, RSS, and social media marketing efforts to design a campaign tagging approach to allow deeper analysis of company-initiated efforts and separation from truly user-generated referrals and sharing.
Results
The audit confirmed the validity of Google Analytics measurements that hadn’t achieved acceptance in the organization, convincing managers to focus on correlations and longer term trends not captured in the CMS reporting. The audit also revealed numerous potential enhancements to make reporting more actionable, so the client agreed to a follow-on engagement for Empirical Path to execute these enhancements. Empirical Path also launched regular narrative interpretation of — and recommendations based on — website results, immediately discovering an opportunity to improve article landing pages to drive deeper visits.
Watch our webinar with Google Analytics about this project.
Or read this client's take on the audit and resulting enhancements.
Or see capsules of other Web Analytics or Media Industry projects.
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