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The Challenge
The site featured an assortment of tracking and measurement methodologies, creating a variety of inconsistent, missing, and duplicative metric outputs. The end result was a hodgepodge of data, accrued in a variety of different ways from different source types, and propped up by a deprecated analytics method that’s no longer supported nor used. The site runs on an arbitrage model so it was not only this business, but others that require correct and complete measurement.
Lack of procedure for data governance introduced inconsistencies in implementation and the data to be collected. This yielded a lot of data that was neither trusted nor usable for analysis, measure results, or able to aid in moving the business forward.
The Goal
We needed to perform an audit where data issues were identified, ways to address the issues presented and corrected, and the resulting data verified and validated. The end result should be an analytics collection methodology and data governance structure that’s standardized against analytics best practices, is reporting and analysis friendly, and can create a solid analytics foundation on which the business can grow.
The Strategy
We identified and prioritized issues to be addressed, corrected these issues, developed an analytics repository, and created a reporting structure that’s intuitive and scalable to make the best use of the data, while also building in ways to mitigate if the tracking is again becoming corrupted and quickly correct course.
The Results
The benefits of this project came in a variety of forms – internal efficiencies amongst several departments, and external confidence and performance building.
Internally, the department most immediately benefitting from the audit and associated updates was the analytics and marketing group. Here, reports that would take hours to complete, primarily from the ‘cleaning’ of data after it had been pulled, were able to now use automated reports built on standardized data formats and outputs, and trust that when reporting updates were scheduled, the additional data would be complete and correct. This was able to reduce the time needed for a typical monthly report from several hours down to 30 minutes. Over the course of a year, this represented a potential savings of 30 hours a year – an 83% reduction in resource time.
The content team, with their new reporting, is able to better identify opportunities for what content could use improvement or expansion, and in some cases, removal. This, in turn, led to additional advertising opportunities and impression accruals along with an improvement in user engagement.
