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CASE STUDY: Hill's Pet Nutrition
Conversion to Google Analytics from Adobe® SiteCatalyst®
Hill's Pet Nutrition provides pet food through partner retailers and vet offices. They do not sell product online or directly to consumers at this time so their website is designed to position them as an expert and highlight health conditions to ultimately sell product through online and offline channels. They chose Alight Analytics to migrate over 80 domestic and international sites to Google Analytics from Adobe SiteCatalyst.
As Hill's analytics agency of record, our services include:
- Measurement strategy
- Analytics implementation code, direction and QA
- Campaign tracking direction and QA
- External media file integration for online media, offline media, PR, social monitoring, sentiment, competitive landscape and sales data
- API development for Google Analytics, including combining over 80 analytics profiles into one database to compare and contrast all sites in a singular, one page view for senior leadership
- Weekly and monthly reporting for both web properties and individual campaigns, published to a web interface where users can visualize and interact with the data.
- Monthly in-depth analysis of integrated marketing, sales and competitive performance
Technical Considerations
Alight was brought on board to provide strategic direction and tactical implementation to steer the company toward a focus on measurement and become an extension of their digital team.
The migration to Google Analytics for over 80 domestic and international websites and microsites plus the ongoing management and evolution of the GA code has provided quite a few challenges. For example, the site was using Blue Martini as a CMS system, providing inherent challenges with dynamic url structures. To further complicate matters, some microsites are part of larger sites yet need to be viewed individually and as part of the larger site. Third party providers are used for coupons and sweepstakes, multiple domain names are also used for promotional purposes. Some providers did not allow for Google Analytics code to be applied to their site so workarounds were needed. The sheer number of promotions, coupons and other success events on the sites made the 20 goal limit impossible to work with.
To solve these issues, we implemented a variety of solutions. Duplicate profiles were configured in Google Analytics with multiple, complex filters to provide visibility into the microsites while leaving the original profile intact. Tackling third-party providers and the large number of goals was a complex problem, but we solved both with a simple combined solution, adding the _trackEvent call in the base code to fire an event upon load of the thank you pages. The thank you pages were a new addition, automatically populating after the transaction on the third-party site was complete. From here, the events can be unlimited and grouped together at a high level to tie to goals. Here is an example of the edited base code to fire the event:
script type="text/javascript">
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-******-1']);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Campaign', 'Click', 'Thank You Page']);
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
(function ()
{
var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async =
true;
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') +
'.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
</script>
Analytical Results
Analysis is done in a variety of ways for Hill's. Google Analytics Alerts are configured to spot and investigate immediate issues. These urgent findings are communicated via email. For quick-turn ad-hoc reports, analysis is provided directly inside the report in addition to an email summary:
Analysis for a global web presence like Hill's can be tricky when the president wants to understand how all 80 websites are performing but doesn't want to read 80 different reports. Since we encourage all of our clients to set performance targets, we were able to develop a meaningful, actionable high-level regional scorecard designed specifically for senior leadership. At a glance they can see which websites are under- and over-performing, read comments directly from the website owner and choose to dig deeper in the more detailed site-reporting if so inclined.
Business Impact
We encourage all of our clients to set targets and then measure against them. Without targets, it would have been more difficult for us to learn that there was a problem with the redesign of an important page. We noticed that we weren't meeting our target and immediately started investigating:
Our deeper analysis uncovered that by moving the shop online promotion below the fold, clicks on that promotion dropped significantly and suddenly, even in light of increased overall visits to the main Where to Buy page.
Our hypothesis was that moving the promotion back above the fold will revive the clicks. This is critical as this link drives to the partners who sell the product, since Hill's isn't an ecommerce site. The client was able to notify their advertising agency and modify the page design. The new design was just launched, early results indicate conversions have jumped back up and are surpassing both historical levels and the current target.
© 2012 Alight Interactive Inc
