Executive summary
Smooth transition from UA to GA4 for data reliant Rivery
Like a lot of businesses, Rivery has been using Google Analytics for many years to measure the effectiveness of its marketing, and with the news of Universal Analytics sunsetting, was very keen to migrate as soon as possible to GA4. As a Saas ELT platform, data integrity is very important to Rivery, and configuring GA4 in the best way possible was high on the agenda.
Adido was responsible for auditing and configuring a new GA4 account, whilst Rivery would be picking up the baton regarding reporting and analysis.
The problem
1 domain, 5 sub domains and 2 Google Tag Managers needed migrating to GA4
The Rivery platform extracts, ingests and transforms data for usage in business intelligence, analytics, and data workflows. With a high regard for data accuracy, Rivery’s marketing team came to Adido to ensure that its Universal Analytics accounts were migrated to GA4 in a robust and highly accurate way. They were also keen to get to grips with the new system sooner rather than later, so we jumped at the chance to help them transition.
As well as the main domain rivery.io, the business deploys Universal Analytics tracking across 5 other sub domains and uses two Google Tag Manager accounts, this project needed to take into account all of them.
The solution
Rigorous auditing of UA properties and best practice implementation of events
With the introduction of a new tracking platform, Rivery took this opportunity to have all of its GA properties and GTM containers audited to ensure that the migration to GA4 wouldn’t be polluted by out-of-date settings or errors, and also ensure the transition was as seamless as possible.
The audit raised some tracking inaccuracies and provided the opportunity to retire redundant events.
Configuring the new GA4 property involved implementing best practice events, taking advantage of enhanced events and integrating custom events into the GA4 event taxonomy to future proof usage.
Rivery was also introduced to one of the new features of GA4 whereby funnel reports can be created from both destination URLs and events. In the UA infrastructure, standard funnel visualisations are initiated from within the goal set-up. These can only work off URLs (forcing Rivery to implement virtual pageviews in the past) however with GA4, funnel reports can combine page and actions/events conditions. This reduced the number of events and goals that needed to be migrated across saving time and money.
The whole project culminated in a meeting with members of the Rivery marketing and product teams to walk through all the changes made to the account. We also gave a live demo to showcase some of the new sections of GA4, especially how/where to create new events and conversions.
The results
A shiny new GA4 profile was born
Success on this project was ensuring Rivery received a new GA4 property. Tick! However, most of the benefits of the project will be realised after we put down our tools, and hand the analysis and reporting elements to Rivery.
That being said, we reduced the number of tags being fired (which should improve page speed), tidied up events and tags so that things are clearer to find and the UI is cleaner (which should make navigation and analysis quicker), and we introduced the world of GA4 to their team (adding new skills and knowledge to the business).
It was satisfying cleaning up an account, documenting the tracking ecosystem and sharing invaluable resources to keep the GA4 profile in tip top condition for years to come!
