Best at Travel GA Audit and new website Launch ● ● ● ● ●

Client Name: Best at Travel Client Contact Information (phone/email): Anita Roberts, 0207 849 4100 Client URL: www.bestattravel.co.uk Client GA Account Number: UA-18177017-1 Background: Best at Travel are a travel agency specialising in luxury travel. They engaged us to assist with a website rebuild to ensure tracking was implemented effectively on their new website using Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Technical Ability (3-4 Paragraphs)      

Migrated all tagging from hardcode to Google Tag Manager. Ensured integrations between Infinity call tracking, Adwords and Google Analytics were working correctly. Audit GA configuration, filters, goals, etc. Audit marketing channel structure to ensure marketing tagging was correctly configured to the client’s needs. Ensured the onsite search could be tracked effectively to provide richer information for analytics to also be used by the search marketing teams. Provided a stabilisation report in Google Docs to show effect of switchover on traffic, outcomes and errors during the migration process.

One challenge with setting up the tracking on Best at Travel was their desire to track the details of what users searched for. Best at Travel did not have a data layer at this time, so I created a number of custom javascript variables to fire on the search results page, to extract the details of what users had searched for: On the search results page, I populated the GTM data layer with the start date of the enquiry, the end date of the enquiry, the departure airport, the destination, how many search results were returned and for how many people.

Above is an example of the custom functions required to extract the required data. Below is a screenshot of some of the resulting data being extracted using this method.

Another challenge with Best at Travel was understanding page views on their holiday search and booking pages. The journey consists of an interstitial page, then a search results page, followed by another interstitial page and then a booking details page where changes can be made to room type and other things. These pages all had long URL strings with many query parameters, each combination of which got very few results but the bigger picture was obscured by the sheer number of variables. There were too many URL query parameters to exclude them using the view settings. I opted to remove the query strings from these pages using advanced filters after creating a master unfiltered view to ensure we did not lose any data. This has made page views report much simpler to use. It was important for Best at Travel to understand how users were moving across their website, and to help get a better view of this I created some new variables to capture as custom dimensions, which is tricky without a data layer. Luckily, the URL structure of best at travel had just been redesigned to match how they wanted to view the data. I wrote some javascript to pull out details from the URL to pass into the required custom dimensions and provide a view on site section and site sub-section in GA:

Analytical Ability (3-8 Paragraphs) One of the first things we set up for Best at Travel was a Google Doc that uses the Google Analytics add-on to provide an automated daily snapshot of best at travel’s website. This allowed me to automate a report for members of the technical and marketing teams at Best at Travel to keep an eye on key metrics on a daily basis. This included a week-on-week view of daily visitors and visits, bounce rate for the past week. How many qualified calls were received, how many technical errors and 404 errors occurred, visits by acquisition channel, and how many holiday searches were performed. We maintained this report, adding specific reports for things we were working on, such as onboarding a new meta search traffic source from TravelSupermarket (TSM). This report showed how many referrals we got from TSM, how many resulted in a ‘date not available’ search (a wasted opportunity) and of the visits, which hotels were most popular, showing which were performing on TSM, and highlighting areas where Best at Travel’s offering was less competitive. We also used Google Sheets to set up automated reporting around their transition from old to new site. Because the new site was responsive, we split most reporting into desktop, tablet and mobile to get a view of changes across different device types. With the new level of detail available on the search, we were able to show the top holiday searches on the website, the most popular hotels and the outcomes from said searches and hotel views. There was some concern over site speed loading times, so we automated reporting on this too, showing the overall performance and the slowest performing pages according to Google Analytics. I worked very closely with the marketing department to design a new view of their acquisition channels, creating the new ‘meta’ medium to segment searches on 3rd party websites, and

ensuring their email marketing tagging was detailed enough to provide insight into the different activities they were engaged in over email. I provided a ‘query string generator’ which allowed users to choose from pre-determined mediums and sources and ensured that query string parameters were well formed and tracked correctly. Business Impact (2-3 Paragraphs) Best at travel were able to on-board two new traffic sources as a result of our engagement, Affilinet required detailed tagging setup to ensure they could track all the details they needed to. TravelSupermarket has worked amazingly well for Best at Travel as a source of good volume and performing traffic. Visits:

Conversions:

Best at Travel now have a view of their traffic sources that matches how marketing view their acquisition strategy, a view of their website across device types that shows clearly what users are engaging with and being turned off by, and automated reporting that alerts them to any significant changes quickly so they can analyse and take action.