Retailer unlocks new insights with custom analytics configuration

This Los Angeles-based candy boutique curates and sells luxury candies from around the globe. Their ecommerce business sells to customers in North America and they’ve been featured on Food Network, The Wall Street Journal, et al. In 2023, they hired QoQ Digital to build a custom analytics package -- from nuts and bolts, to data visualization.

Challenge

This project was rooted in the need to properly upgrade from Google Analytics 3 (Universal Analytics) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). But instead of just covering the basics, such as configuring ecommerce tracking, they took this opportunity to uplevel their entire website analytics infrastructure. In essence, they wanted answers to questions not available in an out-of-the-box Google Analytics 4 configuration.

Solution

After several discovery sessions + recommendations from QoQ Digital, we developed the following:

1. Real-time reporting enablement. GA4 provides a basic real-time report within its interface. And the GA4 → Looker connector doesn’t include any real-time data (rather, it reports with a 24-hour lag). In order to get customized, real-time reporting, we fed data from GA4 to Google BigQuery, and then visualized it in Google Looker Studio.
2. Custom User ID integration. Logged-in customers can now be tracked and segmented as a group over time.
3. Custom internal search reporting. First, we configured basic site search tracking whereby any search conducted on the site is reported in GA4. Then, we developed a custom event that only fires when a search term leads to no results, providing invaluable feedback to the client.
4. Custom channel creation. Very often, Google’s built-in logic doesn’t map traffic properly (e.g., seeing ”unassigned” traffic or traffic being routed to the wrong channel). In their case, most of the “push notification” traffic was unassigned, among other issues.
5. Custom scroll depth. Out of the box, GA4 only tracks one scroll depth event called “scroll” (hitting the 90% threshold of a page). We replaced this with two custom events (Scroll 50%, Scroll 90%) for more comprehensive and intuitive scroll depth reporting.
6. Referral exclusions. Their site integrates with PayPal and AfterPay, both of which overwrite the original attribution (e.g., SEO, paid social, etc.) when folks checkout with this method. Identifying and mapping the proper referral exclusions now allows them to track their marketing channels more accurately. 
7. Form tracking. Email signups, account registrations, etc.
8. Ecommerce configuration. The site is built on Magento, which we used to pass transaction data to Google Tag Manager, which was then passed to GA4.
9. Google Looker Studio dashboards. The client needed a way to quickly draw insights from their newfound data. Unfortunately, out-of-the-box GA4 reporting is incredibly limited. To solve this problem, we built two Looker Studio dashboards (a robust, desktop-friendly report for the marketing team and a condensed, mobile-friendly report specifically for the CEO).

Outcome

The most valuable new report pages include:

1. The Internal Search Queries that led to no results report is already providing invaluable insight. As you can see, many site visitors are searching the site for “bridesmaid” (think: gift ideas for bridesmaids). Unfortunately the site wasn’t returning any results for this, leading to lost opportunities. 
2. The Real-time Dashboard utilizes a live-stream BigQuery warehouse of our GA4 data. Out of the box, real-time GA4 data is not available in Google Looker Studio. Now, stakeholders get the exact pacing data they want in a single report page.
3. The Item Name Drilldown utilizes the newly configured ecommerce data to help stakeholders quickly drill into which marketing channels are driving results on a product-level basis.