How Upgrading to Universal Analytics Helped Client Take Better Business Decisions

Client Background

Our Client is India’s leading Online Gift Service Provider that offers large range of Gift products to people of all ages and gender. This online portal provides wide range of gift items that are manufactured under expert guidance. It’s products are appreciated worldwide for their superior make & design and are known for festival based exclusive product offerings.

Problem

Accuracy of Data Tracking

Our Client has a complex site architecture with 14 subdomains & 1 main domain. All the transactions take place on the main domain and hence any user who enters into a sub-domain gets redirected to the main domain to complete the transaction.

Because of the site complexity and absence of proper tracking, sessions generated from subdomains were reported incorrectly as Referrals in Google Analytics (GA) . This resulted in to unnecessary increase in new sessions for our client. Referral traffic also affected other key data points such as engagement and E-commerce data and were reported incorrectly in GA.

Since client was heavily dependent on Google Analytics data to generate user insights. it became impossible for them to take data-driven business decisions. Our client when contacted Tatvic wanted to improve their tracking architecture so that they can see accurate data in GA and use it to improve the website performance.

Approach to Solution

Migrating to Universal Analytics

Tatvic after studying the Google Analytics data, decided to implement Universal Analytics (UA) on client’s website due to its set of advance features that would help them to track all domain/subdomains data accurately. UA by default tracks all the subdomain/domain as one property with same UA IDs.

To implement the solution, Client’s web property was first upgraded to UA and then the Classical GA code was replaced with UA code on its main domain and all sub-domains. Implementation of UA helped client overcome their problem of high referrals from sub-domains. We also added third party platforms such as Paypal in the referral exclusion list feature of UA to completely prevent the self-referral issue.

Results

Better Data, Better Decision Making

Implementation of UA proved a game changer for Client. With proper tracking of users’ journey across subdomains, Referral issue was solved entirely. Also, solving Self-Referral issue resulted into proper attribution to campaigns that actually brought the conversions. User acquisition and behavior were getting reported accurately for all the sub-domains which enabled our Client to take better business decisions.