Complication – A major, consumer packaged goods company had a global portfolio of digital marketing properties that numbered in the thousands.  Percent of marketing spend allocated to digital marketing was increasing year-over-year, yet measurement of the effectiveness of that spend remained problematic due to poor and inconsistent tracking implementations.  Approaches to web analytics governance had been defined, but enforcement was infeasible given the distributed nature of the organization, and the lack of a technology solution to inspect and report on thousands of short-lifecycle, promotional sites which were developed by hundreds of different agencies. Approach - The Aspirent team approached the problem leveraging a combination of our Information Management and Application Development capabilities:

1. The first step in our approach was to collect and examine data from existing systems that would give a picture of the total portfolio of websites. A single master database of existing properties simply did not exist.
2. The second step was to develop and information model and cloud-hosted database that would serve to simplify the real-world complexities of identifying the improperly tracked websites amongst a constantly changing portfolio of active sites.
3. The Aspirent team next created a customized web crawler process to perform daily scans of the complete set of global web properties to capture reachability status, URL redirections, actual tracking tags in use on the site, and nearly 20 other observable attributes of each site.
4. Armed with real, current data, the team then engaged with Aspirent’s premier UX Partner (Expand The Room) to create the visual design for an intuitive, actionable compliance dashboard which could be distributed to marketing executives in each market unit.
5. Finally, the Aspirent team, using Tableau, developed the dashboard from the visual design.

Results For the first time, Marketing had an effective tool for understanding the current state of their web properties globally, and the availability (or unavailability) of quality analytics data for each site.

• Marketing leadership could easily observe the scale of the analytics data gap.
• Improperly tracked websites were easily identifiable by business owners, as well as the corrective actions required to comply with corporate tracking policy.
• Tracking policy enforcement was effectively gamified through the visual design of the dashboard, which led to accelerated reduction of non-compliant sites.