The Challenge
Ten Years of Teams Inventing Their Own Tracking
The implementation was in good shape when Adobe Analytics first went live at the company. Then it drifted, because nothing held it in place across that many teams and that many years.
No way to stop individual teams from inventing and implementing their own tracking standards
No practical way to monitor or enforce consistent tracking practices
Tracking updates lagged, so new Adobe features and functionality went unused
Multi-suite tagging sent data to each brand and platform report suite and to a consolidated global suite at the same time. That raised costs, and the global suite inherited every inconsistency sitting underneath it.
The consequence was the one that matters to a data leader. The company could not analyze across its brands and platforms, so insights it had paid ten years to collect were out of reach.
The Challenge
Ten Years of Teams Inventing Their Own Tracking
The implementation was in good shape when Adobe Analytics first went live at the company. Then it drifted, because nothing held it in place across that many teams and that many years.
No way to stop individual teams from inventing and implementing their own tracking standards
No practical way to monitor or enforce consistent tracking practices
Tracking updates lagged, so new Adobe features and functionality went unused
Multi-suite tagging sent data to each brand and platform report suite and to a consolidated global suite at the same time. That raised costs, and the global suite inherited every inconsistency sitting underneath it.
The consequence was the one that matters to a data leader. The company could not analyze across its brands and platforms, so insights it had paid ten years to collect were out of reach.
The Solution
Discovery, Audit, Then One Documented Standard
NorthStar Group assessed the current state of tracking across the company's websites and mobile apps, then built the standard to replace it.
Discovery sessions with key stakeholders on business objectives, KPIs, and the data already being collected
A review of every data point collected on each brand and platform, to establish what it was for and whether the business still needed it
An Adobe Analytics audit of each website and mobile app to surface conflicts and inconsistencies
A new global standard, agreed with the client wherever the audit found a conflict, documented in a Solution Design Document
Implementation guides for each brand engineering team, written so that following them produces a clean, structured data layer aligned across every brand and platform
The Results
What Changed in the Tag Manager
Each brand and platform on its own tracking standard
One global standard, documented and handed to every team
Adobe tracking configured individually per website, because no two sites agreed
A single global Adobe configuration in the tag management system
A global report suite degraded by the suites feeding it
Data layer variables aligned to one universal standard
No way to analyze across brands and platforms
Consistent collection across brands and platforms
The updated implementation will save the engineering teams a considerable amount of development time on future enhancements, since a change agreed once now applies everywhere instead of being rebuilt per brand. Collecting the same things the same way is also what makes the global report suite worth reading again.