Unified Tracking Standardization: Transforming Data Quality with NorthStar Group
Problem Statement
The company was using Adobe Analytics for more than 10 years, and each brand and platform has its own engineering team and dedicated report suite. With the implementation work distributed across so many different groups over such a long period of time, it was difficult to:
- Prevent individual teams from inventing and implementing their own tracking standards
- Monitor and enforce consistent tracking practices
- Update tracking in a timely manner to take advantage of Adobe’s latest new features and functionality
Multi-suite tagging was in place to send data to individual brand/platform report suites, as well as a consolidated global report suite. This increased costs, and the quality of the data in the global report suite suffered due to the misalignment across all the underlying individual report suites.
Despite having a state-of-the-art implementation when they first launched Adobe Analytics, the company’s data quality began to erode over time. They couldn’t analyze data holistically across their brands and platforms, limiting their access to valuable insights and their ability to take action on their data.
Solution
The company partnered with NorthStar Group to assess the current state of tracking on their various websites and mobile apps, and to develop, document, and implement a new globally-aligned standard.
The project began with a series of discovery meetings with key stakeholders to discuss their business objectives, key performance indicators (KPIs), and existing data. After gaining a deep understanding of their business objectives, NorthStar Group reviewed the data points collected on each brand and platform to determine its intended purpose and usefulness to the business.
NorthStar Group then conducted an Adobe Analytics audit for each website and mobile app to identify conflicts and inconsistencies. Where conflicts existed, NorthStar Group and our client worked together to create a new global standard and document it in a Solution Design Document.
Once the global standards were established, NorthStar Group developed and provided implementation guides to each brand engineering team. By following the implementation instructions in these guides, each brand would have a clean, structured data layer that was 100% aligned across all brands and platforms.
Previously, each website’s Adobe tracking had to be configured individually in the company’s tag management system due to the inconsistent tracking standards used across brands. Updating and aligning the data layer variables according to a universal standard enabled our client to have a single, global Adobe configuration within the tag manager.
Results
The global tracking standardization and updated implementation will save their engineering teams a considerable amount of development time when implementing future enhancements. It also ensured that data is being collected consistently, leading to improved data quality and decision-making abilities.