Case Study: Navigating the Transition: A Google Analytics 4 Audit for Fastmarkets

Overview of our Partnership 

Fastmarkets is one of the most trusted cross-commodity price reporting agencies (PRA) in the agriculture, forest, metals and mining, and new generation energy markets. 

On the verge of the transition from Universal Analytics (UA) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), Fastmarkets came to us because it didn’t feel ready to make the switch. Its GA4 property was configured over a year ago, by someone who had since left the company. As such, they weren’t sure they could trust its data. A lack of governance process led to frequent changes in the property, making it difficult for the team to trust their reports.

We conducted a thorough audit of the GA4 property, its event tracking in Google Tag Manager (GTM), and their governance process. This gave us a clear action plan, which allowed us to resolve Fastmarkets’ challenges, so they could transition to GA4 with complete confidence.

Results

• Increased trust in GA4 data 
• Increased confidence in being able to use GA4 for analysis
• Improved data governance

Our Approach: GA4 Audit & Action Plan

We began by identifying the challenges Fastmarkets was experiencing, i.e. they weren’t sure they could trust the data, they couldn’t find the data they needed, and they didn’t understand the data when they did find it.

To ensure their property could give them the data they needed, and it was easily interpretable, we identified the key questions they wanted to answer with GA4:

• Which channels generate lead form submissions? 
• Which pages drive the most traffic?
• How is each vertical/industry performing, e.g. Agriculture?

From there, we systematically audited GA4 and its event tracking, using their challenges and questions as the steer for the audit’s priorities. 

Our audits cover three essential areas:

Integrity

Purpose: Verify data accuracy and trustworthiness.

What we assessed:

• Tracking Coverage
• Data Stream Type
• Session Timeout
• Reporting Identity
• Unassigned and Referral Channel Attribution
• Cross-domain Measurement

Organisation

Purpose: The configuration, data governance and GDPR-compliance robustness.

What we assessed:

• Account and Property Settings
• Attribution Settings
• Filters
• Product Integrations
• GDPR-compliance
• Data Governance Processes

Insight

Purpose: Data richness and the ability to glean maximum insight.

What we assessed:

• Enhanced Measurement Events
• Conversion Events
• Performance Safeguarding (Custom Insights)
• Custom Definitions (Dimensions and Metrics)
• Content Grouping 

Results

Once implemented, our solutions enabled Fastmarkets to have:

• Increased trust in GA4 data 
• Increased confidence in being able to use GA4 for analysis
• Improved data governance

The pivotal ways in which we achieved this were:

Increased Trust in GA4 Data 

We reconfigured the event tracking that was inflating lead form submission counts by 82%. This ensured Fastmarkets knew the true success of its marketing efforts and could make informed decisions about which channels to increase/decrease resources and budget for.

Disabling the ‘page view’ conversion event stopped the conversion counts from being inflated by 10,000%. This prevented a false impression of the site’s conversion rate.

Increased Confidence in being able to Use GA4 for Analysis

Through several Q&A rounds, we provided detailed and accurate answers to the questions they were struggling to find answers to online. This gave Fastmarkets the tools to navigate GA4’s user interface and understand its data.

We clarified which domains and subdomains were tracked, and which ones weren’t. This allowed them to confidently use GA4 reports and share them with business stakeholders.

Improved Data Governance

We created a governance process for GA4 and GTM that allowed Fastmarkets to identify who would act as the data owner, data experts and data executives. From there, responsibilities could be assigned, so there was a clear chain of command for who could and should make changes to both platforms, and what would trigger a platform change.

We implemented a fixed collection of reports to ensure the reports remain consistent and didn’t undergo constant changes. Fastmarkets was used to using UA’s custom reports, which each person could have their own set of. We helped them understand the equivalent functionality in GA4 is ‘explorations’. This ensured the reports were no longer being regularly changed by each of their 12-strong marketing team, which was creating confusion about which reports they should use to answer their questions.