Replay Master Class: Reconciling Tracking Performance and Respect for Privacy
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Tracking migration plan: step-by-step guide

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Eric Dumain

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Published on

30-03-2023

7 minutes

Tracking migration plan: step-by-step guide

The migration of tracking tools can be quick (a few weeks) or longer. It all depends on the number of sites and/or applications you want to migrate, the size of your tagging plan but also on its progress. Have you already started or do you want to change your analytics solution? Business stakes, KPI, deployment... Zoom on all the steps to create a tagging plan.

#1 Define the business and digital challenges 

Audit your digital presence

A digital platform (website, application, social networks...) is the tool to achieve your business strategy. It is also the source of all your objectives, whatever they may be. It's up to you toidentify your company'sambitions, needs and expectations in order to define the reasons and aspirations of your digital presence. 

To do this, you can gatherall your teams (communication, marketing, sales, customer service...) to :

  • share feedback from each other;
  • identify what works (or doesn't);
  • determine the ambitions of each party;
  • List the objectives related to the use of this platform.

The idea here is to list your organization's strategic ambitions and, in a second step, to translate them into digital objectives related to the operation of your platform, whatever it may be.

#2 Identify the KPIs to track

To monitor the progress of your project, you need to associate your (newly defined) digital aspirations with tangible performance indicators (KPIs). They will allow you to accurately monitor the achievement of your objectives.

The goal? Measure the performance of your business, your campaigns, the user experience... and identify the main areas for improvement. The ideal way to achieve this? Involve all the company's stakeholders to build a unified and common culture around the data.

To help you : 

  • Identify SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound) goals;
  • Limit the number of indicators to be monitored and keep only the most relevant ones;
  • Avoid indicators that are too generic and vanity indicators (very attractive but not in line with the real health of your ecosystem);
  • use calculated indicators (percentage or average) rather than raw numbers that are difficult to analyze.

#3 Build the tracking migration plan 

The branding plan: the translation of business objectives

A tagging plan is a strategic tool, which allows you to define all the tags necessary to collect data, but to be effective, it must be aligned with your business challenges. It is the technical translation of your marketing ambitions: your entire marketing plan must be transcribed there.

The creation of a tagging plan 

Identify metrics not collected natively 

Have you identified your KPIs to track? Good, now determine, with your team, which ones will be collected natively by your analytics tools to avoid unnecessary implementations.

Create the tagging plan 

Once designed, your tagging plan can be implemented on the platform by a developer via JavaScript functions. All your data will be received by your tracking tools.

Since the appearance of Tag Management Systems (TMS), this implementation is done progressively: the necessary information is exposed in a data layer and then exploited via dedicated tools.

You or your marketing teams can also create your tagging plan on certain platforms, such as Governance Manager, without coding. This way, you can focus your efforts on optimizing your tagging plans: DL, TMS, Tags, Vars...

Note: Entering your tagging plan into Governance Manager will allow you to perform automated implementation and reporting checks.

Localities & the RGPD

Manage brand, region and campaign specifics

Your site can be active and visible in several countries and for different brands. It must therefore have several tagging plans or have one generalized but flexible in the regional specificities.

Comply with the RGPD

Has user consent been taken into account in your tagging plan? Does it impact tracking? Do you have visibility into RGPD compliance? Ask your teams the right questions and make sure you are fully compliant with multiple regulations.

#4 Deploy and receive the migration 

Launch the migration and deploy the new tagging

Once the tagging plan is designed and the implementation is done, you and your team need to configure the TMS, whatever it is (Google Tag Manager, Adobe Launch, Tealium...), so that it can collect the data exposed via the Data Layers. The idea is to create rules in the system to execute and feed the Tags. For example, if a page contains a well-defined category, the TMS will contain its associated value.

Check the conformity of the tagging plan

Is the data from the sites coming back well? Is your tagging plan well implemented? To find out, a complete testing of your data layers must be carried out. Rest assured, governance platforms now offer automated reporting of discrepancies (DL, TMS, etc.). No more need to receive for months by hand, your teams can do it in one click, without touching the technique.

There are several iterations of acceptance: 

  • in the development phase ;
  • in staging phase to see if everything is in order;
  • in operation...

Have a picture at the moment T

For informed business decisions and reliable data at all times, you need to monitor your tagging plan. With a picture of the actual and effective tagging at any given moment, you will be able to decide on the conformity of the tagging plan, provide an implementation status and highlight potential errors. The idea is to be able to correct them easily so that all decisions taken following the analysis of this data are justified.
You will have : 
- a shareable medium to include your less technical teams;
- a complete history of the audits (ideal to visualize the performance of your tagging plan) ;
- a point of performance comparison of a product (outside of an exceptional sales period, as part of a special campaign...).
- a visual support so that your technical teams can prepare the decommissioning of the Tags during the migration of your analytics tools (delete the old ones when adding the new ones).

Objectives to be tracked: a bit of concrete information

After the theory, it's time for practice with the concrete example of 3 typical business objectives, where each line describes the path of thought that you must follow.

The business objectiveIncreased awarenessImprovement of customer satisfactionIncrease in market share
Which team should you involve?CommunicationCustomer service / loyaltySales / Marketing
How does this translate into digital objectives?→ Publication of product & service sheets
→ Deployment of a Store Locator to redirect customers to points of sale
→ Implementation of a Live Chat
→ Development of a connected space to help users manage their services and information
→ Deployment of an e-commerce brick to make online shopping possible
How to track them? What KPIs should be deployed?
→ Percentage of sessions that have viewed at least one product sheet
→ Conversion rate observed on the Shop for new customers
→ Average live chat response time during busy hours→ Number of steps to convert depending on the goal
Are these metrics available?✅ Partly: only page views and sessions❌ No: a specific tag must be deployed❌ No: the tag must be coded

Beware, no expected dimensions are provided. It is therefore better to flesh out your tagging plan with custom contextual variables to collect the missing information.

To migrate your web analytics tools, the best practice is to use a platform that centralizes tagging plans and can be shared with multiple views, such as the Governance Manager platform. This will allow all your teams to collaborate via a single data set.

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