Google Analytics Implementation on Multidomain Website Case Study

Fairplay online is an intelligent gaming portal that unites casual and mid-core games with wager-based competitive mini-games and a social casino. Company has separate domains for 3 different language versions and a number of landing pages on subdomains that are used for PPC and social media campaigns as well as for affiliate traffic.

Challenges

1. It was crucially important for the company to be able to implement remarketing and conversion tracking pixels for each campaign and affiliate traffic source on the domains the traffic is targeted to. 
2. General picture of portal performance and conversion rates is also important for the business.
3. It was required to analyse performance of each traffic source and landing page separately across the portal.

Approach

The first step of any tracking implementation task is to get the idea about the goals, user flow and conversion funnel.

On product launch the main goal was to get as many new users on board as possible. Fairplay has two-steps opt-in process: user should sign up with email on the first step and activate the account on the second. Depending on campaign type and traffic source the first or the second step of this process it counted as conversion.

To avoid misunderstanding among marketers, developers and business tracking implementation document has been created which covers all the steps in the conversion funnel and outlines at which step each of the tracking and conversion pixels is implemented along with some technical notes for developers.

Google Analytics was chosen as the main tool for web-analytics because this is a free software and has most of the required features.

To keep the tags easily to manage and update it was agreed to use only one Google Tag Manager container across all the portal.

This solution had the following benefits:

• To create new trigger, variable or tag for all the portal it is necessary to create it in one container only.
• The developer instructions for tracking implementations are very straight-forward. They need to add same code regardless of language version or campaign. All the hit-tracking, remarketing and conversion-tracking rules are defined inside of the container and can be updated easily without making any changes to the source code.
• Traffic is traced to different properties with same tags.
• Extra tracking codes for particular campaigns is added into the container and does not interfere with general tracking codes, remarketing or conversion tracking pixels.

The only shortcoming of this tracking solution is that one should be careful about adding exceptions for tags if they should fire only for some particular language and campaign. If configured improperly the tag will fire across all domains of the portal.

Vlookup variable is used to track traffic to different Google Analytics properties depending on the domain.

For the marketing team it was also important to understand the performance and conversion rate for different traffic sources and landing pages. To achieve this goal naming conventions have been developed to mark all the traffic sources with url-variables. The value of the url-variable and landing page url are saved as cookies and send to Google Analytics as custom dimensions.

Extra views and segments have been created based on this custom dimensions to analyze traffic for particular campaigns and landing pages separately.

Results

Google Analytics data can be viewed at the desired granularity level. One can examine either aggregated data at highest possible level of abstraction to get overall idea about portal performance patterns or get very granular reports for specific campaign, keyword, landing page, etc.

While marketing team includes over 10 people and vendor companies all the tags are managed by only one part-time tracking implementation specialist and involves little or no efforts from the technical team for new tags implementation.