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Industry
Hospitality & Recreation
Location
Denver, CO
Tags
DIGITAL ANALYTICS
TAG & PIXEL IMPLEMENTATION
DATA INSIGHTS & DASHBOARDS
Key Impact
With cross-domain and Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in place, Dacia Resorts had reliable traffic, engagement, conversion, and revenue data available in Google Analytics for the first time.
THE CHALLENGE
Establish a digital analytics strategy that could be used across all Dacia Resort Group digital properties.
Dacia Resort Group is an RV resort company with a portfolio of campgrounds spread across the United States. The business, which brings independently operated resorts under a centralized management structure, approached Avatria for help in establishing a digital analytics strategy that could be used across all of their properties.
PROJECT DETAILS
Scalable data infrastructure for now and in the future
At the time of engagement, Dacia had recently completed a major project to unify their web presences. Although each campground would maintain its own domain, the sites shared a consistent design and experience, and all used the same booking platform to manage online reservations.
With a number of potential new acquisitions on the horizon, Dacia sought to address the following major challenges:
- Creating a consistent and scalable data collection infrastructure that could be maintained and rolled out to future web properties with minimal additional development effort.
- Implementing cross-domain tracking between a campground site and its booking site instance so that Dacia could obtain accurate usage and channel attribution data regardless of where a user arrived or finished.
- Enabling the collection of online purchase and revenue data from their RMS reservation platform via Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce tracking.
Results
Scalable, reliable analytics for analytics and executives alike
To minimize the effect of any potential bugs or errors, we launched the new data collection solution on just one of Dacia’s sites. After a few days of testing and data validation proved it to be reliable, we were able to successfully roll out tagging to all remaining properties within a matter of hours.
With cross-domain and Enhanced Ecommerce tracking in place, Dacia Resorts had reliable traffic, engagement, conversion, and revenue data available in Google Analytics for the first time. This allowed the marketing team to establish reliable baselines for key metrics like bounce rate and conversion rate—essential for evaluating the success of future campaigns and UI enhancements.
Most importantly, the dashboards we built made this valuable data more accessible to stakeholders across the company. Rather than waiting for the marketing team to create reports (or attempting to sift through an unfamiliar Google Analytics interface), executives are now able to visit a static link to see how site traffic and online revenue are trending.
The Solution
Scalable GTM Strategy
Rather than install a separate GTM container on each of Dacia's 11 sites (as would be common), we built one shared GTM container to be installed on all of their sites. Because the sites shared an identical design and structure, this allowed us to develop a single set of tags, triggers, and variables that would work across all of them. With the use of GTM’s lookup tables, we could easily send each site’s data to its unique GA property.
The benefits of this structure are significant:
The benefits of this structure are significant:
- Simple maintenance and support. If a tagging error is found or a new tag needs to be implemented, it can be developed once, and will be rolled out to all sites at the click of a button.
- Streamlined launch of new sites. To support tagging on a new web property, the client only needs to install the GTM container on the site, update a couple of lines in the GTM lookup tables, and republish the container.
- Reduced risk of error. Rather than having a minimum of 11 GTM containers to manage, Dacia has only one.
UTM Strategy
Prior to engaging Avatria, Dacia did not have a consistent method for tracking where site visitors had arrived from, complicating their ability to properly gauge the success of their marketing efforts. To assist with this, Avatria built a UTM Tracker tool in Google Sheets. This tool created UTM links based on the marketing team's input, simplifying the process of adding these links to their marketing platforms, and helping to ensure that common values were used for parameters such as source, medium, and campaign. It also created a log of past UTM parameters used, helping to ensure consistency across different team members over time.
GA4 & Custom Event Tracking
To give Dacia the data they needed, our first step was to install a comprehensive set of GA4 tags, including nine custom events and six custom dimensions. These custom events covered key actions visitors would take on their websites, including form submissions, phone calls, and reservation searches. These tags formed the base of all other data collection that would later be implemented.
Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking
Although the client’s booking platform supported the installation of GTM, it wasn’t designed to support Enhanced Ecommerce. Without a pre-built data layer, and with no ability to edit the codebase, we were forced to develop sophisticated Javascript to scrape the site’s DOM in order to collect the data needed for our tags.
Though this approach wouldn’t have been our first choice, we were able to track the full suite of Enhanced Ecommerce actions, including Product List Views, Product List Clicks, Adds to Cart, Removes from Cart, Checkouts, and Purchases. For all relevant tags, we were able to track the reservation type, number of nights, price, overall transaction revenue, and more.
Though this approach wouldn’t have been our first choice, we were able to track the full suite of Enhanced Ecommerce actions, including Product List Views, Product List Clicks, Adds to Cart, Removes from Cart, Checkouts, and Purchases. For all relevant tags, we were able to track the reservation type, number of nights, price, overall transaction revenue, and more.
Third-Party Conversion Tracking
Prior to engaging Avatria, the client had limited data available to their third-party ad platforms, limited only to pageviews. As such, along with GA4, Avatria made sure to implement a comprehensive set of conversion event tags to provide data to the client's advertising platforms, inluding Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft Ads. These conversion events covered key actions on the site, including purchases, adds to cart, contact actions, and more. This data was crucial to the optimization of the client's digital ad campaigns.
Looker Studio Dashboard
With good data flowing into Google Analytics, it was time to move into the final phase of our engagement: building a dashboard that Dacia could use to quickly and easily monitor and assess the performance of their website and marketing campaigns.
We chose to use Google Data Studio as our dashboarding tool due to its ease of use and low cost. To provide insights into all aspects of the websites' performance, we built a series of reports, including:
Web Overview
Acquisition Channel Performance
Conversion Attribution
Ecommerce Performance
Site Content & Behaviors
Technology Details
We built additional pages focused on the performance of their marketing channels, including:
Facebook Ads
Facebook & Instagram Organic Performance
Google Ads
Google Search Console
Google My Business
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