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.
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.
- Implementing tracking pixels for advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook
- Migrating to GA4
- Establishing a consistent UTM strategy
- Creating simplified dashboards and reports for monitoring and analysis
- Custom event tracking to track other website behaviors
After documenting the client’s needs and roughly outlining the approach we’d take to the project, Avatria set about on a 3-phase implementation effort. These steps consisted of:
- Google Tag Manager Setup & Basic Google Analytics Install
- Enhanced Ecommerce Implementation
- Dashboard Construction
Given the client’s business portfolio, which included the management of seven independent web properties at project start, and plans to add several more within the following 12 months, Avatria decided to design a web analytics strategy centered around Google Tag Manager.
Our clever approach capitalized on GTM’s flexibility. Rather than install a separate GTM container on each site (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:
- Maintenance and support is much simpler. 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.
- Adding new resorts is streamlined. 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 seven GTM containers to manage, Dacia has only one.
During this phase, we also installed pageview tracking for Universal Analytics and GA4, set up a number of custom event tags to track key site behaviors, and assisted the client with establishing a clear and consistent UTM strategy for their marketing channels. This ensured that the client had a basic amount of data for monitoring and analysis as we continued to work through phase 2.
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.
During phase 2, we also implemented conversion tracking pixels for 3rd-party ad platforms such as Facebook.
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
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. This is a remarkably smooth process for an analytics implementation, and is what Dacia can expect for all changes and additions going forward.
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. It also showed the success of recent social media campaigns, which had overtaken organic search as a key site's primary traffic source since the campaigns began.
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.
