The Challenge

In early 2022, Main Street Crossing, an independent music venue in Tomball, Texas, approached Avatria about assisting with their marketing analytics efforts.

Main Street Crossing had developed a sophisticated email and social media marketing strategy over the years, and with the recent acquisition of a Google Ad Grant (and subsequent engagement with a third-party agency to manage the funds), they sought to better understand how their various marketing efforts contributed to ticket sales.

In order to do so, they needed to fill in gaps in their data collection practices. Most critically, their ticketing platform was hosted on a separate domain, which was preventing them from tracking transactions, revenue, eCommerce behaviors, and even the pages viewed when users were making purchasing decisions.

Additional issues the client faced included:

• An incomplete and inconsistent approach to marketing source attribution.
• A lack of a central reporting hub.
• Opportunities to improve event tracking on their main website.

Finally, Main Street Crossing was looking for a partner who wouldn’t just solve their data issues, but could serve as a knowledgeable resource to help coach their team on analytics best practices.

The Solution

To begin with, Avatria conducted a full audit of Main Street Crossing’s marketing and data collection practices as well the data they had already been collecting.

From there, we identified three core goals to address in the short-term:

• Developing a standardized UTM strategy and link tracking document that could be used across all marketing channels.
• Implementing cross-domain and Enhanced Ecommerce tracking on Main Street Crossing’s ThunderTix ticketing platform.
• Building a Google Data Studio dashboard that could be used to report on web, eCommerce, and marketing KPIs.

In addition to these key goals, we also created a longer list of action items to be pursued following the completion of these tasks.

UTM Strategy & Link Generator

Prior to engaging Avatria, Main Street Crossing wasn’t using UTM parameters to handle link attribution from email or social media sources. Following our audit, this was the first thing we addressed.

To do so, we created documentation to capture our recommended UTM strategy, which could be used to train Main Street Crossing marketing team members and assist with execution. This documentation:

• Created a system for how each UTM parameter should be populated, based on Main Street’s existing marketing strategy.
• Generated final UTM links based on inputs entered by users, helping to ensure link integrity.
• Accounted for all marketing channels, including email, social media, 3rd-party marketing, and physical display.

ThunderTix & Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking

Fortunately, the ThunderTix platform supported the installation of Google Tag Manager on Main Street Crossing’s ticketing site. This made implementing pageview and cross-domain tracking fast and straightforward.

However, implementing Enhanced Ecommerce tagging was a greater challenge. Without a pre-built data layer to rely upon, Avatria was forced to develop sophisticated custom Javascript variables in order to capture key information about the eCommerce actions users were taking, such as the event name, ticket tier, price, and more.

Due to the uncommon customer experience offered by the Main Street Crossing site—where users would usually view event information on one domain before navigating to the other to purchase tickets—Avatria also designed and implemented a unique data structure as a part of Enhanced Ecommerce implementation. This allowed the client to take full advantage of EE’s top-of-funnel metrics, and gain a fuller understanding of the customer journey.

Finally, we made sure to implement all Google Analytics tagging in both Universal Analytics and GA4, so that the client would be ready for the future of GA well in advance of the transition date.

Centralized Dashboard

With ideal data collection enabled, we set out to make that data easier for non-analytics folks to consume. We selected Google Data Studio as our dashboarding platform due to its ease of use and low cost.

The dashboard built was focused on Main Street Crossing’s key emphases: user acquisition and conversion. Each dashboard page was focused on a different core aspect, with multiple visualizations on each providing different ways to pull insights out of the data.

Finally, we incorporated data from Google Ads, Facebook, and Constant Contact, so that all of the client’s marketing efforts were represented in a single location. This would make monitoring and analyzing their marketing data faster and easier.