MetricStream is the market leader delivering GRC and Quality Management solutions for large global organizations addressing multiple regulations and industry mandates. Leading organizations across the world are using the MetricStream solution to identify, assess, quantify, monitor and manage their Risk and Compliance mandates in accordance with industry standards. This includes streamlining key processes for managing IT policies, IT risks, IT compliance and IT audits while enabling multiple stakeholders to have real-time visibility into their risk profile, lower their cost of regulatory compliance and reduce their risk of non-compliance and thus it wanted to leverage Google analytics for giving better service to their visitors.
MetricStream is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and has offices across the globe.
Why Google Analytics Implementation?
MetricStream wanted their website to have a wider reach and more impressions than they already had. To better the website and its reach, the first thing required was to know what their customers wanted, what they are searching for, how they are arriving to MetricStream website – only after knowing all this would it be better armed to position their website across regions and sectors. To do this they required data knowledge –
- Geographically: MetricStream has operations worldwide and it was important for them to know how each of their regions was performing.
- Service Offerings: With number of service they provided, it was again necessary to know how each of those units performed.
Initiation of Google Analytics
The first important step to implementing Google Analytics for a website is to measure its success. To know whether any change was helping, it was necessary for MetricStream to define the metrics for measuring the success, ie the goal of their website. This would help them figure out whether they were getting the expected results from all the changes they were making.
Secondly, it was necessary to decide what kinds of reports were needed. MetricStream decided they needed to know the region-wise performance and business unit-wise performance.
Once all this was decided, the next step is the implementation of Google Analytics on their websites armed with this information.
Implementation of Google Analytics
Since MetricStream was an established website, they had already kept their URLs for optimized SEO ratings. In spite of having restrictions against changing URLs and page names it is possible to install google analytics, although a little complicated. This involves feeding of traffic data to multiple google analytics profiles by modifying the javascript code.
This segregation of profiles was done as follows-
- Main Profile – This contained all the traffic data from metricstream.com. There is no restriction on what data is captured in this profile. In case, in future it is required to create new segments or regions, they could make more profiles and keep the main profile as the input data, so even past information can be analysed.
- Other profiles – MetricStream had narrowed down to two business units whose analysis was of utmost importance to them – Solutions and Industries. Thus creation of these two profiles was done. Since all pages belonged to not just one category, each page reported to both the profiles.
Once this was done, they put the tags in place and proceeded to check if all the profiles were recording the traffic.
Reporting from Google Analytics
Once this is implemented, all that was required was for MetricStream to do the reporting. Reporting involved the use of the tagging strategy, which is classified as –
- Inclusive reports – This would show the overall performance of the website, including all regions and all business units.
- Segmented reports – This would show the reports based on the profile segregations made. Thus, performance of each of the geographical regions and business units was reported in the segment level reports.
One majorly important metric for citing success of the website was its goal setting metrics. The goal set by MetricStream was the registrations on their website. MetricStream provides a wealth of data, tools and mixed media content on their website to reach out to their customers and educate them once they register on the website. Since these registrations happen on different pages and all lead to the same registration page, counting the conversions involved customizing the JS scripts to capture the relevant information for the goal metric to work.
Result of deployment of Google Analytics
After the implementation of Google Analytics on their website, MetricStream was able to see the kind of activity taking place on their website, which they couldn’t earlier. It was able to track the key KPIs and not only the overall KPIs, but also across the different areas of operations.
Armed with all this data, MetricStream would better understand the sense of what content is most relevant to visitors on their site. They could track events and learn more of how to modify the website to give better offerings to their visitors.
Learning from Case Study of MetricStream
It is important to find an easy way to gather and present usage analytics for a website. Leveraging the reporting is a great way to spot any gaps and improve the overall experience for your user. It is essential to re-visit the user experience from time to time as the users’ needs change. Google Analytics can easily collect and present usage data for this purpose.
Image Credits: MetricStream
