Marketing and business goals
Since its crowdfunding campaign in 2015, dairy brand Bettermilk (鮮乳坊) has shared its values through four commitments: veterinarians on site, milk from a single selected farm, no adjustment of ingredients and fair trade. It now offers a wide product range, from fresh milk, yoghurt and steamed buns to brand merchandise, and has developed a new subscription model that gives customers a more convenient way to buy.
With more products and services, and sales channels across online and offline, collecting and using data became more important. The brand needed a stronger data foundation to shape business strategy, allocate resources and reach its goals faster.
Background and challenges
Changes in the advertising environment, the limits of analytics tools and changes within the brand all became major challenges as it grew.
- Event tracking no longer fitted after a redesign. After the website was redesigned, GA tracking events had to be set up again. Because analysis needs had not been clearly defined, event planning and deployment could not fully meet marketers’ needs, leading to gaps in the data.
- Analytics limits made it hard to separate customer journeys. Universal Analytics (GA3) shopping and checkout reports were restrictive, analysing only a single path, and events and dimensions were system defaults that could not be tailored to buying scenarios. Bettermilk offers both one-off purchases and subscriptions, and because of GA3’s report structure, only half of this information could be seen clearly in GA.
- Time-consuming analysis raised marketing costs. GA3 custom reports were limited in flexibility and visualisation. To meet the brand’s varied and complex analysis needs, marketers often exported reports and used Excel pivot tables or charts before they could see trends and investigate changes.
Strategy
CloudAD designed a three-stage GA4 data solution for Bettermilk, built on the right data, the right analysis and the right application, helping the brand put data first and move past earlier obstacles.
- Stage 1, the right data: implement GA4 and verify events and tracking
- Stage 2, the right analysis: build custom exploration reports
- Stage 3, the right application: shape business decisions and marketing plans so data is put to work
How we did it
1. Deploying GA4 around the brand’s needs
Through interviews with the brand and a health check of its website, CloudAD drew up a complete event deployment plan based on the insights the brand’s team needed:
- Core events: a full list of events tracking user behaviour across the site
- Ecommerce: events and parameters planned around ecommerce scenarios to record the shopping flow and order details
- User properties: custom user properties that help the brand identify and filter users, adding depth to profile and behaviour analysis
2. Analysis that shows value quickly
Compared with GA3, GA4 changes a great deal in report flexibility and visualisation. Used well, GA4 reports can show even a rich product mix and many ways of buying in the interface. This saves the time of exporting to Excel and reduces the chance of errors during processing. With custom reports, Bettermilk greatly improved the efficiency of its business analysis. Two examples:
- Tracking two purchase flows: by defining events for one-off purchases and subscriptions and using path exploration reports, the brand can see sales, conversion rate and time to purchase for each.
- Order overview: looking at each order and product sales helps the brand quickly understand product sales patterns and average order value. This supports product selection, bundles and promotions when communicating with new and returning customers.
3. Putting data to work in marketing and business strategy
With the right data and the right analysis, the brand could apply them to marketing decisions and business planning. By studying conversion paths and attribution, Bettermilk identified the order of touchpoints and the role of each medium, making its marketing data-first and allocating resources more efficiently:
- Conversion path reports: the share of early, middle and late touchpoints and their channels helps plan campaign waves, including timing, media mix and budget share.
- Attribution model comparison: comparing media performance under different attribution models shows the right role for each medium and, with conversion path reports, supports a more complete communication strategy. For example, comparing first click and last click showed that Google Display Network ads were key to attracting clicks and search ads were key to driving conversions, so the brand planned timing, targeting and creative for each accordingly.
Results
- Analysis efficiency up 20%: with GA4 custom reports, marketers no longer need to download reports and process them in Excel pivot tables, cutting the time to produce analysis by 20%.
- Order accuracy of 85%: by planning and deploying GA4 ecommerce events and using path exploration reports to show purchases by type, the match between GA4 reports and ecommerce back-end data reached 85%.
Bettermilk worked with CloudAD to implement GA4, putting data to work to drive business growth.
If you also need GA4 implementation or analysis,get in touch.
