Ease-of-use, powerful features, and flexibility
Managing your health is a serious matter. So is managing thousands of websites worldwide. For global healthcare leader Novartis, at least 130 of its thousands of sites focus on corporate communications. With this subset of websites, Novartis needed to get the right page measurements to the right people to make sure its teams could confidently compare metrics.
Since the communications sites had common interactions and goals, Novartis needed to establish consistent naming and goal setting, and be able to quickly replicate any changes and updates made in one site to other sites. At the same time, Novartis needed the flexibility to customize groups of sites, like websites for countries with specific privacy requirements.
Novartis wanted to efficiently implement analytics to make sure that each individual page was measured correctly. It needed a scalable tool to create consistency and efficiency, and avoid hand-coded parameters for custom cases. To accomplish this, Novartis turned to the Google Marketing Platform.
Establishing cross-site consistency
Google Marketing Platform is a set of tools that can be used individually but are even more powerful together. Novartis used Google Tag Manager 360 and Google Analytics 360 to implement and verify custom analytics globally.
The company started by defining clear requirements tied to business objectives, asking questions like: Which websites would be included? How should the account ranking be structured? Which interactions or events needed to be captured? What privacy settings needed to be enabled?
The Novartis team defined a small test group of sites they would use to work out all the kinks in the implementation process. Novartis used Python and the Tag Manager 360 API to create containers, tags, and macros. Then, the team used the Analytics 360 API to create accounts, properties, and views.
Starting with small, manageable steps
Novartis first implemented and tested one container tag to verify that information was flowing into the proper Analytics 360 view. Next, the team implemented the rest of the tags and configured Analytics 360 views for the remaining sites. Finally, it modified the sites that needed customizations such as IP address anonymization.
The ability to add and edit all Tag Manager 360 containers and Analytics 360 properties in one place made it easy for the team to see relationships and ensure all measurements were accurate. Starting simple and setting clear naming conventions helped later programmatic changes roll out smoothly, with easy ways to check that changes worked as expected.
From implementation to analysis
Novartis saved time and got more consistent insights with Tag Manager 360 and Analytics 360. Powerful APIs helped the team take on a complex project in more manageable steps. Google Marketing Platform gave the Novartis team confidence by automating tasks, reducing errors, and giving people the tools to catch problems early. Most importantly, these tools freed up developers and marketers to focus on high-priority tasks.
Novartis is now moving from the implementation stage to the analysis stage. The company plans to use the Google Marketing Platform to give analysts access to appropriate reports. Novartis has also started creating dashboards that monitor multiple properties and visualize results. For example, one dashboard offers widgets for each content group, showing the most popular pages. Meaningful graphs help the Novartis team identify the impact of non-homepage pages and figure out where to focus effort and resources.
