Kate Farms, a U.S.-based provider of nutritional products for patients suffering from severe, chronic diseases, initially engaged Concord to audit the company’s existing Universal Analytics implementation and provide a roadmap for improving e-commerce performance. The overall intent of the project was to enhance data collection and provide analytic, strategic, and marketing stakeholders with more valuable data.

As work progressed, the team recognized that adding a full Google Analytics 4 implementation to the project scope would provide a clear competitive advantage down the road. Fortunately, the team made this decision several months before Google announced its plan to sunset UA between July and October 2023—after which GA4 will be the de facto Google Analytics solution.

“When Google announced the UA sunset, it was a relief to know that we already had GA4 up and running. We’ll have more than a year of data available in GA4 before the deadline.”

— Sara Andrews, Kate Farms

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Challenge

Following stakeholder meetings and the development of a measurement plan designed to gain consensus on Kate Farms’ specific marketing analytics and tracking needs, Concord conducted a thorough audit of the existing analytics initiative. Findings uncovered serious issues with data quality and collection in the UA property, and Shopify integration (the e-commerce platform used by Kate Farms). Specifically, we found problems in the data layer and Google Tag Manager configuration, requiring highly technical development work to resolve.

Without in-house development resources, Kate Farms attempted, and was ultimately unsuccessful at, completing this work with third-party support (Concord rarely provides development services). It was during the audit that Kate Farms executive leadership asked Concord to go ahead with a full GA4 implementation, in addition to the original scope of work. However, to achieve the best end results, they first needed to address the existing UA technical issues and optimize that property before getting started with GA4. We just had to figure out the dev part...

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Solution

At the core of Kate Farms’ dev challenge was the difficulty of finding a developer with experience in Liquid, a template language created by Shopify to load dynamic content in the pages of online stores. Concord does not typically provide this service, but to move the project forward a member of our team learned Liquid, which resolved the issue, making it possible to successfully implement the necessary on-site Google Analytics tracking with Enhanced Ecommerce via Google Tag Manager’s data layer functionality. Another improvement involved setting up internal version control to reduce instances of lost work. Previously, updates to the site were consistently rolled back.

With their existing UA property optimized and buy-in from the leadership team at Kate Farms, it was time to proceed with GA4 implementation. Concord chose a dual approach to deploying GA4—setting up UA and GA4 side-by-side for greater visibility into what exists in both properties and where there might be gaps. It also allows for the establishment of more accurate tracking of measurement events and improves how tags are set up to fire via the same triggers, ensuring consistent implementation.