Case Studies: Analytics For Conversions Dashboard & Redesign

Two detailed case studies on customers thar needed conversion dashboards and more. A detailed break down of SaturnOne vs a Google Analytics 4 approach with costs.

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Case 1: Close & Closer

Close & Closer is an Artist Representation Agency. They curate a roster of top artists throughout the world and connect them with world-class clients to do what they do best—create unforgettable visual experiences through illustration, animation, and design. Their customers include agencies, major companies, and publishers, such as Disney, Nike, Facebook, The New York Times, etc.

Problem: 

“Our team was struggling with Google Analytics, HotJar, and multiple apps, and still not being able to track our calls-to-actions. That was just our first major problem…” – Caton Vance, Marketing & Partnership Director

Close & Closer wanted to begin the process of a website redesign but had no idea how their 50+ calls-to-action were performing. Where to start improving what you have no measurements of? Consulting with them, we broke this down into two major issues; conversion tracking, and website path flow for conversions and campaigns. Basically, what links, searches, and navigation methods from page to page… to help increase ease of use and conversions.

Each artist has their own portfolio page with their own unique call to action they wanted to track. To track and differentiate all 50+ was not working with Google Analytics without extensive work. It was complex, requiring Tag Manager, and then custom coding, and a custom-built dashboard to track. (Plus, GA4 has a limit of 31 customer events it will track.) It was estimated to take weeks to design and then set up. With an initial cost of over $4000, let alone maintain and update as their artists and website changed. See more below for the consultant and GA4 method and costs.

Solution:

Conversion Tracking

SaturnOne.io’s conversion dashboard. SaturnOne analytics automatically all events, including call-to-action clicks, forms, and landing page conversions. This dashboard allowed them to pick and organize specific events to watch. With live support walking them through the process, their team was trained in about 45 minutes in all they needed. All without having to code, use Google Tag Manager, Data Studio, and their complex processes. With SaturnOne they can change it anytime as needed, with all historical data never being lost. 

With SaturnOne.io’s conversion dashboard, they can see trends for individual artists or all of them grouped. They are now able to segment in real time to see how campaigns and channels are performing—all without additional effort. This combination gives them deep insight into what is working and what is not.

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A sample conversion dashboard that SaturnOne.io used.

Website Flow & Usage

Close & Closer also wanted to start a website redesign. For this task they needed to understand how visitors were using their website. How they were really navigating. But more importantly, how there were converting. Normally a design agency would use a special tool like HotJar and Google Analytics path explorer to “try” to connect data and insight. But since they are not integrated making the connection is hard or downright confusing.

With SaturnOne’s integrated suite of tools makes this fast and painless. 

With “Path Explorer” they visually see all the paths, link clicks, campaigns, and referrers into and out of any page. Or content group… yes, they can group pages into content groups and see the flow by entire content categories. The insight to see what referrers and calls-to-action are working, or not, is invaluable. Add heatmaps and you can see entire user segments' interaction with a page and links.

With the Session Recordings, they visually follow individual users across a visit. Seeing what they are focusing upon, reading, and what links and navigation items they are using. This coupled with the aggregate data of the “Path Explorer” makes this so much more than a “nice to have”. This eliminates the confusion problem of having to struggle with multiple apps. 

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Add reporting and trend analysis… more, time, cost, and struggle. Or use SaturnOne, which has it all built in.

Bonus:

Because SaturnOne’s team has years of experience in content marketing, Close & Closer was able to consult with our live support to advise them on some “best practices” and pitfalls to avoid in redesigning their website. All are included in our live support for using our tool suite.

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Alternatively: Google Analytics 4 Approach

To just set up their just their conversion dashboard Close & Closer would have had to hire a Google Analytics 4 (GA4) consultant, and give then access to their website and tool suite. This would be the initial estimate of over $4,500 to set up, but not maintain or update after their redesign. And then they would have had to pay for Hotjar and struggle to connect the data to session recording and heatmaps. All this would have taken several months…all before they could collect enough data and insight to start their redesign process. So add cost, website access risk, time, and opportunity costs to their team.

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Needed: Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager, Looker Data Studio for dashboard and reporting, plus expert to custom code and build:

• Consultant $150 - $200 per hour. See Upworks screenshot below.
• 50 Discrete CTA’s set up with GTM, about 13-hours, say $1,950
• GA4 Integration, 2-hours integration of GTM
• Dashboard and Reporting Set up, with segmentation, about 10-20 hours
• About $2,500 
• Total: About $4,500
• Alternatively, $800 in online courses, plus 40+hours of training at internal cost ($75+/hour)...say, about $3800

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First the consultant would have used GA4 and Tag Manager. While Tag Manager has built-in medium complexity to capture some link internal clicks, this did not meet their needs. They would have add to define 50+ different events, and custom code then on each each page to submit to GA4. Then test each setup and then wait to collect data. (Conversely, SaturnOne automagically captures all these events.)

Next, they would connect Looker Studio and then create a custom dashboard. And then add each of the 50+ conversion events. Then create queries to compare history. Note, this cost estimate does not include adding segmentation. Adding campaign, channel, and referring segmentation requires even more expertise and costs. (This is all built-in to SaturnOne).

Then once they spent the months collecting this custom data from Tag Manager and gaining all the insight they needed… Then the redesign. Then they would have to repeat this process, and cost, for the new design.

Or just use SaturnOne’s tool suite from day one.

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Case 2: Detweiler Group

The Detwiler group is a full-service customer and we help them with tracking of multiple websites. The owners, Andy Detweiler’s, problem is a classic:

• How people are using his website…navigating from one page to the next
• What content people are actually engaging in
• Where and when in using his site are they actually converting

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He has a series of real estate exchanges, this one being the first one that we set-up initially. This one has about nine hundred pages, and he wanted to see how people are navigating his site.

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He set-up these custom widgets in his website that allow these people to navigate all these pages and he had no idea how things are being used and had no idea which pages people are converting on. He wanted to understand his customer journey as he was also setting up a bunch of customer exchanges and he wanted to focus on what people are converting on.

He wanted to see stats on “renters” versus “sales” ‘cause he’s much more interested to see more on sales as this is where the money is. If you click on this particular website, some of the biggest traffic is on apartments, and on renting on houses and condos where he was making sales. 

So we want to track the engagement of where he was making his money and we set-up the analysis to track the content groups over time.

So it kind of validated what he was doing. We also set-up monitoring of the widgets in terms of what was being used and where traffic was coming from. 

So we helped him see how his website is being used and allowed him to set-up these other domains. He had a choice of using Google Analytics and going through all those complexities of setting up Google Tag Manager, but that was problematic and he wanted support.