With the Holiday Season just around the corner, retailers are preparing for the end of the year sprint. Prepping sites and getting tags in order is essential for ensuring smooth reporting throughout the chaotic season. Retailers should take the time to get themselves into a strong position to report on all their holiday season successes.
So, our analytics team has put together a few simple tips and GA/GTM tricks to help retailers make sure that their tagging and reporting does not miss a beat this holiday season.
Use Annotations: Annotations are a simple way to keep track of any notable events that might impact a retailer’s performance. For example, annotations can be used to mark a day a new promotion launched or the day an email campaign launched. Using annotations during the holiday season is a great way to make sense of overall trends and can help analysts answer the why questions.
Set Up Alerts: Since reporting is vitally important during the holiday season, retailers should protect themselves from the risk of losing data by setting up alerts. Alerts can be set up to notify retailers of almost any metric, for instance, if site traffic or revenue has significantly dropped. These alerts can bring attention to any tagging issues that a retailer’s site might be experiencing. If an alert is triggered, retailers can quickly resolve the problem and avoid large amounts of lost data.
QA Ecommerce Tracking: Ecommerce tracking is at the crux of retail reporting. Before the holiday season is in full swing, retailers should do an audit of their ecommerce or enhanced ecommerce tags. Testing these tags will put a retailer in the best position to produce accurate ecommerce reports throughout the holiday season.
Do Not Push Major Site Changes: Retailers should refrain from launching any large site changes during the holiday season. This eliminates any self-inflicted risk of losing tracking, tags breaking, or site issues during this crucial time. If a site change is necessary during this time, be sure to QA the new experience thoroughly to avoid any issues that could impact reporting or the user experience.
These tips and tricks can help retailers get a jump start on their holiday season analytics. A little time spent prepping beforehand can save retailers time and stress later on. Plus, it will make reporting on all of a retailer’s holiday wins more fun and insightful!
