Challenge
Vital Strategies had a disorganized analytics setup with inconsistent tracking across their digital properties. The transition from Universal Analytics to GA4 risked losing years of historical data, and their team needed a reliable system to track donations, resource downloads, and fund-related activity with proper multi-touch attribution.
Solution
I rebuilt their tracking infrastructure from the ground up:
- GA4 Architecture: Established a clean GA4 property with properly structured event tracking for donations, resource downloads, and fund-related searches, all managed through Google Tag Manager.
- Historical Data Preservation: Created BigQuery scripts to backfill GA4 data using historical Universal Analytics records, preserving years of trend data for year-over-year reporting.
- Multi-Touch Attribution Pipeline: Connected GA4 to BigQuery and built custom Looker reports for multi-touch attribution, giving Vital Strategies clear visibility into which channels and touchpoints drive donations and engagement.
- Direct Traffic Accuracy: Integrated Cloudflare data with BigQuery and Looker to accurately account for direct traffic and measure how many users were blocking GA4, improving the precision of all reported metrics.
- Tracking Documentation: Created a detailed tracking plan in Google Sheets mapping every event, conversion, and external connection, accessible to any team member for ongoing reference and maintenance.
Results
- Reliable Attribution Data: Multi-touch attribution reporting in Looker revealed which campaigns and channels actually drive donations, replacing guesswork with data.
- Accurate Traffic Metrics: Cloudflare integration identified the true gap between reported and actual traffic, giving leadership confidence in the numbers.
- Maintainable System: Comprehensive documentation and a clean GTM container mean the system can be maintained and extended by any competent analytics team member going forward.