Case Study - Hihostels.ca
Google Analytics 4 | Google Tag Manager | Looker Studio
About Client
HI Hostels Canada (hihostels.ca) is an organization that offers a network of hostels across Canada.
It is a member of Hostelling International (HI), which is a global network of youth hostels that aims to provide safe, affordable, and quality accommodation to travelers around the world.
Requirements
The client was looking to set up a GA4 correctly and track all their bookings/reservations as a purchase event.
Apart from that, they also wanted to have dashboards in Looker Studio for themselves and their affiliate Hostels. The dashboards were to address questions and provide insights to HiHostels’ marketing team and their affiliate hostel’s marketing team. With these changes, they would be able to boost their marketing strategy and budget allocation in the right direction.
Challenges faced
While trying to implement these changes, we faced below challenges:
First, It was found that the GTM dataLayer variable just had the total value of the purchase (on purchase event) but the requirement was to track a lot more data like (booking_id, hostel_ name, check-in _date, etc), which was not available.
Second, It was also found that a ‘Newsletter subscription Confirm’ event was set up directly in GA4 (not via GTM), due to which passing the event parameter was not possible.
These were thus hindering the correct data from being passed to their new GA4 property.
Solution
To solve these issues, firstly, the ‘DOM Element’ variables in Google Tag Manager were used to successfully track purchase event and all needed data points (such as booking_id, hostel_name, check-in_date, etc), which was earlier not available on dataLayer.
And, to track event parameters in the ‘Newsletter subscription confirm’ event, we removed the event set from GA4 and set it up via GTM.
Result
Now, all the needed data was being correctly tracked. We were able to successfully track purchase events and all needed data points (such as booking_id, hostel_name, check-in_date, etc).
Moreover, the ‘Newsletter subscription confirm’ event was successfully implemented via GTM and allowed us to track the referring page and other parameters on the event level.
Conclusion
Thus, with the above solutions implemented by our GA4Experts team, it became possible to create the dashboards in ‘Looker Studio’ as per the client’s requirements.
Now, the dashboard was accurately reporting all hostel reservations made. Correct attribution also helped to know which channel and marketing campaigns were bringing quality traffic. And, it helped client’s team to see from which location and devices were their customers making their bookings and other important insights.
These insights were to be used by the marketing team to improve their marketing efforts and allocate their budget in the right direction.