One thing I’ve learned from mentors and if you read/listen to any of the great leaders, they continue to say, “celebrate your successes.” Or as Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Be your own biggest fan.”
Anyway, all that to say…
Today I’m celebrating!
Why? Because today I received a Morado Award from AFI for an important project that has been a large part of what I’ve been working on this year. Migrating Armstrong Flooring from Adobe analytics and DTM to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
“In recognition of outstanding guidance and technical leadership during the Google Analytics Implementation.”
When I started at Armstrong Flooring back in 2016 they were in the middle of building the commercial site which included going from a legacy implementation of Adobe Analytics to the new AA and Dynamic Tag Manager (DTM). While I had experience with AA it had been several years since I actively used it. I was one of the only people on the team that had any experience with it so we relied on a vendor to define and implement the tool. Almost from day one, I shared that I believe that Google Analytics is a better more cost effective solution. Especially based on the sophistication of the current analytics reporting.
Then in 2017, I helped convince my manager that it was a good idea to switch to Google Analytics and we were able to start the conversation with upper management. Long story short in early 2018 we had the green light to start the migration project.
We worked with a small team including Tim, a developer. Tim was a critical team member because of his development skills. He did the onsite code to make sure GTM was working and he baled me out a when I was stuck with coding in GTM itself. He and I did the brunt of the work. Although, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we did if it hadn’t been for great team we worked with. We as a team managed to get the project finished early and under budget!
Now with the project complete, we are getting more data each day, and I’m working on the reporting which will include a dashboard for analysts, as well as higher level reporting for management and the executive team. It’s been very exciting to the insights that we are gaining already.
I am still planning to do a post that compares the differences between AA and GA. I might even do a whitepaper, but today I just wanted to share something good.
Thanks to Bryan S. for making sure Tim and I received some recognition of the work we put into the project.