Transitioning to GA4 at Scale • Simplifying Data Measurement With Automation

As an expert in effective wealth management and financial planning, St. James’s Place understands the value of a long-term investment. So, with the announced sunsetting of Google’s Universal Analytics and well aware of the time it would cost to manually measure thousands of sites, the British investment management company wanted to migrate both their corporate website and the 3,000 partner sites they manage to standard Google Analytics 4 (GA4)—and we made sure they got their money’s worth by leveraging our home-made, Google Cloud-hosted tool.

To get this massive job done, we relied on our proprietary automation tool, built by Ahmed Tarek M., which we’ve used time and again to create Google Analytics (GA) properties and Google Tag Manager (GTM) containers at scale. With a visual interface that’s easy to use—no code needed—this solution allows us to quickly and accurately create and update these properties and containers, reducing human effort while ensuring we have top-notch first-party data quality. After assessing the account structure and developing a measurement strategy, we deployed our tool to roll out the GA4 template for the 3,000 partner properties within just a few hours. As the crowning touch, we delivered a roll-up property that hosts all partner sites, thereby creating a clear, uncomplicated overview of the results across each and every one of them.

We migrated the brand’s corporate and thousands of partner sites from Universal Analytics to GA4 across all properties—an automation process that took 80 hours to complete, which is near nothing compared to the 1,500 hours it would have taken to implement all of this manually. This way, we helped St. James’s Place save precious time, which can now be spent on connecting customers with the right financial advisor. And speaking of impact, while our Data.Monks team has a lot of experience doing data analytics at scale, migrating 3,000 websites was the highest number we’ve hit thus far. On top of that, it was the first time we focused solely on Google Analytics 4. That said, given the ever-growing urgency to migrate to this system, we’re sure we’ll be welcoming many more cases like this one in no time.