Relief Applications

UNESCO - Google Analytics Migration and Configuration

UNESCO relies on Google Analytics to understand how visitors use its many websites, and had to leave Universal Analytics for Google Analytics 4 before July 2023. We migrated and configured the new tool across its web ecosystem, including Drupal 7 and 9 and custom PHP sites, with custom dashboards for each domain, internal traffic filtering and tagging moved to Google Tag Manager.

Client
UNESCO
When
2 months
Team
2 people
Services
Info management & MEAL
Technologies
Google Analytics
Industry
Cultural and Natural conservation
SDGs
4. Quality education, 11. Sustainable cities and communities, 15. Life on land
Client website
unesco.org

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promotes international cooperation through cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. They hold one of the most well known United Nations programmes, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites and their websites ecosystem is one of the most visited and referred in the nonprofit and international cooperation sector.

For UNESCO its websites, that include dozens of sites, web-apps, landing pages and more, is one of the most important channel to spread their message, launch campaigns and promote their research and reports on the state of cultural and natural sites and more.

UNESCO uses Google Analytics as their main tool to track what users are doing in their sites, which helps the organization to understand which contents are more popular, how visitors behave and detect points of improvement. Since Google announced the substitution of the old version Universal Analytics for the new Google Analytics 4 UNESCO have been planning the transition, which needed to be effective before July 2023, the deadline offered by Google before proceeding of the shutdown of the old Universal Analytics.

Relief Applications offered a complete migration and configuration service to the new Google Analytics 4 in the whole UNESCO website galaxy, which included platforms developed with different technologies, adapting the new tool for the needs of their data analytics teams, creating customised dashboards and assuring that all the possible events are recollected, filtered and classified.

Some of the most relevant websites affected by the migration:

unesco.org World Heritage Convention Careers UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage UNESCO Core Data Portal

The challenge

  • Migrate all the UNESCO domains and subdomains Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 for Drupal 7 and 9, SAP Success Factors and custom PHP
  • Configure all the filters, including internal traffic
  • Ease future maintenance of the analytics system

What we did

  • Creation of new Google properties and custom dashboards for each domain and subdomain and implementation of tracking tags
  • Detailed filtering by IP of internal traffic and measurement and dashboarding of its impact
  • Migration of all the tagging to Google Tag Manager for automatic update of tracking codes

In a very short period, Relief Applications has been able to conduct the migration from the old Google Analytics to the new one. We did not lose any tracking information and the explanation and guidance provided by relief applications were accurate. The availability of the team was also really appreciated. Thanks to all, we still have a lot to do, we at least, we have some solid foundations.

Maxime Bouquet, Digital Project coordinator
Google Analytics Migration and Configuration, UNESCO: screen 1 Google Analytics Migration and Configuration, UNESCO: screen 2 Google Analytics Migration and Configuration, UNESCO: screen 3 Google Analytics Migration and Configuration, UNESCO: screen 4 Google Analytics Migration and Configuration, UNESCO: screen 5

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