B&NES Council

Migrate Google Analytics to GA4 and advise on how we can get the most out of it

7 Incomplete applications

6 SME, 1 large

2 Completed applications

2 SME, 0 large

• Published: Wednesday 15 March 2023
• Deadline for asking questions: Wednesday 22 March 2023 at 11:59pm GMT
• Closing date for applications: Wednesday 29 March 2023 at 11:59pm GMT

Overview

• Off-payroll (IR35) determination: Contracted out service: the off-payroll rules do not apply
• Summary of the work: We require help to migrate to GA4, set up key user journeys through our web estate, provide skills transfer so that we are able to do this ourselves in future, and with expertise in performance measurement to deliver training on how to effectively measure the success of digital services.
• Latest start date: Saturday 15 April 2023
• Expected contract length: 10 days
• Location: No specific location, for example they can work remotely
• Organisation the work is for: B&NES Council

About the work

• Why the work is being done: We need to migrate to GA4 and have an opportunity to greatly improve the way we have Google Analytics set up. We want to set it up to measure user journeys across multiple sites so that we can effectively measure the success of our digital services.
• Problem to be solved: We need to migrate Google Analytics to GA4 and want help with setting it up to measure success of digital services across multiple sites. We need to be able to identify points of failure and understand user behaviour, and need help with understanding the best approach for implementation, how to get the most out of it, and to understand how it can track campaigns, including social media based campaigns.; We have no shared understanding of how to measure the success of digital services. Measurement is not focused in the right areas and approach to reviewing performance is inconsistent. We want some training on how to measure success for digital services.; Particularly:; • the purpose of establishing a performance framework; • how to baseline performance; • provide a structured approach to developing clear, meaningful metrics that can be used to evidence the impact of change; • what a performance review process should look like (when, how, frequency) for continuous improvement; • how to effectively present data using data visualisation techniques; • how we might manage gaps in what we can track; • the role of a/b testing; • understand metrics/approaches to measuring success of commercial activities; • focus on ‘real’ problems
• Who the users are and what they need to do: As a Web Manager I need to track user journeys across multiple sites so I can tell whether the websites meet user needs; As a Web Manager I need to be able to see where user journeys fail so I can identify improvements; As a Service Designer I need to be able to develop and monitor clear success measures so I can understand whether the product is meeting user needs,; As a service owner I need to be able to develop and monitor clear success metrics so I can determine whether the service is meeting user needs.; As a service owner I need to be able to track the effectiveness of my campaign so I can tell whether it was successful or not; As a performance analyst I need access to clear success measures so I can build and present reports that focus on the right metrics and support the team to evidence the impact of change.; As a developer I need access to clear success measures to help prioritise ongoing developments to the product.; As a content designer I need access to clear success measures so I can understand whether content is meeting user needs and prioritise iterations.
• Existing team: 2 x Frontend Developers; 1 x Delivery Manager; 4.8 x Content Designers; 10 x Service Designers
• Current phase: Not applicable

Work setup

• Address where the work will take place: Bath and North East Somerset Council, Civic Centre, 1 Market Walk, Keynsham, BS31 1FS or can be remote (though delivery of training should be in person)
• Working arrangements: We are a hybrid team working predominantly remotely with some in-person time at Civic Centre, Keynsham. Hybrid working is supported by hybrid meeting spaces and collaboration tools including Microsoft Teams and Miro. We can work in person to migrate to GA4 in our Keynsham offices or are happy to do this remotely.; We will communicate and liaise with the supplier regarding the design of the training remotely. We would like training itself to take place in-person for our people to get the most out of this opportunity together.

Additional information

Skills and experience

Buyers will use the essential and nice-to-have skills and experience to help them evaluate suppliers’ technical competence.

• Essential skills and experience:
  • Have knowledge and expertise in measuring the success of digital services in terms of business outcomes, user satisfaction and ongoing performance.
  • Have evidence delivering collaborative training across multi-disciplinary teams.
  • Have experience of working with Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Data Studio, Google Optimise
  • Have experience of migrating to GA4 and tracking user journeys between multiple sites
• Nice-to-have skills and experience:
  • Provide experience of delivering performance-focused training to teams delivering public services
  • Provide knowledge of cross-platform analytics reporting
  • Provide experience of using Google Analytics 4 and PowerBI
  • Provide knowledge of measuring services based on LocalGov Drupal

How suppliers will be evaluated

All suppliers will be asked to provide a written proposal.

• How many suppliers to evaluate: 3
• Proposal criteria:
  • Clarity of the approach
  • How the approach meets our key requirements as outlined in the 'problem to be solved' section
  • The team you will provide and the skills they will bring
  • Understanding of the risks to successful delivery and how you will mitigate them
• Cultural fit criteria:
  • Be comfortable working with teams with different levels of experience in this space
  • Be committed to inclusion and accessibility
  • Work to create a safe training space where all colleagues can collaborate and feel comfortable doing so
  • Be open and responsive to feedback
  • How knowledge and experience is transferred into the team
• Payment approach: Capped time and materials
• Additional assessment methods: Presentation
• Evaluation weighting:

  Technical competence

  70%

  Cultural fit

  10%

  Price

  20%

Questions asked by suppliers

• 1. What is the budget?: £8,000 but some flexibility
• 2. What experience does the team have with UA (previous GA), or web analytics in general?: We use UA to measure traffic on our websites at the moment but it isn't set up for us to get the most out of it. Currently only really provides traffic numbers but isn't set up to measure full user journeys and successful transactions
• 3. You refer to “tracking user journeys between multiple sites”. Can you qualify “multiple sites”? Are they separate top-level domains (e.g. domaina.com, domainb.com) or sub-domains (e.g. refuse.domain.com, tax.domain.com)?: By multiple sites we mean a combination of top level domains (e.g. Investinbathnes.co.uk, sendiasbathnes.org.uk) and sub-domains (e.g. fix.bathnes.gov.uk, jobsandcareers.bathnes.gov.uk)
• 4. You refer to “cross-platform” analytics reporting. Can you define “platform”? For example, do you mean cross-device? Or do you mean using different reporting platforms in tandem such as an A/B testing tool with behavioural observation tool (e.g. Hotjar), web analytics tool, combined?: We mean combining reporting platforms in tandem such as an A/B testing tool with behavioural observation tool (e.g. Hotjar) and a web analytics tool. Cross device would be good if this can be achieved through GA4
• 5. Are the team aware that Google Optimize is being sunset in September 2023 and that they will need to migrate to a new provider? Google have picked three third party providers to recommend companies migrate to (at least one of which offers a free plan).: No we weren't aware of this and would be happy to be guided on a suitable alternative
• 6. How many events do you need migrating? If you know.: We don't want to migrate events. We want advice on the best way to set these up and measure events across domains and sub domains. This could include developing a strategy for how to implement event tracking effectively.
• 7. How have you implemented GA / and events? (Hard-coded / GTM?): The majority of GA/TagManager tags are coded into template files, some are just included in content headers. What we want from this piece of work is advice, guidance and training on the best way to set GA and events up to effectively measure our digital services. We'd also need advice on custom monitoring and how to get the most out of this.
• 8. Do they have developer resource available if it is needed to aid migration?: Yes in most cases. We may need to request work through third parties for some sites which might take time
• 9. Do you need this work to be cookie law compliant? https://fix.bathnes.gov.uk/ does have GTM but it’s not cookie law compliant for example: Yes we do. Thanks for flagging the issue with https://fix.bathnes.gov.uk/. We will investigate getting this remedied.
• 10. Which social media platforms are you active on?: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram
• 11. How are you currently monitoring and separating social media data (e.g. utm tracking)?: We’re not really. We want advice on the best way to do it and help with setting it up.
• 12. How have you set up and configured these goals in Universal Analytics?: Confirmation pages to signal completion of user journeys using funnels to track steps through forms. Inconsistently set up and a bit ad hoc. We want advice on the best way to do this
• 13. Are you using Google Tag Manager?: Yes, in a limited capacity. Used to define events that are difficult to measure in normal analytics (e.g. with forms that only have a fixed urls)
• 14. How are these goals aligned with your overall business objectives and digital strategy?: That is part of what we need guidance on. We have commercial services within the council with income targets and we want to be able to put a value on our online transactions. We want to be able to measure in line with the GDS model, so things like cost of transaction, digital completion rates, dropout rates.
• 15. Can you provide examples of how these goals have been used to make data-driven decisions in the past?: As part of auditing content to see what users are engaging with. We want to understand how we can better use GA4 to provide the data we need to make data driven decisions.
• 16. As well as social media, what other digital services do you want to measure success for (SEO, PPC)?: Would be good to be able to track promotional materials so we can see the effectiveness of our marketing/advertising campaigns and better target our limited resources. May also include physical advertising assets. We want to develop a better understanding of our demographics and who our audience is so we can better target them with promotional materials.
• 17. Related to the above, what are the objectives and KPIs of these services?: • Measuring digital take-up; • Measuring user satisfaction; • Measuring completion rate; • Measuring cost per transaction; • KPIs that are unique to services and campaigns
• 18. Can you describe your current approach to reviewing performance and why it is inconsistent? What are the common pain points you’re hoping to alleviate?: We don’t currently have one and really want help with developing an approach and getting some skills transfer. We only scratch the surface of GA because we don’t have the time and resource to apply to it. We are looking for help to develop a common strategy that we can apply to each service we work with. We want to know what we are doing well and how we can identify what we need to improve.
• 19. How do you define success for digital services and what are your goals?: • Measuring digital take-up; • Measuring user satisfaction; • Measuring completion rate; • Measuring cost per transaction
• 20. Are there any limitations or challenges you have encountered with measuring these goals in Universal Analytics?: Our knowledge limitations and time and resource constraints. We made decisions a number of years ago when we set up UA and are still living with the consequences of them because we haven’t had the knowledge or time to fix those early decisions. We really want someone who can advise us on the best way to implement GA4 and create that shared understanding across our team on how it should be used to measure our user journeys.
• 21. Are you currently receiving any monthly reports or insights from your analytics team or agency? If so, what specific information is included in these reports?: Just basic reports set up and we report on an ad-hoc basis. We want to set GA4 up so that we can provide more meaningful data on transactions and costs not just page views. We need help configuring GA4 to do this, and skills transfer so that we can do this independently.
• 22. How do you currently analyse and interpret the data collected in Google Analytics, and who is responsible for this process?: We provide ad hoc reporting to services and use basic reports to help inform which user journeys people are interacting with. We want help with setting GA4 up to collect more meaningful data so that we can provide it to our Business Intelligence team, who can then start to incorporate into our Power BI reporting.
• 23. How are you currently tracking and reporting on progress towards these goals? Do you have a dashboard set up in Google Analytics or any other analytics tool to monitor key metrics and KPIs?: We don’t have dashboards or any other tools set up. We want to develop a strategy for this and want help with configuring GA4 to help with this.
• 24. Can you describe your current understanding of GA4 and your level of experience with it?: Assume we know nothing. We have done some basic research into GA4 and know what direction we want to go in, but we want to seek advice on our assumptions and want help with the strategy, shared understanding and configuration
• 25. What specific data visualisation techniques are you interested in learning more about?: Being able to see GA4 data in Power BI, which is our corporate reporting tool.
• 26. Can you clarify what you mean by “gaps in what we can track” and provide examples?: We can’t really track users between different sites we provide (we support 12 websites as team), and we have difficulties tracking different types of forms (Drupal forms and .NET forms). We want to know how to set GA4 up to enable us to do this.
• 27. Can you provide more information on the role of A/B testing in your digital services: We want advice on the best way to introduce this as one of our user research tools. We don’t currently do it, and feel it would help us design better services for our users.
• 28. Can you give some examples of commercial activities that you want to measure success for?: Booking and paying for wedding venues, making enquiries for Haycombe Cemetery, paying for Building Control services, signing up for business waste, booking/paying for pest control services and many others.
• 29. How do you plan to use the data and insights from GA4 to improve your digital services?: We want to be able to measure transaction cost and success, dropout rates so we can target services to improve, look at how people are engaging with page content, help inform our channel shift approach by being able to compare with data from other channels, are our campaigns working effectively, are we losing out to competitors in a commercial sphere (building control, wedding venues etc)
• 30. Are there any specific features or reports in Universal Analytics that you find particularly useful or valuable for your business needs, that you aren’t certain exist on GA4?: No. Our UA installation is not a good one and we want help, advice, and training on how to configure it to measure against our business needs. We want advice on the best reports to use and how to set up custom reports. We want to move away from looking at page and groups of pages to looking at whole user journeys rather than sections of the site.
• 31. What is the typical user journey for your clients?: Ideal user journey: Go to Google, search for task, visit website, read page information, click on a button, apply/book/request something, pay for it (depending on the service), complete transaction.
• 32. How would you currently define success?: Being able to measure whether people are using our online services. A resident/customer being able to come to our site, do what they need to do (ideally without needing to email or call us), and go about their day. We want to know where our online transactions fail, or where users give up, so we can identify areas for improvement.
• 33. Can you provide details about multiple sites that you want to measure success for? Do they have separate properties on GA, or are they subdomains under the same property?: https://beta.bathnes.gov.uk/media/5622 ; ; List of all our accounts and properties

The deadline for asking questions about this opportunity was Wednesday 22 March 2023.