The Canadian Red Cross was using Universal Analytics (UA) for measurement and wanted to transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) as an early adopter. As a nonprofit, measurement parity was critical for understanding marketing’s influence on donations, in support of Canadian Red Cross’ mission to “help people and communities in Canada and around the world in times of need and support them in strengthening their resilience.”

Canadian Red Cross partnered with Merkle | Cardinal Path to proactively execute a 1:1 implementation from UA to GA4. The implementation needed to cover the full user journey for donations, volunteer applications, and educational class registrations.

Merkle | Cardinal Path delivered several key components to ensure a seamless transition:

• A comprehensive migration plan with project timelines, key deliverables, quality assurance checkpoints, and more.
• A solution design document to translate business requirements into technical tagging details and ensure capture of all required data.
• Measurement and reporting metric planning to define the right KPIs to support business needs.
• Account structure consolidation to streamline reporting and tagging.
• Training and workshops to empower Canadian Red Cross team members to take advantage of GA4’s capabilities.

While other organizations are scrambling to get GA4 transition plans underway, Canadian Red Cross is fully prepared for the deprecation of Universal Analytics. “It’s such a comfort to know that we don’t need to think about transitioning to GA4 because we’re already there,” says Rafi Chaudhury, Senior Advisor of UX and Web Content at Canadian Red Cross. “We can instead focus our efforts on getting the most out of GA4’s many features to ultimately deliver on our mission.” With streamlined processes, a strong knowledge base, and the right measurement in place, Canadian Red Cross is equipped for the next steps in their journey with GA4.