Unlocking never-before-seen data insights for a leading social enterprise

Overhauling a complex cross-domain tracking system for consistent and reliable insight into business performance

Charitable social enterprise Greenwich Leisure Limited (or GLL) exist with the sole purpose of making community services and spaces better for everyone.

Founded in 1993, the company manage more than 250 public sport and leisure centres and 57 libraries working in partnership with 45 local councils, public agencies and sporting organisations.

The challenge

The customer-facing brand Better operates over 200 venues and has a digital presence which spans a dozen websites and 3 unique checkout platforms. Their complex cross-domain tracking setup was not reporting with any sort of consistency and there was no centralised resource which made business-critical data accessible. This situation meant that the internal marketing team were resorting to time-consuming and cumbersome Excel-based reports, missing out on vital insights that could directly add value to the top line. Further to this, the data also lacked granularity, with regional marketing stakeholders completely unable to gain insight into the performance of memberships types and activities in the centres they managed. Other analytics agencies had tried and failed to address the problem.

The solution

Working closely with the internal team and collaborating with GLL’s numerous marketing and development agencies we developed a cohesive Data Layer structure to be used across their digital presence. We standardised ecommerce payloads across checkouts and built custom dimensions around GLL’s organisational structure, allowing for consistent and reliable information to be accessed at various levels of granularity, from regional performance down to individual leisure centre metrics. A full Google Tag Manager container audit also revealed a number of inefficiencies which when fixed resulted in a 75% reduction in the volume of code running in the container.

Following these improvements, we built bespoke Google Data Studio dashboards which pulled together the now consistent and reliable feeds into an automated report which put GLL’s most important metrics front and centre. We ran a series of interactive training sessions with the team to show them how to make the most of the new data that was at their fingertips. The team were thrilled to be able to delve into the data using various channel drilldowns and filters to gain insights they’d never previously had access to, from data they now knew they could trust.

GLL Case Study

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The results

GLL have seen a dramatic improvement in the relevance and integrity of the data which is available to the Better regional marketing teams. As well as transitioning to a data-driven approach to decision making, the central team are now able to prioritise development resource and formulate campaigns based on in-depth, reliable insights into their customers’ interactions with their websites.

Builtvisible also now acts as the central gatekeeper of GLL’s tag management system, reviewing and deploying tags and tracking pixels for stakeholders throughout the organisation.


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