The importance of up-to-date analytics implementation documentation
If you are like me, solid documentation surrounding your analytics implementation isn’t just a nice-to-have. It is essential. For starters, thorough documentation ensures that when a primary analytics resource leaves your organization, all of your knowledge about your analytics solution doesn’t leave with them. Additionally, good documentation speeds up the time it takes to maintain your implementation, especially when it comes to validating your data layer and tags.
Why is it so hard to keep documentation updated?
The tricky thing about documentation, though, is its uncanny ability to become outdated. Ten years ago, we thought of analytics implementations as one-time events. We would put analytics on our site and then leave it be.
But today, an analytics implementation needs to be agile. It needs to continually expand to help us answer new questions and scale to help us track new apps/sites. The tasks required to continually maintain your implementation must be weighed against other competing priorities for your busy, resource-limited teams. Keeping documentation updated is also (usually) just plain burdensome. It doesn’t take place within the same platforms where you are making your tagging and analytics configuration updates.
So, understandably, keeping up documentation falls through the cracks.
How Apollo can programmatically keep your documentation current
One of Apollo’s key features is programmatic documentation management. Apollo can create and maintain your:
- Data Layer – The specifications to deliver to developers to implementation on your app/site
- Solution Design Reference -Outlines all the variables in your solution, along with their purpose and configuration
- Test Case Report – Identifies which variables/parameters should be set for each tag and use case, which is helpful when performing manual QA
- Business Requirements – All the business questions you are able to answer with your analytics implementation and how they relate to your solution design
To date, these features were just a subset of all the features offered in Apollo. However, we heard a lot of feedback from our users and prospective customers that you wanted this subset of features offered as a standalone solution. Well, friends, consider yourself heard!
Announcing the release of the Apollo Design and Documentation service/support tier for both Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics users
We’re happy to announce the release of the Apollo Design & Document tier! You can use this tier of service and support whether you have an existing Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics implementation, or you are starting a fresh implementation. Apollo Design & Document helps architect and maintain all the documentation around your implementation.
This service tier announcement follows hot on the heels of announcements for two other service tiers:
- Apollo Free – To create Apollo properties to support simple GA4 migration implementations or to start a GA4 implementation off fresh.
- Apollo Migration – To automate the migration of your complex Universal Analytics implementations on websites that use Google Tag Manager.
These three new tiers join our popular Full Service Tier, for when you want to migrate a complex implementation and manage that implementation on an ongoing basis. This ongoing management is an incredible benefit of using Apollo that keeps your instance dynamically updated with quality data and saves you time and money.
What are the benefits of using Apollo Design and Documentation
This Apollo tier is best for organizations that are frustrated by analytics documentation that is perpetually out-dated, organizations that need help creating a best practice architecture for Adobe Analytics, and organizations looking to speed up the time-to-value for GA4 implementations. Benefits include
- Time savings – Apollo programmatically builds and manages your analytics documentation, including your data layer, SDR, and test cases. No more manual labor necessary in these arenas.
- Cost savings – Keep your team busy on other business priorities.
- ROI gains – Best practice architecture is built in to help you leverage your implementation to its fullest and speed your time to value.
- Increased effectiveness – Apollo ensures your data layer and solution design support your analytics business questions effectively.
How to use Apollo Design and Documentation
First, enable the business questions (business requirements) important to your organization. Apollo provides hundreds of proven business questions that you can choose from to simplify the requirements definition process. These business questions can be filtered by industry vertical or by the features present within your digital property, and they help you align with your business stakeholders on your analytics implementation goals from the outset.
Next, watch Apollo programmatically build both your Data Layer specifications (image 1) and a Solution Design Reference and Testing Report (image 2).
It’s that easy! When your business requirements are translated into technical requirements for your developers and analytics to implement against, your organization saves valuable time and sweat. Plus, with the Solution Design Reference and Testing Report managed in one place instead of several (documents, spreadsheets, etc.), all necessary stakeholders can see the up-to-date requirements in one place.
You can continue to update your business question on an ongoing basis and downstream documentation will update to match your needs. Plus, if you need to make customizations or import an existing implementation into Apollo, these features are available to you within this tier and Apollo’s Full Service tier.
Apollo’s different support tiers offer your business optimal flexibility within the right solutions to meet your needs. We look forward to helping your business thrive with Apollo to manage and evolve your future’s best analytics implementation.
How much does the Apollo Design & Document offering cost?
This tier costs only $750 per month, billed annually, and keeps all your documentation for Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics current on an ongoing basis.
Apollo’s different support tiers offer your business optimal flexibility within the right solutions to meet your needs. We look forward to helping your business thrive with Apollo to manage and evolve your future’s best analytics implementation.
