Ladbrokes Coral: Adopting Digital Analytics Data Governance to Increase Data Quality and Efficiency

Overview

Ladbrokes Coral Group is a leading multi-channel betting and gaming company that has an international presence in markets across the world. They wanted to improve their Google Analytics implementation to ensure data accuracy and develop internal data governance processes to create a Center of Excellence (CoE).

Challenge

Ladbrokes did not have the resources available for this undertaking, nor did they have a centralized resource team managing data collection. As a result, the organization did not have confidence in their data, and had difficulty accessing and using their data to make data-driven decisions.

Solution

Blast Analytics & Marketing and Ladbrokes Coral worked together to define and document their data governance goals, and establish a steering committee. The steering committee was comprised of representatives from multiple areas of the organization to ensure organizational alignment. This was important because creating a consistent tracking framework across the organization can only be successful if stakeholders from multiple brands, departments, levels, etc. agree on the tracking strategy.

Along with a tracking strategy, many departments within Ladbrokes Coral relied on Google Analytics, so there was a clear need for increased processes that would help:

• Manage report access
• Increase efficiencies in tagging
• Optimize marketing campaigns
• Improve usability of the website

As part of their data governance adoption, multiple roles were defined, and existing employees were identified to fill those roles, such as:

• Controller: Works closely with the steering committee and oversees all aspects of the digital analytics platform. They serve as the resident expert and owner of the platform within the organization.
• Champion: Experts within a department that serve as internal evangelists and support their team’s usage of digital analytics. They have advanced knowledge of digital analytics and the platform being used.
• Google Tag Manager (GTM) Maintainer: Responsible for implementing tagging, testing impact of 3rd party tags on site performance, maintaining log of implemented tags, and performing periodic audit of tags in order to identify tags that are no longer in use.

Roles and expectations were also defined for existing roles like:

• Product Owner: Works closely with their Google Analytics Champion to relay new requirements and identify planned changes that may impact tracking.
• Developer: Responsible for implementing tracking based on documented specifications.
• Test Analyst: Ensures tracking is implemented correctly and does not adversely impact performance of website.
• Release Manager: Coordinates release of code updates to live site.

Blast then worked with Ladbrokes Coral to define and document specific processes that would further increase their data governance, such as:

• Account permissions and accesses
• Requesting new report or change to existing report
• Request for data analysis
• Requesting additional tracking

Further, a CoE was created on Confluence to house all business requirements, implementation instructions, configurations, reporting, data, and role expectations for data governance.

Results

Implementing a CoE, creating internal governance processes, and educating the Ladbrokes Coral team led to an increase in organizational collaboration and success. Ladbrokes also saw an increase in efficiency of getting the data they needed to make important business decisions.

Other positive results included:

• More clarity around requesting changes
• Increased efficiency in gather data
• Clearly defined set of requirements agreed upon across the organization
• Extensive documentation around the implementation and alignment with business requirements
• Improved data quality and structure.

Mark Stern, Director of Business Intelligence & Analytics