Working as a Senior Data Specialist, I’ve come across a series of common mistakes that prevent enterprises from leveraging this tool to its full potential—and consequently, accessing the true value of their data. During a series of panels at Melbourne MeasureCamp, I was lucky enough to host a session on these observations and some recommendations so that brands can bank on actionable insights into user behavior and application performance. If you missed it, continue reading for the main takeaways.

Learning #1: Only one Firebase project can be linked to one GA4 property.

An important thing to consider when it comes to integrating Firebase with GA4 is that only one Firebase project can be linked to one GA4 property. This means that if there are multiple Firebase projects, it’s necessary to transfer all applications—regardless of operating systems or development cycles—into one project and link it to the main GA4 property. 

This requires careful planning and a deep understanding of how Firebase projects are set up.  Keep in mind the potential technical challenges and limitations in migrating apps from one project to another. For example, certain app developers may have their own preferences in terms of project setups, so you need to talk to your development team and understand what that looks like. 

Also, be aware of dependencies such as Crashlytics or BigQuery exports setup when moving apps from one project to another. Each Firebase project can have multiple stack integrations, and we should be ready to reconfigure all of them. Make sure you have historical data and map out timelines for these app migrations.

Learning #2: Standard naming unlocks customer insights. 

The main reason why you’d want to integrate Firebase with GA4 is that it provides valuable insights about user journeys across web and app platforms. However, the only way to unlock those insights is by ensuring standard naming conventions for web and app events. 

First, you’ll need to create a Google Sheet or an Excel spreadsheet to standardize the naming of events and parameters. Here’s an example:

As you can see, we recommend having standardized event names and parameters across web and app platforms in GA4. It may seem simple, but it's not uncommon for organizations to use different conventions on different platforms, making it harder to cross-reference the data.  

Other tips to make the process easier include:

• If you have a website, but no app implementation yet, rely on your web and GA4 Recommended Events to name the event and implement these for the app.
• If you already have an app implemented with Firebase, use the mapping sheet to understand which events from the app can be mapped to web. It is easier to rename web events with GTM than doing so for the app.
• Align with both web and app development teams for naming conventions. For example, using camelcase (e.g. SignUp) vs snake case (sign_up)

Learning #3: Be Aware of Data Collection Limits.

When you use Firebase to collect data from your apps, it’s important to be mindful of the data collection and configuration limits. Firebase Analytics does not log events, event parameters, and user properties that exceed certain limits—which means that the platform will drop the events and stop tracking valuable data even if you exceed the limit by a few characters. 

In my experience, this mistake is especially common among developers who implement the Firebase SDK without really knowing about the limits. These are some of the main caveats and my respective recommendations for them:

• Event parameters limits: 25 parameters per event may seem a lot, but it may add up if you’re sending ecommerce events. GA4 and Firebase will drop the events and event parameters if you exceed this limit.
• Be careful not to go over the maximum length of the event parameter value, which currently stands at 100 characters. Be aware of user-generated values (e.g. listing name in marketplaces)
• Remember that Firebase does not accept array type parameters.
• When setting up BigQuery export for GA4 (with both app and web streams), check the usage in advance so that you don’t get shocked with the cost for the storage and querying the data. Pro tip: Set up daily aggregated tables for important metrics instead of querying directly from raw export tables.

In conclusion, it is essential to be aware of limitations around linking Firebase projects with GA4 property and plan ahead for your migration. Create a mapping sheet to map the events across the website and apps and standardize app and web events naming. Take note of Firebase data collection limits and make sure you are not going over the limits and risk losing your data. Finally, learn how to debug apps using Firebase Debug Mode, a bonus tip that can save you time and headaches.

Organizing content in a way that is easily navigable and actionable is crucial in developing a strong user journey—even more so for a corporate platform that exists to inform. “When it comes to companies that have so much existing content and information, how do you organize that massive number of things to say—and make it personalized and easy to find?” asks Group Creative Director Niels Dortland. The challenge lies not in representing the breadth of information available, but rather pushing users to the right content to act or purchase.

From microsites to enterprise platforms, our platforms team has worked with a wide variety of brands to implement new content management systems, design personalized journeys, and improve accessibility—and finding the right way to surface up key bits of content out of a massive library is key to each of those efforts. Here’s a look inside how the team did just that for Jacobs, an engineering company whose portfolio touches design, construction, consulting and maintenance across a wide range of industries around the world.

Overcome the homepage turf war.

What causes the content overload that is so common on corporate websites? “Everyone wants to say everything, so everything is on the menu,” says Fernanda González, Group Experience Director. That might be a welcome sight at an all-you-can-eat restaurant, but not so much when searching a website for information you need.

The maximalist approach is often the result of intra-political clashes between different business units. A company is a bundle of different teams with different goals and responsibilities, and it’s a reasonable expectation that each should be equally represented on the website. But the primary focus should be on understanding the different types of users who will visit the website and how to account for their needs. 

“What will get people to move forward, and how do we mix those things together into a good user experiences?” González asks, reasserting a user-led approach to content management. Our team’s solution: deliver dynamic content based on each individual’s needs, meaning no one is scrounging for homepage real estate.

Tap into off-the-shelf solutions to make content easily searchable.

One way to move past messy menus and overwhelming content feeds is to put search front and center, helping visitors access the content they need in just a few keystrokes and clicks. For Jacobs, we implemented an AI-powered search engine that greets visitors by asking what they’re looking for. The sophisticated language model lets users answer in plain English, rather than strings of SEO-ified keywords.

The model also made search far easier to implement than a traditional engine, as natural language processing bypassed the need to index and structure data across Jacobs’ existing content—a lengthy and meticulous process that can stretch development cycles across months. “Many other search engines on websites like this need to be very structured with keywords,” says González. “Instead of that, we implemented a smart one that learns to search for content as quick as possible.”

The team further sped up development by choosing an existing search solution, rather than build one from scratch. “Taking tech off the shelf is smarter for brands because it’s faster,” says Dortland, compared to the work of big consultancy firms who easily get tied up in assessments, planning and processes instead of execution. This resourceful method of spinning up solutions means we can make a difference to the user experience now versus a year down the line.

Not only that, off-the-shelf tools are also backed by dedicated development teams and robust documentation should the need for troubleshooting arise. And that’s just the beginning, because as users browse and search around, the platform becomes more aware of their needs, employing a feedback loop to help enhance the user experience with speedier, more accurate results.

Take a cue from social media to make content actionable.

Easily finding content is one thing, but what should users do with it once they’ve landed? “We realized that people want to save content, so we activated that in the user journey,” says González. As users browse content, they can save it to their favorites board—a lot like saving creative inspiration on Pinterest. 

“You can shape boards around different topics of interest, and this lets you use the website more as a utility to gather information,” González adds. In addition to letting users build their own boards, the platform also curates topic-specific boards that pull content from both the CMS and social platforms like LinkedIn that are always changing and always relevant to provide a unique experience for every user.

Put accessibility at users’ fingertips.

A social-inspired interface is one way to make content easily accessible to users. But platforms should also comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which a legal requirement in many parts of the world. Accessibility works best when it plays a key role in the design of an interface—not as an afterthought—and we went beyond Level AA compliance for Jacobs by also implementing a configurator that lets each user create the optimal viewing experience for themselves.  

Options include a reading mask—which creates a focus area on the screen that follows the user’s cursor, blocking out distractions—and the ability to turn off animations and motion graphics. The result is a platform that’s not only personalized in the sense that content conforms to a user’s interest; the interface itself adjusts to their needs. Both result in a more intuitive journey across the entire Jacobs brand story.

Keep up with solutions as technology evolves.

Building a state-of-the-art platform doesn’t mean spending years reinventing the wheel. Nor does trudging through a library of legacy content to make it easy for modern visitors to search and navigate. Rather, tapping into existing, modern tech solutions can help overcome hurdles that hamper the user experience—and do it fast.

As new technologies emerge—hello, generative AI—platforms and user journeys will continue to evolve, underscoring the importance of a partner who can identify the shortest path to success among them. Remember: platforms are always evolving, meaning there’s never a shortage of options to streamline user journeys and make content more accessible.

This was key to the design of our website, particularly our homepage, which emulates the look and feel of a newspaper. The format calls for experiences that feel new and contemporary on a regular basis, compounded by the accelerated pace in which our industry changes. Now one year since the launch of our brand, we’re looking at how our approach to content curation has panned out, solving key challenges that many brands face when it comes to delivering distinct digital experiences or breathing new life into their legacy content.

Set a foundation for flexibility at scale.

“Our homepage was designed to mark special moments in time, like a turning point for the company or when something is trending industry-wide that we have a strong point of view on,” says Vinicius Araujo, Creative Director. One recent moment was the release of The Transformation of Digital, our report detailing how consumer behaviors are shaping a new era of virtualization. To celebrate the launch of the report, our homepage took a new look: a unique color scheme, a curation of thematic content and an animated logo that represents the report’s visual identity.

Such an overhaul to the homepage may seem like a significant investment of time and resources, though the flexibility baked into our CMS made it a simple overnight change. Easy-to-update components and customizable fields also ensure that bespoke designs are scalable into the future. “It’s always ready to be updated in a heartbeat,” says Araujo. “And it’s ephemeral: it’s only there for a week, and then it’s gone.”

On the flipside, the flexibility baked into our website keeps our content timely while ensuring we can authentically represent the breadth of our capabilities. At the same time, brands following a similar approach can iterate experiences that support the different needs of diverse audiences. “In curating the content for the virtualization takeover, one thing we considered was: How do we get someone who doesn’t want to digest the whole report to understand what this is?” noted Gardner, who gathered a wide selection of content that make virtualization tangible while also representing the diverse skills of our team.

Collaboration enables new ways to shape and expand content.

With our homepage takeover, it was important to build an experience that felt distinct right from the jump—not exactly separate from the other content on the website, but something that commanded attention as soon as people landed on the website.

The first thing viewers saw when loading the page was a reanimated Media.Monks logo that leverages the bespoke identity crafted for the report—all built around a design language of four quadrilateral shapes that represented key themes of the virtualization report: ownership, identity, community and experience. These adapting shapes interact with each other at different frequencies throughout the report, keeping the audience focused on the insights. “It was important to create a wrapper that wouldn’t alienate the audience,” says Benjamin Tuffy, Design Director, noting that using iconography like VR headsets or futuristic environments could either limit virtualization’s scope, overwhelm non-technical readers or simply feel irrelevant for those who aren’t engaged in those channels.

But the shapes are just one kind of graphical element that made their way from the report to the homepage design. In discussing the role that bespoke experiences can play in enhancing the original source material, Tuffy spoke about a collaborative approach between design, copy and growth teams to pull the content into previously unforeseen directions.

Curation breathes new life into legacy content.

In addition to finding new ways to visually represent content from the report, our virtualization-themed homepage takeover also provided an opportunity to highlight ways that virtualization impacts different categories and audiences. “Leaders across different regions are bringing the story out to their teams,” says Tuffy, and viewers could see this play out through the content we curated to substantiate the report’s claims.

This highlights another purpose to building around key marketing moments: breathing new life into some of your existing content. In our case, this meant further drawing lines and connections between our multidisciplinary team. “We saw we had some content from Jam3 and a recently published piece by Chief Diversity Officer James Nicholas Kinney, both of which spoke to the purpose of virtualization from two different directions,” says Gardner, noting that the content helped showcase how we’ve been grappling with these ideas long before the report’s release.

Our special-edition homepage sought to leverage our CMS’s flexibility to deliver custom web experiences as new moments arise. Brands seeking to build bespoke, scalable web experiences can follow a similar approach by thematically curating and remixing new or legacy content, while also enhancing it further through added fit-for-format design elements. The result? A differentiated digital experience that never overstays its welcome and dazzles audiences with something new every time they visit.

Right now, a need to differentiate and capture first-party data is revitalizing the potential of the web experience. In my new role with the Jam3 team, we focus on combining insight, creativity and technology to align with culture and connect with people. Because websites have become the primary sales support and source of information for audiences once again, they must also pull their weight in building deeper connections with audiences. Yet many designers and development teams are focused on ticking every best practice off the list, resulting in websites that end up looking and feeling the same, lacking the unique spark needed to make an indelible impression with audiences. 

We need to raise the standards and expectations on what a website can achieve—so I say rip up the rulebook and trade best practices for bespoke, premium solutions that forge deeper connections with audiences and immerse them within the world of the brand.

Set Your Brand in Motion—Literally

There’s a saying we like to use: the interface is the brand. It means every experience across the digital ecosystem becomes a direct reflection of its core products and services. So when we set out to build an immersive web experience, we begin by examining the essence of the brand and how to communicate that through a series of moments. What is the emotion we want to trigger with visitors? Building a uniquely differentiated platform starts with defining what you want audiences to feel at every step.

This is where conventional wisdom to stick to standard best practices falls flat. Limiting your website interface to static text and images does little to bring brand moments to life. Interactive elements in particular—think real-time rendering and explorable 3D product models, or even full games themselves—enable user journeys that feel premium and personalized, but even little touches in motion design go far beyond user expectation.

Form Meets Function

Elements like those described above aren’t just for looking good; they can also help translate abstract concepts into tangible, memorable experiences. Product demonstrations are a great example of this. With 3D interactive models, you can break apart a product to explain its various pieces, like an exploded-view diagram.

This was our approach to building a strong online identity for Lucid Motors, creators of the most luxurious electric cars on the market. We built the user journey around motion visuals and CGI assets that were animated to perfectly highlight key features of the automaker’s technology, including components of the chassis and the battery pack that powers it all.

The scalable platform is also lightning fast. This is an important consideration that can’t be overlooked: when you have resource-intensive, motion-heavy assets and animation, your team must ensure the experience doesn’t slow down and freeze up—especially for those on mobile devices. What’s the highest performance, most flexible way of representing the brand? This is a critical question but one that most production studios skimp out on, sacrificing performance for flashy visuals. But the fluidity of moving through a platform contributes just as much, if not more, to the experience than visual fidelity alone.

Building Effective Experiences

With the rise of the immersive web, much of the work that was once restricted to microsites has made its way onto brand platforms and commerce. Which means truly standing out requires a totally different set of skills than many teams may be accustomed to. Realizing the market need for experiences built upon a foundation of data-driven and strategic insights, we’re scaling up our own capabilities within the Media.Monks team to defy convention and create work that breaks new ground.

What we do is highly specialist—and that can make it tough to find the finest talent in-house to support brands’ growing ambitions. To combat this lack of talent, we recently launched a six-months paid immersive web traineeship to cultivate a pool of specialist creative web developers who have instilled our values and pursuit of perfection from the start.

This means tackling historic challenges like measuring the value of touchpoints like microsites. In the early aughts (when the microsite was king), they lacked the analytics to understand if their million-dollar investments were worth it. The present-day focus on conveying the feeling of a brand may not be as concrete as selling X amount of product, but it’s no longer immeasurable.

The ultimate goal is to forge a connection and relationship with audiences. While today’s immersive web thrives from CMOs willing to take creative risks to build something special, there’s opportunity to bridge together creative UX design, strategy and analytics to eliminate risk and enhance the brand—even without relying on best practices that have sucked the feeling out of the everyday digital experience.

With Wajer Yachts, for example, we used the website to transport visitors to the exact moment of casting off with a yacht in a single click. 360-degree product views and gorgeous imagery of the yachts’ interiors offered a vivid experience and a sensation of ownership. But it didn’t just look good: time spent on the website increased by 250% after launch and generated qualified leads increased by 450%, demonstrating the value of bespoke branded experiences.

The internet in its current form is closing to its end. A new era of immersive, personalized experiences is emerging, as evidenced in recent discussion around the metaverse. As brands aim to build relationships with consumers through bespoke touchpoints, the role of web experiences—enhanced by immersive web technology—has elevated to become an essential space to differentiate the brand and translate it into compelling experiences.

Each one of these events has attained international relevance, playing a fundamental role in the sales of brands everywhere. Yet in the race to capitalize on them, many campaigns fall short of their true potential—whether they know it or not. The fact is, Black Friday can be much more than a one-off event to boost your sales for a few days. It’s a priceless opportunity to establish a lasting relationship with consumers all year long. 

Experiences That Stand on Their Own

A lot has been said about how to gear up for Black Friday—and with good reason. Its massiveness has turned the event into an advertising frenzy that spans a myriad of categories, products and services, which make it increasingly hard for a brand to stand out. As a response, sales are now popping up weeks before the event—to the point where some argue that Black Friday has long moved beyond its original meaning. 

But if anything, these changing dynamics stress the importance of enhancing the customer experience and establishing a relationship that will last far longer than the event itself. “You’re not only competing with other brands; you’re also competing against ad fatigue,” explains Platforms Lead Brook Downton.

A good example of this is what Tmall did for Singles’ Day. In the lead-up to the event, the Chinese website for online retail launched an immersive art exhibition where they showcased eight limited-edition collections from leading brands in the form of NFTs. In putting these experiences together, it’s not imperative to keep Black Friday at the center of it all. The ultimate goal is to provide an added value for consumers, so approach it with a customer-first mindset and let the event be merely the amplifier of an experience that stands on its own. 

Getting to Know Your Consumers

By the start of the Black Friday season, you should have a clear idea of who your consumers are, their behavior and nuances. But if your marketing efforts go according to plan, you can expect a significant influx of new data during these days—both from new and existing consumers. Knowing how to leverage the new data can help you carry this momentum forward, and provide tools you’ll fall back on in the quieter months of the year.

“At this stage, good data management is the equivalent of remembering our conversations with people,” says Gastón Fossati, VP of Data Growth, LATAM at Media.Monks. Having control over this data will bring your consumers’ needs into sharper focus. And when it comes to new shoppers, don’t look at Black Friday as the end of something; rather, as the start of an ongoing strategy. “In this scenario, the conversion already happened, it’s the opposite of what we’re used to,” says Downton. “Have a follow-up moment, acknowledge that new engagement and start building from there.”

That first touchpoint after Black Friday can take many forms, but Downton recommends giving consumers the opportunity to reconfirm their desire to connect with your brand and exchange information. In doing so, it’s important to demonstrate the value exchange that you offer—that is, the more personalized suite of services and benefits that having accurate data can lead to. 

Paving the Way for an Ongoing Relationship

Once the consumer has shown true enthusiasm about engaging with your brand, you can move forward with other marketing efforts, such as a cross-selling strategy. “Considering the products that your consumer already bought to recommend others is a great way to better serve your audience with a more personalized experience,” says Fossati. “It can also be helpful to have a model in place to predict their lifetime value, which will help you focus on the consumers with more potential.”

This point illustrates that the difference between a brand that waits for Black Friday to see their sales ramp up and one that builds on this date to maintain a consistent cycle lies in data management. In order to continue to reap the benefits of Black Friday weeks after the event, it’s important to nurture your relationship with consumers—something you can’t do unless you show up for them and provide real value.

Traditional data practices are en route to disappearing—and while working on a first-party strategy may feel daunting, that shouldn’t be the case. For most brands, the only thing preventing them from truly regaining control over their data is a matter of priorities. Knowing that Google will block third-party cookies in 2023, there’s still a misconception that developing a first-party data strategy is not urgent, when in fact, it’s never been more relevant. 

Now is the time to invest in modern solutions that provide valuable insights. While planting the seeds of anticipation with marketing campaigns and exclusive sales is essential, there’s as much to be done—if not more—after Black Friday. This year, aim at making data-driven decisions that incentivize consumers to keep coming back for more, and you’ll have the key to a consistent sales cycle.