Ark
Humankind – Digital strategy to drive traffic and engagement with alcohol advice service
2018
Humankind is a charity offering services and support to meet people’s complex health and social needs, helping them to build healthier lives.
We worked with Humankind to overhaul the reporting of their ‘Drink Coach’ alcohol test tool. This involved a full redesign of their analytics setup and development of interactive visual dashboards allowing their clients to explore data in real time.
About DrinkCoach
One of Humankind’s programmes is DrinkCoach, a service which offers advice and tools to track and change people’s drinking. It includes an alcohol test, which is based on the established Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test (AUDIT) standard. In addition to being available to the public, the alcohol test is used by around 25 local authorities as a public health intervention for their populations.
Reporting through Google Analytics and Looker Studio
The team uses data from Google Analytics to report to their clients on the usage of the tool. Historically this had been a largely manual process, involving the export of multiple reports on a monthly basis and a large amount of spreadsheet work. We were commissioned to help them to streamline the process.
We established that the best tool for sharing the data was Looker Studio, which allows for the creation of dashboards that can connect into various relevant services, including Google Analytics and Search Console. These dashboards enabled us to provide data to the local authorities in a real time, visual and more interactive way.
Migration to Google Analytics 4
Initially the reporting approach involved complex manipulation of the available event tracking data using a combination of queries and custom functions to wrangle the data into a suitable format for output. On migration to Google Analytics 4, we completely redesigned the event data structure to make extensive use of data layer variables and custom dimensions. This provided a much more flexible and accurate representation of user behaviour and opened up a range of interactive reporting possibilities.
Dashboard users can now access data on the full pipeline from initial page view through to completion. They can take advantage of sub-regional, risk, age, gender and ethnicity breakdowns and are able see information about follow up actions (e.g. reading more or searching for local services).
We received excellent communication from Bureau throughout our change project and their dedication to problem solving and adapting to challenges is second to none. They optimised our dashboards which resulted in greater accuracy in reporting, which has increased our client satisfaction. I have no hesitation in recommending Bureau to any individual or organisation who requires technical support served with a smile.