How to have your analytics ready for peak times

For many purpose-driven organisations, the bulk of the year's success hinges on a handful of critical days. Charities often receive the majority of their annual donations in the run-up to Christmas. Universities see application surges during clearing. Museums experience visitor spikes around blockbuster exhibitions or school holidays. Some orgs are even more peak dependant, revolving around a single huge event. Charities like Comic Relief, Booker Prizes or Children in Need spent their whole year preparing for the ‘big event’. These peak periods can make or break your year. 

Yet sometimes organisations scramble to understand what's happening on their website precisely when they have the least time to do so. The reality is stark: you can't track what you don't have tags to measure, and you can't retroactively capture data. If your analytics aren't properly configured before your peak arrives, you'll be flying blind at the worst possible moment.

Getting your analytics ready in advance serves two essential purposes. First, it establishes a baseline so you can meaningfully compare performance. Second, it confirms that everything is tracking correctly before it really matters. This article sets out how to prepare your tracking and dashboards so you're ready to act when the pressure is on. 

Analytics infrastructure isn't something you can throw together at the last minute.  

Google Tag Manager configurations, custom events, and dashboards all require testing and refinement. Making changes to your tracking setup on the day of your peak is risky. If something goes wrong, you'll lose the very data you're trying to capture. Worse still, you'll have compromised your baseline for next year.

During short peak periods, your digital team will be under enormous pressure. The last thing anyone needs is to be manually pulling reports or troubleshooting broken tracking when they should be responding to what the data is telling them. That’s why it makes sense to invest in getting your analytics ready well ahead of the peak.  

Start by having a proper conversation with your stakeholders about what they will need to know during the peak period. It’s best to consult as widely as possible to cover all bases. You don’t want to be de-railed by having someone in an over-looked part of the organisation suddenly say they need something tracking a few days before the big event.  

Senior leadership might want a top-level view of how the organisation is performing against targets. Marketing teams might need granular data on which campaigns are driving traffic. Operations teams might need real-time information to allocate resources.

Work backwards from these needs. What questions do people need answered? What decisions will they be making? A university clearing team might need to know: which course pages are attracting the most interest, which are struggling, how many people are clicking 'Apply Now', and how does today compare to the same day last year?  

A charity might need to know: how many donations have come in today, what's the average donation amount, and which channels are performing best?

Once you've established what you need to know, you can determine what events need tracking. This might include clicks on key calls to action like 'Donate Now' or 'Apply Now', scroll depth on important pages, time spent on content, or interactions with specific features like course finders or donation calculators. All of this needs to be configured in Google Tag Manager and tested thoroughly before your peak period begins.  

A well-designed dashboard is your control centre during peak periods. It should give everyone a single, clear view of what's happening without requiring anyone to dig through raw data or run manual reports. This is especially important when your team is stretched thin and needs to make quick decisions.

Consider whether people need live data. For some peaks, hour-by-hour updates are essential. A university clearing team might need to see how enquiries are trending throughout the day so they can adjust staffing or promotional activity in real time. For other peaks, daily updates might be sufficient. Build this requirement into your dashboard from the start.

Year-on-year comparisons are particularly valuable, but they require careful thought. Your peak day this year might not fall exactly 365 days after last year's peak. Clearing dates shift slightly each year. Christmas falls on different days of the week. Events tied to the lunar calendar, like Easter or Eid, move around significantly. You need to work out in advance when your actual peak was last year, so you're comparing like with like—peak day with peak day, not arbitrary calendar dates.

Our recommendation is to start with an MVP and refine: Build a first-pass dashboard, test it with stakeholders, and see if it gives the teams the information they need. You can then alter it based on their feedback.   

We worked with Kingston University to prepare their analytics for the clearing period, starting the conversation two months before clearing opened. This lead time was crucial—it gave us space to understand their needs properly, build a custom dashboard, and refine it based on their feedback.

The dashboard was designed to answer the questions their team would be asking in the heat of clearing. It showed how they were performing compared to the same day of clearing last year, so they were comparing peak with peak. It also showed performance compared to the previous day, helping them spot trends as clearing progressed.

The team wanted visibility on which course pages were attracting the most traffic and, crucially, which were struggling. The dashboard tracked 'Apply Now' clicks and 'Call Us Now' clicks, providing a good indicator of genuine applicant interest even though the final conversion happened on the UCAS system.

The feedback from Kingston was extremely positive. Having everything in one place, updated in real time, meant their team could make quick decisions at a crucial time without getting bogged down in data wrangling. 

Dashboards should drive decisions, not just display data. Before you build anything, consider how it fits into your broader success framework. What does success look like for your organisation during peak periods? What are the metrics that matter, and what actions will you take based on what they tell you?

A dashboard that shows donation numbers in real time is useful, but it's even more useful if your team knows in advance what thresholds trigger specific actions. If donations are tracking below target by midday, what do you do? If a particular course page is underperforming during clearing, who needs to know and what options do they have? Building these decision points into your planning ensures the dashboard drives performance rather than just providing interesting information. 

Well before your peak period, work backwards from the decisions you'll need to make. Determine what data you need to support those decisions, configure your tracking to capture it, build dashboards that present the information clearly, and test everything thoroughly before the pressure hits.

The investment in preparation pays dividends when your peak arrives. Instead of scrambling to understand what's happening, your team can focus on responding to what the data tells them.  

If you'd like help preparing your analytics for peak periods, our performance analysts can put the tracking and dashboards in place so you're ready when it matters most. Get in touch—we'd love to help.