Answers to your five questions — and what the data couldn't tell us yet
Your note asked for ProDir analytics, ProDir social, anonymized analytics on key customers like PCU, cross-property correlations, and any GTM-strategy gaps we'd flag. Twelve closed months of GA4 across governancesolutions.ca, professionaldirector.com, and boardconnex.com, plus the LinkedIn ads account and the LinkedIn pages, are enough to answer four of the five directly today. The fifth — companies behind the browsers — is unanswerable without a tracking change, scoped below.
Terms used in the answers below
- GA4 / key event
- Google Analytics 4 is the analytics platform on every site in scope. A "key event" is GA4's term for a conversion — a form submit, a cart view, a sign-up — and only events explicitly flagged as key events show up as conversions in dashboards.
- UTM
- Tags appended to a campaign URL (
utm_source,utm_medium,utm_campaign) that tell GA4 where a click came from. Without them, owned email and outbound links fold into "Direct" and become invisible. - Direct / Referral / Display
- GA4 channel labels. "Direct" = the visitor typed the URL or used a bookmark; "Referral" = arrived from another site (e.g. GSI to ProDir); "Display" = clicked a Google image or banner ad.
- ABM (Account-Based Marketing)
- The practice of targeting and measuring specific named companies (e.g. PCU, Air Canada, Manulife) instead of anonymous individuals. Requires a way to resolve a website visitor's company — GA4 alone cannot do this.
- LinkedIn Insight Tag
- A small tracking pixel that LinkedIn drops on your website. It lets LinkedIn count conversions from paid ads, build retargeting audiences, and show demographics of visitors. Not currently capturing conversions on the three sites in scope.
- RB2B / Leadfeeder
- Third-party tools that turn anonymous website traffic into named companies (or, in some cases, named individuals). Cost: roughly $200–$1,000 USD per month. The fastest path to answer "did PCU visit?".
- User stitching /
user_id - A way of telling GA4 "this visitor on Monday and that visitor on Friday are the same person." Without it, every login session and every device counts as a new user, and cross-site journeys break.
- Search Console
- Google's free search-performance tool. Linking it to GA4 reveals which queries drove organic clicks and at what position. Currently not linked — so the organic-search dimension reads as
(not provided). - ESP / RD Station
- An "Email Service Provider" is the platform used to send marketing emails (open rates, click-through, bounces). RD Station is the ESP whose UTMs we can see arriving at the sites; we have no direct access to the ESP itself.
- Showcase page
- A LinkedIn page format affiliated to a parent company page, used to highlight a specific brand or product (the Professional Director Institute™ page is one). Admin rights are managed separately from the parent.
Direct answers to the five asks
Canadian buyers, US data-center noise, lead intent buried under cart and login forms
21,077 sessions · 210 measured key events · 79.1% Direct
Direct dominates ProDir at 79.1% of sessions but produces only 36.7% of measured key events; Referral converts at the highest rate (3.91%), and the bulk of it is the GSI → ProDir cross-promotion (1,856 sessions, 74 key events). Real lead intent sits at roughly 107 of 1,714 form_submit events — the rest is account-login and cart-flow noise. Roughly half of US-attributed sessions are data-center traffic, not buyers. Sector is not captured on the lead form today; geography reads as Canada / Ontario for real buyers. Full breakdown in §03; first-user vs. session attribution and Direct-leak diagnosis in §09.
Social is not the conversion engine — and the ProDir showcase page is outside our admin
9 of 1,378 key events combined · 0.65%
Two LinkedIn surfaces exist: the Governance Solutions company page (1,177 followers, full Sawi admin) and the Professional Director Institute™ showcase page (120 followers, no Sawi admin — public signals only). Across all social channels, paid plus organic, social produced 9 of 1,378 measured key events (0.65%). Organic reach on the GS page is 2.56% of total impressions — almost everything visible came from paid amplification — and only 4 comments landed in 365 days. The community reads, it does not converse. LinkedIn paid breakdown in §06; organic and demographics in §07.
Not answerable today — GA4 sees browsers, not companies
0 named accounts resolvable in current data
Without CRM linkage or a working LinkedIn Insight Tag, GA4 cannot resolve which companies visit or convert — including PCU, Air Canada, or Manulife. The directional proxy we can offer is the LinkedIn paid sector mix (Senior / Director / CXO / VP / Manager / Owner across IT, Healthcare, Higher Ed, Government, Insurance, Financial Services, Capital Markets, Banking — 95.6% Canadian impressions, 99.7% in-band seniority). The fix to actually answer "did PCU visit?" is scoped in §08 with three options ranked by effort and payoff (RB2B/Leadfeeder, CRM user_id sync, utm_audience per ABM list). Recommended first wave: Option 1 plus Option 3 in parallel.
GSI ↔ ProDir is the live cross-promotion; BoardConnex is islanded; the Community is invisible
1,856 stitched sessions · 1 unstitched property · 0 measured surfaces
GSI and ProDir share the same GA4 property, so cross-site movement is measurable: governancesolutions.ca → professionaldirector.com is the single biggest referral row on ProDir (1,856 sessions, 74 key events, 3.99% CR — the cross-promotion is working as designed). BoardConnex sits on a separate GA4 property with no user_id stitching, so a visitor moving between GSI and BoardConnex appears as two separate users. The Governance Community has no measurable surface in any property in scope — no /community URL, no UTM, no community event. Cross-property analysis in §08; the stitching fix in §10-P1.1; the Community measurement question in §04.
Five tracking conditions bias every number; four data sources are missing from the brief
5 conditions · 4 missing surfaces · ~80% conversion under-count today
Five structural conditions sit underneath every dashboard: form_submit not flagged as a key event on GSI or ProDir; UTM-less owned email and LinkedIn outreach folding into Direct invisibly; a duplicated cart_view stream reporting only ~33% of GSI purchase intent; the LinkedIn Insight Tag capturing 0 conversions across $861 USD of paid spend; BoardConnex with 0 key events configured against 1,494 sessions. Four data surfaces never came up in the original brief but matter for GTM — email-marketing analytics (RD Station signals exist, no ESP visibility), podcast analytics (3,624 pageviews on the podcast page, 0 listen events), Paid Search (96 sessions in 12 months — essentially untested), and Search Console linkage to GA4 (not connected, so organic queries read as (not provided)). Diagnosis in §09; ranked roadmap with effort estimates in §10 and §10 — Areas missing from the original brief.
What to fix first to make the unanswerable answerable
- Configure key events. Page-scoped
form_submiton ProDir and GSI, the duplicatedcart_viewon the GSI/ProDir property, and the BoardConnex marketing site. Effort: 1.5–2 days. Effect: every GA4 dashboard starts reporting real conversion volume — today they undercount by roughly 80%. §10-P0.1 to P0.3. - Wire the LinkedIn Insight Tag and define conversion events. Verify the tag is on all three domains, then create the conversions in Campaign Manager. Effort: 1–2 days. Effect: the $861 USD already spent (and any future LinkedIn investment) becomes measurable, and ABM-list visitors become resolvable. §10-P0.4.
- Roll out a UTM standard. Document the template, audit existing owned-email and paid-social UTMs, enforce across the campaign team. Effort: 1.5 days plus ongoing discipline. Effect: Direct's share drops toward 60% as owned-campaign traffic gets correctly attributed; LinkedIn paid stops dispersing across
linkedin.com / referral. §10-P1.2.
Five findings worth flagging
Beyond the five direct answers above, five findings reshape how the rest of the deck reads. Each links to the deeper section.
Display is the conversion engine on GSI
5,754 sessions · 497 key events · 8.64% CR
Display generates more measured key events than Direct from one-eleventh the sessions. The 2026/01 Governance Professionals Certificate Program campaign alone produced 497 key events on a single landing page. The shift into Display is also the largest positive year-over-year channel move among major channels (+412%). See §04.
Tracking gaps mask most conversion intent
5,389 form submits, 0 flagged as key events
form_submit is not flagged as a key event on GSI or ProDir; the LinkedIn Insight Tag captures 0 conversions across $861 of paid spend; BoardConnex has 0 key events configured across 1,494 sessions; cart_view reports only ~33% of actual purchase intent on GSI. The fixes are mechanical and ranked in §09 and §10.
Audience is well-targeted, blind at the company level
95.6% Canadian impressions · 99.7% in-band seniority
LinkedIn paid reaches the right people — Senior, Director, CXO, VP, Manager, and Owner across IT, Healthcare, Higher Ed, Government, Insurance, Financial Services, Capital Markets, and Banking. What we cannot answer today: which companies are visiting and converting. ABM tracking options are scoped in §08.
Direct dominance is partly real, partly a leak
79.1% on ProDir · 74.6% on GSI
Brand awareness genuinely drives a large share of Direct (visitors who know the URL or have it bookmarked). But UTM-less owned email and LinkedIn outreach also fold into Direct invisibly. A UTM standard should drop the Direct share toward 60% within 90 days. See §10-P1.
Two unscoped brand sites are firing the production tag
FinancialLiteracyCheck: 32 sessions · 8 key events · 25% CR
browngovernance.com and financialliteracycheck.com were not in the original SCAN brief but appear on the GSI/ProDir GA4 property. FinancialLiteracyCheck's 25% CR is small in absolute terms but striking. Worth a quick decision in §11 — bring into scope, or retire the tag.