About
Website: www.montclairymca.org
Since 1891, the YMCA of Montclair has been committed to caring for individuals and families in New Jersey, with a focus on youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility. They offer a host of programs, including before and after-school child care, summer day camps, teen programs, swim lessons, group exercise classes and more.
Opportunity/Challenge:
Over three months, Whole Whale worked with the YMCA of Montclair to improve their digital analytics tracking, increase visibility and access to their data with a real-time dashboard, and build capacity to use their data to further their online impact.
Big Wins:
- Accurate tracking on all key website interactions that measure success – such as membership signups, class registrations, and donations – aligned to GA4 best practices
- Real-time impact data dashboard that allows YMCA of Montclair to focus on the most essential information from GA4 that can be easily shared with other stakeholders, including growth in membership sign-ups, new class registrations, and dollars raised.
- Team expanded knowledge and skills to conduct ongoing digital marketing analytics work, measure and report on the organization’s digital impact and goal progress, and find and act on relevant data
WHAT WE DID
Analytics
Whole Whale set up a sustainable solution for the YMCA’s website data analytics using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics 4. The process involved four main steps:
- Assessment of current GA4 and GTM accounts and identified areas for improvement
- Alignment with YMCA of Montclair’s goals to make sure key events were being tracked, such as page views, sessions, users, engagement rate, memberships purchased, donations, and more
- Implementation of custom tracking to bridge data gaps and accurately measure impact, including cross-domain tracking on key conversions between the website and Reclique Core platform
- Installation of Microsoft Clarity, a user-friendly behavioral analytics tool that helped the YMCA Montclair gain valuable insights into their website visitors’ behavior
This comprehensive approach allowed the YMCA to better understand and analyze their web traffic, user behavior, and the effectiveness of their online initiatives. This also enables them to discover insights that the team can act on to make even greater progress on their goals.

Dashboards
Whole Whale created a real time Looker Studio dashboard to visualize the most important data in GA4 that indicated progress and change towards YMCA’s goals, as well as a Universal Analytics historical data dashboard ahead of the Universal Analytics data deletion. Highlights include:
- Connecting key events to create a dashboard that would be useful for the YMCA of Montclair team and their stakeholders for ongoing visibility and decision-making
- Connecting CRM fundraising software (Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge) to their primary analytics to increase visibility into priority goals like membership, revenue, and other key KPIs
- Visualizing important activities and user interactions happening on their website, such as top traffic sources, website sessions, average session duration ,transactions, total revenue, and overall engagement rate

- Preserving 10+ years of prior website data from Google’s Universal Analytics ahead of that product’s deprecation in July 2024, allowing key metrics to be accessed via a custom website historical data dashboard

Trainings
We provided custom training, feedback, and ongoing support to the YMCA of Montclair team to build GA4, GTM and Clarity knowledge and analytics capacity. After completing the trainings, the YMCA of Montclair team can confidently:
- Use the GA4 platform and understand its structure, capabilities, settings, and caveats to find the information they need
- Leverage GA4 and Looker Studio to find, measure, report, and act on data that supports digital goals and configure Custom Reports
- Use the GTM platform and create new custom event configurations going forward
- Analyze Microsoft Clarity data to understand how users interact with their website

From the YMCA of Montclair Team:
“From start to finish, we were in excellent hands. We could not have asked for a better experience. Our team and leadership are thrilled to have the analytics and dashboards to make data driven decisions now and in the future for YMCA of Montclair.” – Suzanne Broullon, Executive Director, Marketing and Communications, YMCA of Montclair