Future-ready analytics across a leading retail portfolio

The client

Frasers Group

Frasers Group began in 1982 as a single sports shop opened by Mike Ashley in Maidenhead. Over four decades that one store grew into Sports Direct and then, through the 2018 acquisition of House of Fraser and a renaming in 2019, into Frasers Group: one of Britain's largest retail businesses, spanning Sports Direct, FLANNELS, House of Fraser, USC, Jack Wills, GAME and Evans Cycles, headquartered in Shirebrook, twenty minutes from our own office.

The group trades across every price point in British retail, from value sportswear to luxury fashion through FLANNELS, guided by its operating principle, Think Without Limits. That breadth is exactly what made its measurement challenge so distinctive: dozens of brands, more than fifty websites, and one need for a single trustworthy view of the customer.

The challenge

A powerhouse of British retail, Frasers Group operates a diverse brand portfolio including Sports Direct, Flannels, USC, and Jack Wills. Its core value of 'Think Without Limits' encourages boldness, innovation and exploring new retail formats. This strategy is perfectly embodied by the group's analytics transformation.

Between 2020–2022, with Google's GA4 deadline approaching, the business needed to replace a fragmented, unreliable Universal Analytics setup with a futureproof measurement framework. Dozens of sites were running on inconsistent dataLayer formats, with no unified tracking logic, limiting confidence in reporting and insight generation.

Our approach

The strategy encompassed an end-to-end transformation, establishing enterprise-grade data foundations to improve clarity, compliance, and ROI. Rather than treating GA4 as a mandatory migration, we approached it as an opportunity to rethink measurement across the entire portfolio.

We standardised tracking across more than 50 brand websites, consolidating three conflicting dataLayer structures into a single, event-driven framework. This enabled advanced event and parameter schemas to support detailed analysis across product discovery, conversion, user behaviour, and campaign attribution.

Multiple GA4 properties were implemented via Google Tag Manager and Twilio Segment CDP to maximise visibility across the full customer journey. These data streams fed directly into Looker Studio dashboards, tailored to the needs of trading, marketing, and executive stakeholders.

Alongside technical delivery, we led GA4 adoption training for internal teams and agency partners, driving confidence, consistency and a data-first culture across the business. Looker Studio engagement increased, demonstrating stronger adoption and greater trust in analytics across the business.