Helping Google manage thousands of marketing platforms

Challenge

Web Health Dashboard was a tool created for Google’s marketing team for cataloging and monitoring all Google marketing websites. The purpose of WHD was to scan websites and provide insights to inform continual optimizations – ensuring a consistent Google ecosystem experience adhering to the latest Google brand guidelines.

Before rolling out Web Health Dashboard, Google’s website ecosystem was fragmented. Google’s internal engineering leadership team did not have an effective method for ensuring the quality of the thousands of websites the company’s various marketing teams released over the years. With a multitude of new website requirements rolling out every year, Google needed to ensure that each site was assigned a responsible owner who could access a tool to identify and address issues and ensure all requirements were being met.

Beyond was tasked with designing and building a prototype to demonstrate the core functionalities of the Web Health Dashboard. This prototype team quickly evolved into a full product strategy, design and development team responsible for building and maintaining the tool.

Solutions

Beyond provided solution design in the form of technical design documentation, system architecture diagrams, schema maps, UX flows and data maps to ensure that Web Health Dashboard could provide all of the necessary functionality in a format that was easily consumable by Google’s product marketing managers.

We developed a powerful and easy-to-use tool that could more efficiently track bugs, keep content fresh and up-to-date, and provide workflows to improve performance, accessibility, speed and discovery. By taking advantage of Google Cloud services like AppEngine, DataStore, BigQuery, Cloud Endpoints and Cloud Scheduler, Beyond’s engineering team was able to develop a system to scan Google’s 4,000+ sites using tools like PageSpeed Insights and extract important data that was then visualized on the Web Health Dashboard.

Technologies

During the engagement, we leveraged Google Cloud, including:

• Compute
• App Engine
• BigQuery
• DataStore
• DataFlow
• Cloud Storage
• Cloud Endpoints

Impact

After introducing Web Health Dashboard, Google was able to depreciate hundreds of old websites, increase the levels of accessibility and performance across their website portfolio, eliminate thousands of outstanding website errors and improve the overall alignment of Google’s public-facing sites with the company’s strict technical and brand design guidelines. WHD was championed by Google’s Brand Studio team for several years before being phased out and replaced with alternative tracking tools.

Within just six months of launch, we’ve been able to deprecate a significant number of sites without fresh content. This has resulted in the most significant decreases in total code volume on the Google.com domain landscape in years, which was precisely the purpose of the tool.

‍Googler

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