Why analytics should be one of the first things considered when launching a new site…

By: Andrew Stockwell | May 15th, 2009

When a new site launch is fully underway your stress levels are at an absolute maximum. Several things we know for sure are going to happen which will amplify this even further; business requirements will probably change, the content management systems won’t do exactly what you thought it would, your technical lead will invariably go off with a long term illness and in all probability your budget will run out far quicker than you thought. People may ask; why would you make this period even more painful by trying to focus additional time, effort and resources on the implementation of web analytics? The simple answer is web analytics will be your best friend, your success barometer, your truth teller and your provider of the gauge of success through the days/weeks/months after the launch.

I’ve been involved with many large website implementations over the years and one thing I’ve noticed that separates the experienced website launch gurus from the first time web release newbies is that the guru will have web analytics in step 1.001 of the first set of release items and the newbie will have it as an afterthought. No doubt the newbie is thinking “once the main release is out of the way and we’re happy everything is working, we can now start implementing analytics”. But they couldn’t be more wrong to leave it till after the launch. Even with a basic web analytics package, by implementing it from the start you are provided with many insights related to a site launch, many of which cannot be gauged with transactional databases or performance monitoring. A few are listed below:

Website visits by day through the launch period to monitor traffic
Topline conversion of the website
Process conversion
Bounce rate of key landing pages
Day parting of analysis to look at load during peaks
Natural search performance during the changeover (how does Google like the site?)

With a more advanced web analytics package, looking at people rather than just cookies, you can gain additional insights to help you answer the following crucial questions about your website users:

Are my best customers still using the site?
Is customer spend/value consistent?
Is the new expensive to maintain content attracting high value customers?
How engaged are customers and prospects since the launch?
How many errors are being seen and are they fatal to the visit?
How are my new natural search priorities performing across multiple visits?

Just by taking these few examples we can see very quickly how the new site is performing, how customers are engaging with it and what we need to do to spot any issues that need rectifying.

When you have been though this process once and have generated these sorts of insights which have in turn proved the success of the launch (or generated actions to make successful changes to a new site) you will never again have analytics anywhere outside of step 1.001 of the first set of release items….

I’m keen to hear any experiences you have had with web analytics or any recommended insights you have unearthed during a new site launch. Email me at blog@redeye.com.

Andy Stockwell, Senior Account Director, RedEye