A web analyst’s technical checklist for (re)launching a website

When (re)launching a website, every department of a company focuses on 2 big objectives:

• How not to loose what we have gained so far
• How to make things better than before

Everybody is planing and working like crazy for the above objectives, then the new website gets launched and suddenly, all eyes are on you: the web analyst. After all, who else can answer those questions better than you?

It’s not a very good idea to wait till everything finishes and get the tracking going at the end… nope, not wise at all. You’d rather make sure you will be able to answer the above questions in detail and some more. Based on a project we have recently worked on, here’s our web analyst’s technical checklist for (re)launching a website:

Prepare for (advanced) web analytics

Start by finding out the expectations for the website of the other departments. Work with the dev team from day one to make sure that your web analytics tool will be able to report on the established KPIs.

Tip: Number one priority for the projects we worked on was to be sure that we can track both micro and macro conversions.

We use the following checklist:

• The back-end allows for global tracking settings. This way you make sure that each page has the tracking code placed properly.
• The global tracking can be overwritten on specific pages of the website directly from the backend
• All actions on the website have designated Thank You pages (makes conversions tracking a breeze)
• Error pages are being tracked as well (404, 503, etc.)
• Outgoing and download links can be tagged manually and/or automatically
• eCommerce data is accessible through JavaScript (we usually request a JS array containing the eCommerce data)
• Custom Variable data is available through JavaScript arrays (mostly used by advanced solutions like Omniture or WebTrends)

When all implementations are finished, use a tool like WASP to check that everything works like it is supposed to. The website should not go live unless everything is tracked accordingly. Having all that in place will offer an infrastructure that will make future tracking implementations easy.

Things don’t stop here though. Your job is not only to analyze but rather to help improve. So, the next step is to…

Prepare for A/B testing

Sooner or later, if you haven’t already, you are going to start A/B testing. Checkout the main tools out there for their technical requirements in order to do A/B or multivariate testing and see if the new platform will be able to handle them. Get your specs to the dev team before the work gets started as after might be too late. In case you will go with Google Website Optimizer, you will need the following:

• The possibility to add JavaScript snippets to any page’s footer and header;
• The possibility to add invalid JavaScript to the body of any page;
• The possibility to add JavaScript codes to Thank You pages or instances.

Have this and you’ll be able to roll out any A/B testing campaigns in minutes. Make no mistake about it: with any website redesign testing ideas pour in like nothing you’ve seen before.

Prepare for personalization

This is something that very few people actually prepare for. A/B testing is not the only method out there for increasing conversion rates. Personalizing the experience for different segments of traffic and behavioral targeting have great results for boosting up conversions. So, what are the basic things you can do for having a website platform that can customize itself based on user behavior:

• Make a list of the possible segments of traffic you might consider for targeting
• Ask your developers to create a framework in which you can populate cookies with data specific to those segments

What is important is just to have the framework in place… no need to populate the cookies with anything for now. However, when you will want to start behavioral targeting campaigns you should be able to do it easy and fast.

Ok, this is what we have been using so far. What about you. What do you have in your checklist for (re)launching a website?

Other great resources on the web about website (re)launch checklists, not necessarily related to analytics:

• Website Prelaunch Checklist
• The Ultimate Website Launch Checklist
• Checklist before (re)launching a website for the win!