How do you measure the impact of your new website launch? Is it possible to quantify a digital aesthetic? While it’s traditionally difficult to put an exact ROI on a new website launch, there are a number of digital metrics that can be used to paint a convincing picture, even alongside your other marketing initiatives.
Here are 10 metrics to monitor before and after your website launch.
Record Your Baseline
Before you start on your website redesign project, pull reports from the past six months to see trends and each of your marketing campaign’s impact.
This data should go beyond Google Analytics. also look into your Google Search Console, social media accounts, email subscription rates, site speed, and CRM data.
#1 Traffic From Organic
In theory, a new website won’t increase or decrease most segments of your traffic overnight, with the exception being organic traffic.
A new website should follow an improved sitemap strategy, have optimized content, and be built for mobile-friendliness/speed. Search engines will need to recrawl and index your new content, so you might experience an organic traffic dip in the weeks immediately following your launch. But once indexing is over, your organic traffic should increase compared to pre-launch.
Tip: A common error is not implementing 301 redirects from outdated content. Be sure to do this before launch or you may notice this metric decrease over the long run.
#2 Bounce Rate
With new and improved user experience, you should expect your bounce rate to decrease. while there isn’t a hard and fast rule around bounce rates, aim for a 5-10% decrease on average, measured for six months post-launch.
#3 Average Time on Site/Page
Bounce rate and time on site go hand in hand. We hope that our new site launch is more engaging and impressive than the old, resulting in users spending more time on your website.
While you should analyze your website as a whole, we recommend drilling down to your top landing pages too. Now that these landing pages are improved (and medium/source is constant) you can see if things like bounce rates and average time on page are improving after launch.
#4 Pages/Session
Pages per session (alongside the previous two) can give you a well-rounded look at engagement across your new website. Pages/session success will likely look different depending on your website strategy.
If your website goal was to simplify and consolidate content and the customer journey, you’ll want pages/session to actually go down rather than up. To get a better picture of success as it relates to pages/session, analyze it alongside conversions.
#5 Email Subscription Rate
If you refreshed your content and strategized CTAs (as is best practice), we hope that your qualified users are more interested in engaging with you in their inbox. This is especially true if your web design project utilizes specialty call outs, opt-ins, pop-ups, or offers.
#6 Site Load Time
A new site should be developed with the latest and fastest best practices. Things like optimized images, clean code, limited third-party scripts, and cached assets should all be discussed with your web design agency before launch. Otherwise, your site speed may decrease, which can damage traffic, bounce rates, and brand loyalty. For site speed tests, we enjoy Pingdom.
#7 Micro Conversions
Micro conversions can give you insight into your middle of funnel traffic and how they are interacting with your site. These microconversions may include:
- Time on site (1+ minutes, for example)
- Pages/ session (3+ pages)
- Resource downloads
- Video plays
- Email subscriptions
- “Contact Us” pageview
- “Add to cart” event
- Resource downloads
#8 Conversions
Then, of course, you’ll want to look at your big, fat macro conversions. Things like purchases, contact form submissions, and whatever else is considered a conversion for you. Since these are the things that actually make your company money, monitoring these for trends pre and post-launch is essential if you’re trying to determine ROI on your website launch project.
#9 Conversion Rate
Analyze both your micro and macro conversion rates to see whether both went up, only one went up, or they went down. Remember that many factors can impact these rates. For example, a drastic increase in organic traffic may actually lower your conversion rates, even if your conversions are up on the whole.
# 10 Customer Feedback
Yep, the final metric we highly recommend analyzing isn’t a metric at all! We think you should ask your stakeholders and clients what they think about the site. Getting some documented feedback about your new site design can be leveraged when analyzing the success and ROI of a new website. Because there will always be an element to any digital initiative that’s impossible to monetize. Rather than denying it, embrace it with some old fashioned opinions.
For a website that can help you achieve your digital marketing goals and targeted metrics, contact Zenman Web Design Agency.
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