How to Implement Measurement Infrastructure into Your Website Redesign

In order to launch a successful website redesign, implementing a proper measurement infrastructure is crucial. Doing so will allow your brand to accurately see the results of your redesign.

When Rise works with clients on a website development process, it is important that we are aligned on what they are trying to achieve with this investment. Once we have an understanding of their goals, we will check to see if their current website is properly tracking these metrics.

In a recent virtual event, Jean Zhang, VP of Customer Experience, goes over some key questions to ask yourself when looking to see if your measurement infrastructure is properly configured:

• Who are my users and how are they interacting with my site? Answering this question can help you narrow down what measurements you want to track once your redesigned website is launched.
• Are user interactions happening as intended per business goals? And are these interactions being properly tracked? This consideration is something that Rise often finds being amiss when starting new work with our clients.
• Where are the friction points for my users? How can you solve them? When investing your time and money into a website redesign it is important that the website remain on a forward trajectory after the launch.

Zhang continued to discuss some common pitfalls that Rise finds when looking at a client’s analytics for the first time:

• A high bounce rate on content-heavy pages: Many brands will spend a lot of time making some great resources for their target audience, and then they will drive a lot of traffic to those pages using digital media. One thing that is unique about these pages is that oftentimes you will have users land on the page, read the content, and then leave. If proper measurement infrastructure is not implemented, that can sometimes count as a bounce, which is not the same as a user landing on your page and then immediately leaving. In this scenario, we recommend implementing scroll tracking. Our usual interaction threshold is 75%, meaning that if a user views 75% or more the page it is counted as an interaction rather than a bounce rate. This threshold will provide a clear and accurate view into how users are engaging with your content.
• iFrame tracking: iFrame is another major pain point that many brands face. The issue occurs when we start to integrate third party technology within a website. There is usually a lack of communication between the actual third party and measurement system, resulting in a loss of data. In this scenario Rise recommends implementing a GTM container to help tracking and closing that loop.
• Cross domain tracking: This last common pitfall is more specific to clients that have multiple domains. Cross domain tracking will become more of an issue as a user starts to navigate between multiple pages. For example, a client could have a career site that is on a separate domain, but is commonly linked in their ecosystem of websites. In this case, a user going between the main domain and the career domain will be counted as two separate users and sessions. Therefore, it is crucial to set up your cross domain set up correctly, so you can accurately record that referral traffic.

To implement a proper measurement infrastructure in your website development process, evaluating your current website and learning how to avoid common pitfalls is a great place to start. Taking these steps will help your website accurately measure metrics that are crucial to the success of your business. Reach out to Rise for more information on how your brand can create a measurement infrastructure for a successful website redesign launch.