Analytics Best Practices Guide: Redesign

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The redesign of a single website can have a major impact from an analytical point of view and must be prepared, evaluated and addressed from several aspects.The goal of this article is to detail how your website or brand can 1) prepare, 2) assess, and 3) act on what is needed for a redesign from an analytical perspective. These steps must be repeated for each site being redesigned (individually per property).Making the Google Analytics (GA) Ownership Decision When redesigning a website, the choice to keep a current GA property or migrate to a brand new property is an important decision (and should be one of the very first) made when preparing for relaunch.There are two options:Retain the same GA properties after the redesign, maintaining a single continuous ownership of GA data for each site.Create new GA properties for each site, breaking down pre- and post-redesign data for each.pasted image 0 below you will find recommendations from the Seer Analytics teams for making the GA ownership decision.Option 1: Maintain Properties This is the default preferred option, except in very specific cases. The reasons for keeping things in the same ownership are as follows: Advantages Keeps all data in one location, allowing historical comparisons Acheter une base de données in one area.Eliminates the work in GTM of having to completely move all page views and event tracking to new properties.Maintains all events and goal tracking under one domain, assuming the site(s) will operate largely similar before and after the redesign (basically the same business goals, user actions, etc.) Allows for easier visualization of data, using one data source (i.e. view under a property) will inherently be easier than trying to combine two data sources globally No need to change user management or data access.Any links to additional domains (GS, Ad Words, etc.) will not need to be changed.pasted image 0 6Any type of custom dimension or property-level custom metric will be retained.pasted image 0 3All view parameters can be carried forward (site search, query parameters, bot exclusion, etc.).All content groupings and filters will be transferred.All segments, annotations, custom alerts, and scheduled reports will also carry over.pasted image 0 14th inconvenient significant sections of the site change, we won't have direct 1:1 comparisons in the data Will need to do a full reassessment of targets set for all areas when relaunching - could start from scratch in new ownership Can't look at new site performance in isolation without separating period from date range only after redesign In the end, the pros of this option far outweigh the cons, and below I'll describe the edge cases where it makes sense to create new GA properties.Option 2: Create new GA properties There are very specific cases where it makes sense to start from scratch with brand new GA properties. Here are the situations where creating a new GA property makes sense after the redesign: