Revisiting our four-part approach to enterprise redesign, you’re at Phase 4, which means you’re ready to release your new site out into the world and start assessing its performance, while making ongoing adjustments as needed. Here, we take a look at some important long-term considerations and measures that you can put in place now to ensure that your site launches smoothly and scales optimally into the future.

PHASE 4: Measure & Optimize

WHAT IT INCLUDES:

✓ SEO: on-page
✓ SEO: off-page
✓ SEO: technical
✓ Analytics customization & reporting
✓ Marketing technology/personalization/sequencing
✓ Ongoing SEO and content strategy
✓ Ongoing ad campaigns (e.g., PPC/social)
✓ Ongoing technical support

Take stock of current metrics, KPIs, and goal funnels so you can measure the success of your new site after launch.

As you prepare to launch your enterprise redesign, you’ll need to identify what you need to track, define how you’re going to measure success, and establish goals for the future. A few important things to keep in mind:

If you don’t already have an established analytics and optimization process, this is the time to start.

Goal Setting: KPIs and OKRs

Every initiative needs identified metrics that can be used to measure success. For a large-scale website redesign, there are a wide variety of metrics — page views, session duration, goal completions, and bounce rates, just to name a few — and any number of different tools that are used for measuring and reporting.

But before you even begin, you have to understand your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and your Outcomes and Key Results (OKRs). Let’s talk about each.

Website KPIs You Should Track

⇨ Acquisition: Where are users coming from when they land on your site?
You’ll need visibility into where your traffic comes from. Are you getting traffic from your social media account? Mostly organic search? Paid ads?

Data about acquisition is extremely important in informing where you should invest time and energy — but it shouldn’t be assessed in a vacuum. If most of the traffic from organic search fails to convert, it might not be as valuable as it looks on the acquisition report. Which brings us to our next metric:

⇨ Session behavior: What do visitors do when they reach your site? 
Are visitors engaging with your content, or do they immediately “bounce” from the site having not actually gotten what they came for? Or, maybe your content is highly relevant to a set of users that will never actually become leads? For example: A software consultancy with detailed technical articles that help other developers, but don’t resonate with their client base. In that case, it would probably be best to add additional content into the mix (the technical content should almost certainly still remain for the sake of E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust).

⇨ Total Traffic/Page Views
This is probably the most common metric in website analytics, but it’s also the easiest to overvalue. Page views are only valuable if they are relevant to your conversion goals. For example: you may have some content that attracts extra attention through organic search, but if that content is not relevant to the site’s overall conversion funnel, looking at overall traffic and page views offers little insight into performance or conversion optimization.

⇨ Conversions/lead generation: How many visitors completed the action you wanted them to take?
Page views are likely only valuable if they generate leads. If an increase in page views doesn’t correlate with an increase in conversion, your site is likely suffering from user experience or content strategy deficiencies.

⇨ Page speed and load time: How long does it take for your site to load? 
Google Core Vitals performance metrics are used to influence your search positioning. If your site is slow, your bounce rate — the number of people leaving your site before meaningfully interacting with it — will increase significantly. The site will also lose search positioning to faster competitors.

OKRs You Should Watch

The KPIs noted above are an important step in assessing the success of your website, but remember that they are only indicators. In isolation, the data can’t tell you what those goals should be or whether you’re actually meeting them.

This is where OKRs – Objectives and Key Results – come into play.

Notice how the key results are tied directly to your key performance indicators above, but the OKRs describe specific differences between where you are now and where you want to be

Final Thoughts to Keep in Mind

No matter how successful your project is in the end, launch is not the time to move on to other tasks while letting the site sit idle until the next redesign. On the contrary, it’s the time to get serious about analytics, automation, advertising, and conversion goals. You’ll need to:

• Establish baseline technical support and updates to keep the site running
• Measure and report on effectiveness of PPC and social ads
• Measure and report on search positioning/SEO
• Add new content to keep the site fresh, align with industry trends, promote thought leadership, and optimize search positioning by maintaining E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness)
• Optimize landing pages to continually impact conversion

How Eastern Standard Can Help

Enterprise website redesign projects are massive undertakings that take a significant level of expertise to manage effectively. If you need help better understanding any of the concepts presented here, or would like to discuss the specific needs of your own organization, please reach out to start a conversation today.

Don’t Miss the Rest of the Digital Transformation Series

Part 1: Introduction to Enterprise Website Redesign
Part 2: Planning, Brand Alignment & Research: The Starting Points for Successful Enterprise Website Redesign
Part 3: Enterprise Website Redesign: Tips for a Seamless Design-Build Process