You will be surprised to know that, most of the analytics implementations gets worse after the site redesign is launched because, the kind of passion and aggressiveness brands showed towards analytics implementation during site launch, were not existing during Site Redesign.

During Site Redesigns, the focus is always on delivering a better user experience to the new and returning visitors, and create stickiness on the website so that, conversion can be improved but, for some reason, both retailers and brands forget to optimize their analytics implementation to measure the impact of site redesign, and when asked why is that? Following 3 justifications came in to highlight:

• Our Site Redesign was scheduled to launch in the 1st week of 4th Quarter, which is the beginning of code freeze, and we didn’t have enough time and budget to include analytics in to the scope of the project.
• We were in an impression that, our ecommerce service provider would take care of it because, it’s a common sense. You cannot publish changes to the website without analytics component baked in to it.
• As per the ecommerce service provider, our client never asked for analytics code optimization so; we simply excluded from the scope and secondly, even if we would have included, we would not have made this deadline.

All the above justifications are just ridiculous. It’s a complete failure of communication process between Brand and the Ecommerce Service Provider. So; the bottom-line is, “Any change which impacts the visitor behaviour, should be measurable”.

Here are some tips, we would like to share with both Brands and Ecommerce Service Providers, which would help them preparing for smart Site Redesigns:

First, let’s start with a question, what a typical site redesign may comprise of and why the need arises?

Here are some real life scenarios: -

Over the last 6 months, you have been experiencing a consistent spike in the Cart Abandonment rate on your website. The industry average is 56.7% in your vertical while; you are experiencing 85% on your website. Along with this, your analyst found a consistently high fallout rate from the Payment Page during checkout process. To get better insight on this issue, you decided to go for a Usability Test. While conducting this test with 500 Users from different demographics and socio-economic conditions, following facts came in to picture:

• Visitors were expecting size and colour update on the shopping cart page.
• Visitors were feeling intimidating when they saw, 2 checkout buttons on the cart page saying, “Proceed to Secured Checkout” and “Google Checkout”
• When they went to Google Checkout window, they didn’t know what login to use?
• Taxes and Shipping on the big ticket items were ridiculously high.
• Taxes and Shipping on the big ticket items were ridiculously high.
• Site Logo on the Top Left hand side was not hyperlinked, as a result of which, visitors were using browser back button on the checkout pages.
• Visitors were expecting more payment methods on the Payment Page such as PayPal and Bill Me Later for the big ticket items.

Similarly, here are some other problematic areas which require Site Redesign:

• Existing store taxonomy resulting in higher exit rate from the Category and Shop Pages.
• Absence of Guided Navigation and Recommendations on the Search Results page causing higher bounce and exit rate.
• Online visitors expect interactive Product displays on the Product Page.
• Absence of Reviews and Ratings feature on the website resulting in poor Product to Cart conversion rate.
• Brand Pages are not able to generate emotional connection with the online visitors.
• Visitors are expecting interactive and fun-filled experience while configuring a product.
• Visitors are expecting recommended and personalized merchandise on key landing pages of the website.

Now, once you have outlined what areas on the website need to be optimized, the next step is to create a measurable optimization plan. Here are some tips:

• First are foremost, define the relevant business goals and success metrics against each change item.
• Secondly, create a blueprint of the expected report layout, and how the data would be presented and shared with the target audience.
• Thirdly, share the above business goals, metrics and anticipated report layout with rest of the members in the ecommerce team, and get their perspective.
• Fourthly, create the requirements document including business goals, metrics and expected report layouts and share with the project team.
• Fifthly, arrange a meeting with the project team including your web analyst and technical analytics engineer, and get their perspective on the project goals, success metrics and expected report layout.
• Sixthly, ask your project team to provide estimates for the redesign project including analytics and specifically mention, how many project hours are getting allocated towards analytics implementation? This is very important because, often times you would find analytics hours are way out of limit, and here are the 3 most common reasons:
  • Project team has never done any analytics implementation in the past.
  • Project team has done couple of implementations in the past but, have not gain efficiency as yet.
  • Project team doesn’t know how to upgrade or optimize the existing tags on the website and how the reports need to be configured.
• Last but not the least, review and optimize those estimates if, things are going beyond the budget. Often times, we have come across a scenario where, we had to cut down our analytics requirements to bare minimum so that, we have atleast 1 success metric available against each feature.

Remember, our goal is to measure the impact of every change which is going to influence the visitor behaviour and bring them closer to the conversion path. We are not in the ecommerce business to hoard the data but, to achieve our quarterly and yearly goals.