Launching your new website is an exciting process and an important step that comes with new opportunities for your business. However, for paid media managers, website migrations present a number of challenges that can quickly go off-track if not planned for or dealt with properly.
While your SEO team is checking over metadata and your developers are resolving technical issues, the role of paid media managers is to ensure their finely tuned ads aren’t sending users to 404 pages. The goal is to ensure a seamless transition, minimising performance disruption and keeping reporting accurate.
That’s a lot to keep running smoothly. As experts in paid media management both pre and post-website migration, we’ve put together this helpful guide of processes and red flags to consider when your new site goes live.
Pre-migration: A quick prep-list
Before we get into post-migration checks, it’s important to ensure a migration goes through at all. As your website flips over to a new version, there are a number of essentials that need to be covered:
- Update ad URLs: Swap in any new destination URLs across your campaigns
- Check your tracking: Make sure all tags and pixels are in place and firing on key pages
- Review conversion goals: Confirm you’re still capturing leads, purchases, or downloads accurately to avoid reporting discrepancies
- Consider audience lists: Make sure your lists aren’t tied to URLs that are about to disappear
- Plan for launch day: Consider pausing high-spend campaigns during the migration window
This crucial preparation is designed to keep reporting seamless and genuinely reflective of your campaign performance, avoiding any sudden dips in traffic and conversions. Once these tasks have been ticked off, you’re on a solid ground to go live. However, this next step in the process is where you need to stay sharp and be fully aware of red flags….
Post-Migration: What paid media managers should look for
With your migration out of the way and your brand new website ready to go, the next phase of the process focuses closely on monitoring campaign performance and undertaking necessary adjustments, tweaks and fixes to the new live site, ensuring no stone is left unturned.
Key Monitoring:
Step one in your post-migration process – is your website working properly?
It’s vital in the days immediately preceding migration that your team is regularly checking core landing pages and conversion paths for technical errors. Slow speeds or the page failing to load properly at all can cause significant friction within the user journey. A seamless user experience is non-negotiable for any paid campaign.
We’ve found employing a combination of automated website monitoring tools and manual reviews, while analysing behaviour metrics such as bounce rate, helps uncover hidden useability issues that may be impacting visitors ability to enjoy your site.
Campaign Performance Metrics:
Scrutinising your campaign performance metrics can offer an illuminating window into potential website errors you might not be able to identify from a manual check.
The importance of keeping an eye on KPIs such as clicks, impressions, click-through-rate, conversion rate and return on ad spend in the days following a migration cannot be understated. Comparing performance data pre and post-migration helps identify any sudden dips, highlighting targets for any adjustments that might need to be prioritised. Considering historical data across all paid media platforms can also shed light on whether significant deviations are technical issues or yearly trends.
Tracking Data Accuracy:
Tracking is key to identifying problems swiftly and securing informational data that informs reporting and campaign changes. Continuously verifying that your tracking is functioning accurately post-migration ensures you’re not losing valuable data in the early days of your new site.
We’re strong proponents of running a real time reporting dashboard and performing routine test conversions to validate performance and data consistency across any analytics platforms. Gaps in conversion tracking can lead to flawed decision-making and misplaced budget allocations.
Broken Links & Errors:
It’s important that any migration is followed by a swift and proactive approach to identifying broken links.
Broken links are one of the primary issues that can arise from a migration, particularly 404 errors stemming from paid media traffic. We utilise tools such as link checkers and monitor analytics error reports to quickly identify these issues. Ensuring that all your ads direct to live, relevant pages not only protects the accuracy of campaign performance, but preserves the reputation of your brand and user’s trust in it.
Audience Performance:
Evaluating how updated and new audience segmentation is performing is an important step in identifying whether or not your migration was a success.
We track for noticeable drops in audience size or engagement rates that don’t feel in line with typical year-on-year numbers or trends leading up to the migration. Using this data, we revise and change our targeting strategies accordingly. Sometimes, even small URL and structural changes can have a significant impact on segmentation logic, skewing the type of users you’re targeting, so it’s important to be attentive to these subtle shifts.
Search Query Reports:
It’s important not to overlook your search query reporting. As with any change in site structure or aim, there’s a chance that new, irrelevant traffic might slip through. Review these reports with regularity following the migration to identify off-target queries and respond by applying negative keywords.
Time to optimise
Once you feel you’ve ironed out the creases on your site, your tracking is verified and it seems as if stability has been restored, it’s time to focus on your performance enhancement.
We prefer to look at this point of the migration process as a growth opportunity rather than a risk. You can begin to make adjustments such as:
- Planned updates to ad copy and on-page content
- Fine tuning calls-to-action, bids and targeting settings based on initial performance data to maximise efficiency
- Aligning your campaigns to brand adjustments that may have come as part of your migration, such as adjustments to tone of voice
Why post-migration checks are important for paid media
Minor errors and oversights are part and parcel of a website migration, small challenges that provide crucial tests of our analysis, observation and planning skills. However, a disciplined, knowledge approach to migration can dramatically reduce the potential for long-term paid media performance drops.
Paid media campaigns live and die by the quality of their data. Understanding the potential risks to your campaigns doesn’t just help maintain performance, but encourages a considered, thorough approach to migration and major website updates across your digital teams.
By taking post-migration checks seriously you and your users can enjoy the fruits of your new website.
Migrate smoothly with Loom
Website migrations can feel like a case of spinning plates across your business. But with the right checks and a clear post-migration plan of action, you can keep performance steady and emerge from the process with the integrity and accuracy of your campaigns in check.
Whether you’re planning for a full website replatform or need advice on how to manage your campaigns post-migration, our Paid Media team is here to provide you with clear, expert service. From smart strategy planning to post-launch optimisation, we provide an expert eye to ensure everything is running like clockwork. Explore our Paid Media services or get in touch today to see how we can support your next move.
