Q: How do you measure results as a new website goes live?

It is important to know that there are best practices for measuring progress and results once you launch a new website. Windmill follows best practices, while also taking into account your unique needs and preferences.

To begin, it’s recommended that you’ve established a few specific goals that you want to track before launching a site. Common examples include form completions, clicks to call, MQLs or sales transactions (SQLs). Think of the things that will help you measure user engagement and transaction completions. Our team can work with you to identify the various conversion points on your website.

Once we have worked together to determine your goals, we’ll make sure they’re set up properly for tracking in an analytics tool such as Google Analytics. You may also use another of the many third-party analytics tracking tools such as Adobe Analytics, Plausible, Woopra, Matomo, or others, but Windmill prefers to use Google tools across the board for consistency.

If you choose to use Google Analytics, we’ll set the goals up in Google Tag Manager first, another Google tool that makes it simple to set up and track goal conversions without the need for coding and web development skills. Once Tag Manager has been set up, we then connect them as ‘conversion goals’ in Google Analytics under Admin -> View -> Goals -> + New Goal.

Another consideration that we do for all of our clients is setting up an easy-to-share dashboard where the most important data can be found for simple reference. This allows you to have clear insights into all of the most important metrics without the need to understand the more complex aspects of Google Analytics. We use Google Data Studio to create a Reporting Dashboard that our clients can reference for simple, real-time information.