Setting up analytics for a website redesign

[DanDeceuster]

Hey all, so in the past when I make changes to a site, I make the changes, review the analytics in the wake of the changes, analyze and go from there. Little things here and there, no biggie.

With my new company, we're doing a full website redesign from scratch (Currently on Wordpress, moving to custom). They are asking me about analytics and reporting and I was hoping to get some insight here.

When the new site is ready, they are launching it at www2.ourdomain.com and sending 25% of traffic to ourdomain.com to that with the other 75% going to www.ourdomain.com (current site).

So two questions- how would you go about setting up analytics for that? And how do you ensure the www2 version doesn't get indexed but stay in Google's good graces? If you de-index your "home page" that 25% are seeing I can't imagine that's helpful for SEO.

Hopefully that makes sense! Trying to look at how to A/B test to ensure the new site is working and converting before pushing all traffic to it.

[DanDeceuster]

So the non dub version of the URL points to www right now. Somehow, what they plan to do is take 25% of all visitors to our website and send them to www2 instead of www. I don't know how this works personally.

I guess with analytics, how do you even set that up? As a separate profile in Google Analytics? But the domain is the same, so can you do sub-domain specific? I need separate analytics for the new site to make sure conversions look good, and that's what I'm not sure how to set up.

My secondary concern is doing a noindex on the www2 subdomain. Is that the best way to keep this out of the index? Once testing is done we'll move the new site to www and redirect www2 to it as well. Any thoughts on that set up?

[Chris.Menke]

Funny you said it's the IT department's decision. From the sound of this scenario, I seriously almost asked if your web programmers were the ones running the show over there, but then thought better of it. : ) I was pretty close though, huh?

But we are talking 3 domains though---www2, www, and nonwww.  All three with the very similar, if not the same content and in this  scenario, you can't canonicalize www and nonwww back to www2 because www2 is not in the index.  How can ww2 send search traffic to www or nonwww if search doesn't know ww2 even exists?

Is it their new architecture that they're worried about converting or is there new content going in? Because if it's just new content, you could start A/B testing that now. But I'm  guessing it's the architecture they're  worried about. So maybe they want the glory of creating a brand new site from scratch but they want you to be responsible for making sure it works as they advertised.

If that's the case, I'm not sure if you have a choice but to document the heck out of the current site's performance, conversion-wise as well as search-wise and then just  throw the new site up on  www and then start tweaking.  With solid current-performance documentation you'd have clear metrics to bring the new site back up to and hopefully, surpass.

[DanDeceuster]

So it's not my decision but the IT department's. Our current site at www.ourdomain.com will remain while www2.ourdomain.com will be the new design receiving 25% of the traffic to our domain. So not three domains, just two different subdomains is all. I just want to make sure we have analytics on there in a way to be able to see that it's working/converting without getting www2 indexed if that makes more sense.

[Chris.Menke]

hmmm, not sure I get it. The whole 3 domains thing seems very convoluted.  Why not just A/B test off the one domain between re-makes of the old landing/conversion pages and the new ones?