A website relaunch is an important and nerve-wracking moment for every organization: it’s exciting to reveal a new brand or approach (and hours of hard work) to the world. But far too often, things happen that can have a lasting effect on the website’s performance in the future. Consider this your word of caution: you’ve got to nail the site flip! Here’s how.
Checklist for Managing Google Ads through a Site Redesign or Relaunch
As your site changes, your strategy for using the Google Ad Grant (or paid Google Ads) should change, too. Follow each of the steps below when managing your campaigns through a site redesign or relaunch to ensure your campaigns stay up to date.
Pre-Launch Actions
1. Map out current vs. new URLs for each ad landing page
Any time you change your website is a good time to QA ad landing pages and conversion tracking. Having ads pointing to old, non-existent URLs (404s) is a violation of Google Ad Grant policy (and a terrible user experience). If the URLs of any of your website pages are changing, you will need to update the destination URLs of the ads that point to those pages.
Use Google Ads to generate a list of all the Final URLs that are currently being used in your Google Ads account:
- In your Google Ads account, use the left navigation to go to your ads level view.
- Under columns in the table header, turn on Final URL.
- Ensure you see Final URL in your table. Also ensure your filters are set up correctly — select the right time period you want to report on, the campaign status is enabled to see all currently active campaigns, and you aren’t filtering for a specific campaign (you want to get all currently active urls).
- Click download to download the report.
Delete any unnecessary columns in your download. Label the final url the “Old URL” in one column and create a column for “New URL”. Use this to plan out the migration. Then, log into Google Ads post-site launch and update any ads with the old url to the new url.
2. Update sitelink extensions
After mapping out your URL updates, make sure URLs used in sitelink extensions are accounted for with updated destinations, too. Sitelink extensions are links that you add below your ad to allow users to access other relevant pages on your website directly through the ad. Again, if you updated your site content or even made any changes to your URL structure, your sitelinks may require updating.
3. Refresh your Ad Grant campaign strategy
If you’re deleting any pages from your site that are currently receiving ad traffic, and you’re not putting up a similar page that could act as landing page for the same ads, plan on pausing the campaign.
Likewise, we also want to find new traffic opportunities to replace lost traffic from the old campaigns. During the site relaunch process, you probably spent a lot of time reworking your site’s content, and your priorities (and resources) may have changed. Is there a new section of the site you really want eyeballs on? A new action people can take that wasn’t there before? Immediately after launch is a great time to set up new campaigns to promote these new or updated resources while they’re still gaining organic search traction.
4. Pause all active campaigns during launch
Right before your site launch begins, don’t forget to pause all active campaigns. Generally speaking, we recommend leaving campaigns paused through the actual relaunch period (which could take up to a few hours depending on the size of your site) until you’ve completed priority QA actions, to avoid sending traffic to pages that are actively undergoing updates.
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Post-Launch Actions
1. Swap in updated URLs
Use your URL mapping list to find and edit the final URL of all ads that need updates — make sure you have a column in your URL mapping sheet to indicate your progress. You can also make sure any new campaigns that you will be launching to promote updated or new content are fully built out at this time. Make changes while ads are paused; leave ads paused until both the updated ads and the site have been QAed for major issues.
2. Turn on all paused and new Ad Grant campaigns
After the site flip is complete and priority URL redirects, UX, and tracking QA is finished, turn all updated and new campaigns back on. This could take up to ~24 hours to a few days after launch before you feel comfortable resuming advertising efforts, so prepare your team for the short pause in campaign traffic and impact.
3. Monitor Ad Grant traffic daily for ~2 weeks after launch
Give your Ad Grant a little extra love in the immediate aftermath of a site relaunch — like with other analytics and SEO management efforts, we should be taking a quick peek at our Ad Grant and GA4 analytics every day to stay on top of any missed errors.
Need help?
Whole Whale’s customizable “Ready, Set, Launch” package focuses on ensuring smooth site relaunches so your organization won’t lose out on any paid or organic traffic during or after your relaunch. We’ll work with your development firm to nail the relaunch without skipping a beat. Get in touch for more information.