Overview
Website technology migration is a very common use case for ObservePoint. Because ObservePoint can do large scale testing, it's an obvious solution for saving time when making big sweeping changes across your tech stack.
This guide will help you understand how we recommend using ObservePoint in your migration process and which features will help you along the way.
Implementation
See all steps for Implementation below:
Create a pre-migration inventory using Audits and Journeys
You'll need to first create an Audit or leverage existing Audits to create an inventory of the current technology you have set up.
For a tag management system or core analytics technology migrations, the Tag Inventory report and Audits Exports will be most helpful.
Journeys are important too because they can be used to simulate a user experience and test your website's response to various actions e.g. form submission, "add to cart" click, video play, etc.
Run Audits and Journeys on the production version of your website before launch
File Substitution allows users to swap any file at the time of execution. Users can provide the source URL for their Tag Management System or other technology and swap it for another source URL or an uploaded file.
We recommend you leverage this feature to do one of the following depending on your use case:
Swap a Tag Management System for another Tag Management System (e.g. Google Tag Manager to Tealium)
Swap a production version of your Tag Management System for a lower environment version of your Tag Management System (e.g. Prod Adobe Launch Library to Staging Adobe Launch Library).
The File Substitution configuration can then be applied in an Audit Advanced Setup for an Audit that crawls the production version of your website. This effectively tests how this migration will go without doing any damage to the reporting and technologies on your live site.
This feature can be applied to both Audits and Journeys and we recommend you take advantage of it for both.
When migrating a specific technology, you can leverage Tag & Variable Rules to compare variables in specific tags, this can help you ensure that the variables in the new analytics tag capture what was being captured in the old tag. (e.g. ea in the Google Universal Analytics tag equals pev1 in Adobe Analytics)
As you detect issues or discrepancies in the reports, correct them before launching.
Note: For this step, consider leveraging Comparisons. We recommend you work with your Success Manager to set this up the first time. With Comparisons you can quickly identify the differences between two Audit runs and surface anomalies quickly.
Run Audits and Journeys on the production version of your website after launch
After you have tested on the production version of your website, you are ready to launch. After pushing those changes, next you should run a large scale Audit on the production version of your website to confirm that the changes did not break any important user experiences or measurement tools.
We recommend at least one site-wide Audit because you want to be sure that the migration was 100% successful. If you can't do a site-wide Audit, do a statistically significant sample.
Run Journeys as well, focusing on the most important conversion funnels.
Refine and test again
Finally, make sure you resolve any issues that still managed to leak into production and correct them quickly. Run additional Audits and Journeys to confirm that issues have been resolved at scale.
Note: If your Audits are not side-wide Audits, they may discover errors as they randomly sample pages later on. In this case, we recommend you set up Alerts for those technologies in case they are discovered after launch.