There are several ways you can measure the success of your new product or release. Microsites are a very intelligent way of releasing your new product and measuring the success of that product against previously released products or your main website. By combining a microsite and website analytics together you can really measure the success and learn from your new product or release. Regularly analysing your website statistics and tweaking your content based on those findings will help you leverage off the power of the knowledge at your fingertips.

This is how to get real value out of your microsite.

A microsite is a mini website dedicated to one particular product or release. Click to find out more about what is a microsite?. A microsite can have its own domain, sub-domain or just be down further in its own separate directory on your current domain. Depending on the product/release and your information architecture you will employ one of these methods.

A microsite is beneficial on many levels

• Your focus is entirely on that individual product/release
• The design can be different from your main site
• Allows for the design to target a completely different market
• Can assist in making your business look larger
• Is extremely useful if you want to keep your different target markets separate
• Gives you the ability to make your site more user-friendly and memorable
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Measuring the success of your new release

Depending on which tracking software you use, you can set different campaigns for different sites or parts of your website. This way you’ll keep the statistics of your new release separate from the statistics of your main website. Employing this method is vital so that your statistics don’t become skewed.

Combining a microsite and web analytics together you can really measure the success of your new product or release. You can learn a lot about your customers – how they got there, what they’re most interested in, track their browsing patterns, see which page they landed on and which page they left from. These statistics are worth their weight in gold.

Regularly analyse your tracking statistics

Once you have your new microsite and website analytics tools running, it is important that you regularly view and analyse your website statistics. Analysing your statistics frequently is of great importance and of benefit for you as you will be able to notice trends on the browsing patterns of your websites users. You’ll be able to find out which specific page on your website most users are exiting from.

Benefiting from your microsite and statistics

Based on this information you can then revisit the content on that specific page and tweak it, because obviously there’s something there, or something that’s not there, which is sending valuable potential leads away from you website.