Nobody’s migration checklist says “and then the star ratings vanish.” But that is the kind of thing a move breaks. Not the homepage. Not the checkout. The quiet things that feed Google, your reports, and your sense of whether the month went well. Here are three from this summer.
1. The stars that disappeared from Shopping ads
An online store moved from one shopping-cart platform to another. The site came up fine. Orders flowed. A few weeks later someone noticed the product star ratings had vanished from the Google Shopping ads, and no dashboard had said a word about it.
The cause was a few layers down. The review system still sent Google the product IDs from the old platform, so Google could no longer match the reviews to the products it was showing. The ads still ran. They just ran without the stars that earn the click. We worked it through with Google’s support and the review platform’s, re-mapped the IDs, and confirmed two weeks later that the stars were back. Nothing about this showed up as an error anywhere. It showed up as a slightly worse month.
2. Three leads or twenty-two?
A travel client’s monthly report was due a week after we moved their website to a new host. The website’s own form log said three quote requests for the month. That number was wrong, and we knew why: form entries from the two weeks around the move lived only on the old host. Rebuilding the count from the client’s own CRM found more than twenty.
The same move, plus a Google update in the same window, made their rankings wobble. The report said all of that plainly. Here is the number the form shows, here is the reconstructed number and how we got it, here is why rankings dipped, and here is why next month is the first clean one. A clean chart would have been easier to send. It also would have been fiction.
3. The typo in the ad account
A new paid-search program was built to go live on the first of the month. Before it did, we read the whole account the way a stranger would. The brand name was misspelled in one campaign and in the tracking code attached to it, which would have split the analytics into two piles forever once traffic started. A tracking string had been cut off by one character on paste. Five old campaigns from a previous program were still switched on, ready to spend the moment billing activated. The analytics link needed confirming.
All of it was fixed before the first dollar was spent. Earlier in the same account, a tracking tool had reported that cross-domain tracking to the checkout was broken. We tested it by hand and it was working; the tool was wrong, and the vendor agreed. Pre-launch is the cheapest moment to find any of this. After launch every one of these costs real money or ruins real data.
The checklist we run on every move
A migration is not done when the site loads. It is done when these are true:
- Every form that took a lead before the move takes one after, and the entries from the move window are accounted for somewhere you can report from.
- Product and review feeds still match. If you sell online, check the stars in your ads a week later. Nobody else will.
- Redirects, analytics, and ad tracking are tested by hand in a real browser, not confirmed by a tool’s green check.
- Old campaigns, old tags, and old accounts are off, not just forgotten.
- The first report after the move says what the move did to the numbers. Wobble is normal. Hiding it is not.
If you are planning a move, send us the date. The checklist is the same whether we built the site or not.