Basic Google Analytics Fail

You how I was bragging the other day about how all this web development stuff was child’s play for me? About how I’ve been doing it since 1994?

Well, pride goes before the fail.

When I pushed the new site design live, I was so excited. I had polished it for days to get it looking just right. I was so proud. I put it out there for the world to see and what happens? I get guest published the next day in ChurchCrunch! More traffic! I was just so relieved that I had the shiny new site ready for all the new visitors.

I checked Google Analytics the next day. (You do have Analytics set up, don’t you?) My traffic went down! What happened? I watched for another day and traffic was still down! Something must be happening, but what?

Then it hit me.

I forgot to put the Analytics tags into my new template files.

I was so worried about how the buttons looked and cross platform testing that I forgot the basics.

When you ever publish a new site, go over the checklist and make sure that you didn’t forget the basic stuff. I’ll try to get together and publish a good checklist for pre-launch web sites in another post.

Now, I’ll just sit quietly in the corner.