B2B Website Analytics to Capture Before a Redesign

You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Before a redesign, baseline how B2B buys: long cycles, multiple visits, more than one person. Sessions aren’t enough. You need leads, lead quality, and assisted conversions.

This is the measurement model. Set events and thank-you URLs before you trust the baseline. If tracking is broken, fix that first or every later report is fiction.

Why Sessions Lie

A manufacturer can have thousands of sessions and a dozen usable inquiries. Another firm can have fewer sessions and a higher close rate. Volume without pipeline is a content site.

B2B also splits credit. Someone finds you on organic. A colleague returns direct. A third person submits after a sales email. Last-click “direct” steals the win. If you only watch last-touch, you will cut the blog that started the thread.

Traffic (Context, Not the Goal)

Capture this so you know what the new IA must protect:

• Users and sessions — By channel: organic, direct, referral, paid, email. 90 days minimum; 12 months if seasonality matters.
• Landing pages — Where the session starts. These URLs need redirects. Deleting a high-traffic /services/old-name without a 301 is a self-inflicted drop.
• Top pages — Not the same as landings. Industry and resource hubs often assist.
• Queries — Search Console: queries, pages, impressions vs. clicks. The new information architecture has to keep covering these.

Export the lists. Screenshots in a slide deck go stale. CSVs survive the rebuild.

Behavior (Where the Story Breaks)

Use behavior to find pages that attract the wrong click or hide the next step:

• Engagement time — Did they read the service page or bounce from a mismatch?
• Scroll depth — If most never pass 25% on a long page, the hero or the intent is wrong.
• Exit pages — Contact with no submit is a form problem. A case study with no path to /contact is IA.
• Device — Mobile share on key landings. If research is on phones and the form fails, that’s a mobile-first requirement.

Bounce rate in GA4 is not Universal Analytics. Don’t compare them blindly. Prefer engagement rate and the events you fire.

Conversion (The Baseline That Matters)

Define a lead the way sales does.

• Primary — generate_lead: quote, demo, contact. Count and conversion rate by landing page and channel.
• Secondary — Downloads, tel: clicks. Useful as assists. Don’t treat a spec-sheet download as equal to a quote request unless sales agrees.
• Quality — How many form-fills became opportunities? If you have CRM data, even a three-month sample beats a sitewide “2% conversion” slogan.
• Assisted conversions — Pages and channels that appear in the path but aren’t last click. Blog posts, industry pages, and comparison articles often live here. Cutting them because they “don’t convert” is how redesigns get dumber.

Funnel, if you have the events: landing → service or industry → form_start → generate_lead. The drop between form_start and submit is the form. The drop before form_start is the page.

Attribution Without a Religion

You don’t need a perfect multi-touch model before rebuild. You need:

1. Clean source/medium (UTMs on paid and email).
2. First landing and last conversion page for a sample of real leads.
3. Honesty that organic and direct will mix on long cycles.

If sales already tags “heard about us,” join that to landing page. Ten real deals beat a default GA4 report nobody trusts.

Before You Rebuild

• Export — Traffic, landings, queries, conversion events, a sample of lead records. Date-stamp the files.
• Audit tracking — Are goals firing? Duplicate tags? Thank-you pages counted twice? Fix before you lose the old site.
• Document winners — Which pages create leads? Which only create sessions? Keep the first group obvious in the new sitemap.
• Share with the team — Design and IA should see this in discovery, not after launch.

A redesign without a baseline is judged on opinions. With leads, assists, and landing pages, you can tell if the new site is better infrastructure.

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We audit analytics as part of discovery. Start a project and we’ll baseline leads before anyone redraws the homepage.