IQ Website Launch - Results Exceed Expectations

About 6 months ago I hired a Marketing Production team in Bangalore (see June 1 2007 posting) to do website development, collateral creation, SEO, SEM, online advertising, etc. Their first main project was to develop a new "customer network" concept for IQ; very Web 2.0 and extremely promising. The team delivered the prototype with flying colors and the "project" is expected to be launched in 2008. Their next initiative has been the redesign of the IQ website as well as a completely new collateral package that includes new product positioning, customer case studies, Podcasts, recorded demos and more.

For a number of business and schedule reasons, the website launch has been split into 3 phases:

Phase 1 - Re platform the website so that marketing can make content changes without engineering input. This will accelerate content creation and increase efficiency / cut costs. We are migrating the aspx website to a CMS system (Joomla) with integrations to SugarCRM. Other items in scope include additional content, more detailed analytics and significantly more targeted landing pages (squeeze pages).

Phase 2 - Redesign the homepage and include new events, Call-To-Action options, PR and product information. This will coincide with the 3.0 launch of an IQ product in Q2 2008.

Phase 3 - Update the website to support on-going marketing activities.

Phase 1 has been completed and we launched on Nov 1st; the first two weeks of metrics have exceeded my expectations. When comparing the old site to the new site for the same period in the current and prior months (Oct 1 - 15 vs. Nov 1 -15) the results are very encouraging:

Avg Time on Site +199.95% (good)
Bounce Rate -13.89% (good)
Average Page Views: +31.04% (good)
Goals (new leads) +42.86% (good)
Absolutely unique new visitors -32.66% (not so good)

At first glance it is a negative that our number of absolutely unique new visitors has dropped by 32%. While I never want to see a drop in visitors, it is actually a good thing. When we launched the new site, I initiated an online advertising review that ended-up reducing the number of words that we are paying for - essentially cutting out the lower performing "garbage" words but paying more for the high-value words. The 32% reduction in visitors is a result of this......and so is the 42.86% increase in conversions. All in all a good trade off.