Most agencies treat launch as the finish line. We treat it as the start of the data. Here's what we instrument before the site goes live. Plus what we change in the first 30 days.
For most agencies, launch is the moment the contract winds down. Hand over the keys, send the final invoice, suggest a Care Plan™ retainer, move on.
We don't think this is good for the client. The most expensive part of a website project isn't the build. It's the months after launch when nobody's watching what the data is saying. So our launches look a little different.
Before the site goes live, we instrument the funnel. Not just GA4 page views. We tag every meaningful interaction: scroll depth on long pages, time-to-first-form-field, form abandonment per field, outbound clicks to pricing pages, navigation friction on mobile. We agree, in advance, on the conversion event the site exists to drive. We make sure that event fires server-side, not client-side, so ad-blockers and consent banners don't quietly destroy the data.
Then we don't disappear. The first 30 days post-launch are the most data-rich period the site will ever have. Real users, real intent, real signal. We watch the funnel daily. We ship two or three rounds of changes against what the data is telling us. We document what we learned for the team that will run the site after we leave.
The result is a site that ships in better shape than it launched in. A client who can see, with their own eyes, what's working. That's a different relationship to "launch" than most agencies are running.