Your website relaunch broke your leads: the migration break, explained

If your leads dropped straight after a website relaunch, the most likely cause is that your tracking tags and your old URLs did not survive the rebuild. Relaunches commonly break both at once: the new site ships without the measurement code the old one carried, and the old pages that held your Google rankings now return 404 errors (page not found), so paid and organic enquiries fall together.

The cruel part is that nothing looks broken. The new site is faster and prettier, the ads are still running, and the only visible symptom is a dashboard going quiet. Underneath, the account is decaying in ways that compound every day the break stands.

• DAY 0The new site goes live, and the old tracking tags and URL structure stay behind with the old build.
• DAY 1The ads keep running and spending, but the new site cannot count the visits they buy, so conversions stop being recorded.
• WEEK 1Remarketing audiences shrink daily while the site is untagged, and those days cannot be recovered. Smart bidding, starved of conversion data, drifts back towards guesswork.
• WEEK 3Old URLs keep returning 404s and shed the rankings they held, so organic enquiries slide as well.
• FIXThe tags are restored and the redirects are mapped. Counting resumes immediately, but smart bidding re-learns slowly and rankings take longer still.

What actually breaks when a site is relaunched?

Four things, and they interact.

First, the tags. A developer rebuilds a site from new templates, and the measurement snippets buried in the old one rarely come across. Your ads keep buying visits, but the new site has no way to count which of those visits became enquiries, so Google Ads reports silence where there may still be activity.

Second, the URLs. When old addresses are retired without redirects, every link Google had ranked, every link in an old email or ad, lands on a 404. Those pages shed their rankings, and the traffic they earned goes with them.

Third, the audiences. Remarketing lists, which are the pools of past visitors you can advertise to again, only grow while the site is tagged. While it is untagged they decay daily, and there is no way to backfill the people who visited during the gap.

Fourth, the bidding. Smart bidding is Google adjusting your bids automatically based on which clicks convert. Cut off its conversion data and it degrades, and after you fix the tags it re-learns slowly rather than snapping back. This is why accounts often stay soft for a while even after the technical repair is done.

How do I check whether my relaunch broke tracking?

Three checks, roughly ten minutes, and you need nothing beyond a browser.

1. View the source. Right-click your site, choose View Page Source, and search for gtag, GTM- and AW-. If none appear, no measurement is installed at all. If you find a GTM- ID, the Google Tag Manager container is public: open googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id=GTM-XXXX with your own ID in place of the X's, and search the text for AW- to see whether a Google Ads conversion tag is actually configured inside it.
2. Test three old URLs. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com and click three results, or use links from old emails and campaigns. If they land on 404 pages instead of redirecting to the new equivalents, your rankings are bleeding right now.
3. Confirm the ads are still spending. The Ads Transparency Center at adstransparency.google.com shows every ad any advertiser runs, searchable by domain or brand, with last-shown dates and regions, and it needs no login. Look your own domain up, confirm the ads are live, and note where they point, because ads still aimed at retired URLs are buying 404s.

What order should the repairs happen in?

Restore measurement first, always. My working rule is to fix measurement before judging any campaign, because until the tags are back you cannot even see what the relaunch cost you. Reinstall the Tag Manager container or the gtag snippet, submit a test enquiry yourself, and confirm the conversion records in Google Ads. Check inside the container rather than assuming, since a suspected break is sometimes a tag that moved rather than a tag that died.

Then map the redirects. Point each old URL to its nearest new equivalent with a permanent (301) redirect, starting with the pages your ads point to and the pages that ranked. A generic redirect of everything to the homepage protects less than page-to-page mapping does.

Then let the account recover on its own schedule. Remarketing lists rebuild only from new visits, and smart bidding re-learns slowly once real conversion data returns, so hold off on judging campaign performance until the data has been flowing cleanly again for a stretch. Decisions made in the blind window will mostly be wrong.

If the relaunch has you re-examining what you pay for ads management in the first place, I have set out the going rates and where the fees stop making sense in what Google Ads management costs in South Africa. Rebuilding measurement after a relaunch is the most common shape of my tracking rescue work, which is fixed-fee at R4,500 to R8,000.