Website Retirement Strategy

If you have any questions about how this document applies to any work you are doing or if you have feedback or comments or need clarification, please contact cbrodigan at mozilla dot com.

This strategy applies only to websites built for marketing campaigns for the Engagement team.

Working Group

Chrissie Brodigan

Status

Pending presentation

Problem

We are currently using an End of Life (EOL) strategy that routes all traffic to campaigns that have ended to a blog. This experience is not a good experience for our users and it also doesn't help with conversion strategy.

By dead-ending users to a blog, we aren't putting our best foot forward or leveraging the awesomeness of the web. We're also losing valuable traffic and opportunity.

For example, the following are some of the redirected campaigns:

• [glow.mozilla.org] redirects to [1]

• [markup.mozilla.org] redirects to [2]

The blog does not share Mozilla or Firefox branding, does not optimize for conversion, does not necessarily present useful information about the campaign's performance.

Solution

Let's soften our approach currently called, End of Life, and implement a more meaningful retirement strategy that:

• shares useful campaign performance metrics
• guides traffic to Firefox
• prominently displays the Firefox download button
• integrates social connection opportunities: newsletter, twitter, facebook

A great example of this is the way in which Caitlin and I retired the Spark campaign at [spark.mozilla.org]

Spark's Strategy

To retire an active campaign in a meaningful manner that included conversion- and connection- focused content:

• metrics: # of total shares, # of countries sparked, # of total sparks
• "Thank You" message to all participants, so that they would feel that they had had a meaningful impact on supporting, promoting, or just participating in the campaign
• a link to a list of the overall results of the game
• a link to download Firefox for Android
• a link to download Firefox for Desktop
• email sign-up
• Twitter & Facebook icons
• Code (the value of view source to see the cool animation we included and hopefully someone somewhere would grab that code and play with it)

Proposed End of Life -to- Retirement Changes

Using the principles of the "One Mozilla" strategy, I suggest the following changes:

• Include retirement in campaign planning
• Include single-page retirement design in campaign planning that includes standard units of content:
  • Download buttons
  • Email sign-up
  • Twitter & Facebook
  • Universal Tab

Technical Considerations

Localization

Security

Webtrends Tracking

SEO Best Practices

SEO Best Practices When Retiring a Campaign

Please take the following into consideration when making these switches to minimize any possible dips in natural search traffic.

Redirect Treatment (Technical Owner)

• The most important thing to avoid is 404 (file not found) errors when searchers click on Mozilla site links that show up on the search engine response page (SERP)
• Use a permanent 301 redirect to redirect the pages on the old site to the new site. This also lets Google know all the pages have officially moved.
  
• Change all internal site links to point to the correct domain
• Use link checking software to find any broken links
• Submit a new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Submit
• Do this in phases if possible, moving one subdirectory over at a time, monitoring the results
  

Implementation

Once we've agreed on the plan we want to roll out these changes incrementally, choosing one-two campaigns in Q4 to apply this strategy to. Doing everything at once would be too big a project and we expect there will be things to learn about the process as we start making changes.