Redirect Analytics: What to Monitor After Migration
Michel Bardelmeijer is Tech Lead and Sales at redirect.pizza, where he helps DevOps and IT teams solve domain redirect challenges at scale. Michel has guided organizations like SD Worx, Zurich Airport and Harvard through complex redirect scenarios involving thousands of domains.
Have questions about bulk redirects, HTTPS migrations, or domain consolidations? Connect with Michel on LinkedIn or reach out to the redirect.pizza team.
The redirects are live. DNS has propagated. You tested a few URLs and everything lands where it should. Migration complete? Not quite.
A redirect can be technically correct and still cause problems you won't notice until weeks later. URLs that weren't included in your mapping. Traffic patterns that reveal forgotten campaign links. SEO impact that only shows up after Google recrawls your site. The first 30 days after migration determine whether your traffic and search rankings stay intact or quietly erode. For redirect fundamentals and setup guidance, see our Complete Guide to URL Redirects.
Key Takeaways
- Track four metrics: hit counts per redirect, error rate, geographic distribution, and Search Console performance
- Days 0-2: verify technical correctness (status codes, certificates, redirect loops)
- Week 1: confirm traffic patterns match expectations and watch for 404 spikes on destination
- Month 1: validate SEO transfer in Search Console - old domain indexation should decline, new domain should increase
- Retire domains only after 90+ days of zero traffic; keep anything receiving steady hits indefinitely
Four Metrics to Track
Most post-migration guides focus on setting up Google Analytics or configuring UTM parameters. That's useful, but it misses the redirect-specific metrics that tell you whether the migration actually succeeded.
Hit counts per redirect
This measures how much traffic each old domain or path still receives. It's the most direct indicator of which redirects are actually being used.
Why it matters: hit counts reveal which old domains are still valuable. You might discover a legacy domain you planned to retire is still receiving thousands of monthly visits from an old email campaign or a backlink you forgot about. Without this data, you'd let the domain expire and lose that traffic.
What to look for: consistent or gradually declining volume over time. A sudden spike might indicate broken links appearing elsewhere (someone linking to your old domain in new content) or bot traffic. A sudden drop to zero on a previously active redirect could mean DNS issues.
Error rate
This measures whether redirect requests are failing. Failures include broken destination URLs, certificate errors, timeouts, and malformed requests.
A healthy redirect should rarely produce errors. If you're seeing failures, something is wrong. Common causes: the destination URL changed or was deleted, SSL certificate expired or failed to renew, or the redirect service itself is having issues. For HTTPS configuration and certificate management, see How to Redirect with HTTPS.
How to check: some redirect services surface errors in their dashboard. If yours doesn't, you'll notice problems indirectly: users complaining, traffic dropping unexpectedly, or monitoring tools flagging your old domain as down. For critical redirects, consider setting up uptime monitoring through a service like UptimeRobot or Pingdom that alerts you when the redirect stops working.
Geographic distribution
This shows where your redirect traffic originates. Not all redirect services provide this data, but you can get it from Google Analytics on your destination domain by filtering for traffic that arrived via redirect (using UTM parameters).
Why bother? Geographic data reveals problems that other metrics miss. Unexpected traffic from regions where you have no customers often indicates bot traffic or scraping. If you see unusually LOW traffic from a specific region shortly after migration, DNS propagation may still be incomplete there (those users are still hitting your old server instead of the redirect service). If your business operates in specific countries and you see traffic distribution that doesn't match your customer base, investigate before assuming everything is fine.
Search Console performance
Google Search Console shows how Google perceives your migration. Add both your old and new domains as properties if you haven't already.
What to watch: impressions and clicks for both domains. On the old domain, impressions should decline over time as Google recognizes the redirects and updates its index. On the new domain, impressions should increase as Google transfers the ranking signals.
If impressions on the old domain stay flat or increase weeks after migration, Google may not be following your redirects correctly. Check for crawl errors and indexation status. If the old domain's URLs are still being indexed instead of the new ones, something in your redirect configuration needs attention. Make sure you're using 301 permanent redirects rather than 302 temporary redirects.
The Monitoring Timeline
Different problems surface at different times. Spreading your attention across a structured timeline catches issues before they become permanent damage.
Days 0 to 2: immediate verification
Focus on technical correctness. Your redirects are live and real traffic is hitting them for the first time.
Visit your highest-traffic URLs manually and verify they redirect to the correct destinations. Check both HTTP and HTTPS versions. Look for certificate warnings, unexpected destinations, or redirect loops. Use browser developer tools (Network tab) to confirm you're getting 301 status codes, not 302s.
If your redirect service has a dashboard, check for early error reports. Even a small number of errors in the first hours can indicate configuration problems that will scale as traffic increases.
Red flags at this stage: certificate errors on HTTPS, 404s on destination URLs, redirect loops, or status codes that don't match what you configured.
Week 1: traffic transition
Focus shifts to traffic patterns. By now, DNS has propagated globally and the bulk of your traffic should be flowing through the redirects.
Check your redirect service dashboard for total hit counts. Traffic volume should be consistent with what you'd expect based on your old domain's historical traffic. On your new domain, watch for increasing sessions in Google Analytics as redirected users arrive. If hit counts on the redirect service are lower than expected, some DNS resolvers may still be caching old records and sending users to your old server instead.
Watch for unexpected 404 errors on the new domain. These indicate URLs that weren't included in your redirect mapping or mapping errors that sent traffic to non-existent pages. Check your analytics and server logs for 404 spikes.
Red flags: redirect hit counts much lower than expected, spikes in 404 errors on the new domain, traffic to the new domain not increasing as the old domain's redirects are being used.
Month 1: SEO validation
Focus on search engine recognition. Google has had time to recrawl your old URLs and follow the redirects.
In Search Console, check the indexation status of both domains. The old domain's indexed page count should be declining. The new domain's indexed page count should be stable or increasing. If old URLs are still being indexed weeks after migration, Google may not be processing your redirects correctly.
Monitor rankings for your key search terms. Some fluctuation is normal during a migration, but sustained drops after a month suggest a problem. Check that important backlinks still point to your old domain (they should, and the redirect passes their value to the new domain). If you use a backlink tool like Ahrefs or Moz, verify that the new domain is being recognized as the redirect destination for your existing backlinks.
Red flags: old URLs still appearing in search results instead of new URLs, rankings dropping without recovery, indexation stalled on the new domain.
Month 3: steady state
Focus on long-term stability and cleanup decisions. The migration dust has settled. Now you're establishing baselines for ongoing monitoring.
Audit which old domains and paths still receive meaningful traffic. Some will have declined to near-zero. Others may still be receiving consistent hits from sources you can't control (old PDFs, cached pages, bookmarks).
Document your baseline metrics: typical traffic volume per redirect, normal error rate, expected geographic distribution. Set up automated alerts if your redirect service supports them. An unexpected spike in errors or traffic drop should trigger a notification rather than requiring manual checking.
This is also when you start making decisions about retiring old domains. More on that below.
When to Retire Old Domains
Maintaining redirects costs money (domain renewals, redirect service fees) and attention. At some point, you need to decide which old domains to keep and which to let expire.
There's no universal rule, but here's a framework to guide the decision:
Zero hits over 90 days: Generally safe to retire. No one is using it.
Under 100 hits per month: Consider whether those visits are valuable. They might be from a seasonal source or a long-tail link you haven't identified. Set a calendar reminder to re-check in three months before making a final decision.
Steady traffic in the hundreds per month: Keep it active and investigate where the traffic is coming from. This might be valuable traffic from backlinks or campaigns that are still running.
Thousands of hits per month: Keep it indefinitely. This is meaningful traffic that justifies the maintenance cost.
Traffic volume isn't the only factor. Consider whether the old domain has backlinks from authoritative sites that are passing SEO value. Check if the domain is still indexed and ranking for any search terms. Remember whether the domain appears in offline marketing materials (print ads, business cards, signage) that can't be updated. Factor in legal or trademark considerations for brand-related domains.
When in doubt, keep the redirect active. The cost of maintaining a redirect is almost always lower than the cost of losing traffic from a domain you retired too early.
Frequently Asked Questions
Three months of active monitoring is the minimum. After that, shift to monthly check-ins and rely on automated alerts for error spikes or traffic anomalies. Search engines may take several months to fully process a migration, so don't consider the job done after week one.
Several possible causes. DNS propagation might still be incomplete in some regions, though this is unlikely after the first week. Cached links in emails, documents, or offline materials continue driving traffic. The new domain might not be getting indexed properly, so Google keeps sending traffic to the old URLs. Check Search Console indexation status and verify that your redirects are returning 301 (permanent) rather than 302 (temporary).
Yes, but it's limited. Your redirect service logs every redirect it processes, so if they offer log exports or API access, you can pull that data into your own dashboards. For tracking what happens after the redirect, add UTM parameters to your destination URLs (e.g., redirect all old domain traffic to newdomain.com?utm_source=redirect) so Google Analytics can identify sessions that came through redirects. Note that the destination server's logs only show the final request to the new domain, not where it originated from.
Related Guides
- Domain Migration Hub - Complete resources for planning and executing migrations
- 301 vs 302 Redirect Guide - Why permanent redirects matter for SEO transfer
- Bulk Domain Redirects - Import hundreds of redirects via CSV
- DNS-Level vs Server-Side Redirects - Choosing the right approach for your infrastructure
Ready to Redirect?
redirect.pizza provides built-in analytics with hit counts per redirect, error monitoring, and geographic distribution. See which old domains are still receiving traffic and catch problems before they affect your SEO. View enterprise features or get started free with up to 5 domains.
