Taking over the two things nobody wants to own
Tracking setup and hosting management for a site somebody else had already built.
- Tracking
- Hosting management
Not every project starts with a blank page. Some arrive already built, already live, and already quietly broken in the two places that are hardest to see.
Auora came to me for exactly those two. The site existed. The measurement underneath it did not really, and the hosting was somebody's unclaimed responsibility. Neither is glamorous work. Both are the kind of thing that gets discovered at the worst possible moment.
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Measurement on somebody else's site
Fixing tracking on a site you did not build is a particular skill. You cannot rewrite the markup to make your life easier. You have to work with the structure that is there, find the moments that actually matter, and instrument them without touching anything that currently works.
The questions are the same as always. What counts as a conversion here. Where does that event go. Is it arriving from the browser only, which means a meaningful share of it is quietly disappearing. Is anything being counted twice, which is worse than counting nothing, because it is confidently wrong.
That got rebuilt properly: one taxonomy, events leaving from both the browser and the server, matched so the platform sees each one exactly once.
Hosting, which should be invisible
The second half was making the hosting stop being a thing anyone thinks about. Certificates that renew themselves. Backups that exist before they are needed. A place to look when something behaves strangely.
Good hosting has no highlights. The entire deliverable is that nobody has to talk about it again.
Why this is worth writing down
Most agencies want the rebuild, because the rebuild is what makes a portfolio look impressive. But a working site with broken measurement does not need a rebuild. It needs the measurement fixed, and it needs somebody to own the server.
Saying that out loud costs me the bigger invoice. It is also the honest answer, and this page would be worth very little if I only wrote about the work that pays best.