Complete Web Monitoring

Chapter 3. What Could We Watch?

Regardless of the type of site you’re running, there are many things you can track: the actions visitors took, the experiences they had, how well they were able to use the site, what they hoped to accomplish, and most importantly, whether your business benefited in some way from their visits.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the things you’d like to know, and the tools you’ll use to collect that knowledge.

What we’d like to know	Tool set to use
How much did visitors benefit my business?	Internal analytics
Where is my traffic coming from?	External analytics
What’s working best (and worst)?	Usability testing, A/B testing
How good is my relationship with my market?	Customer surveys, community monitoring
How healthy is my infrastructure?	Performance monitoring
How am I doing against my competitors?	Search, external testing
Where are my risks?	Search, alerting
What are people saying about me?	Search, community monitoring
How are my site and content being used elsewhere?	Search, external analytics

We’re now going to look at many of the individual metrics you can track on your website. If you’re unfamiliar with how various web monitoring technologies work, you may want to skip to Chapter 4 and treat this chapter as a reference you can return to as you’re defining your web monitoring strategy.

How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?

When you first conceived your website, you had a goal in mind for your visitors. Whether that was a purchase, a click on some advertising you showed ...