Complete Web Monitoring

Preface

This is a book about achieving complete web visibility. If you’re involved in something web-based—and these days, everything is web-based—you need to understand the things on the Web that affect you. Of course, today, everything affects you, which means looking far beyond what visitors did on your site to the communities and competitors with which you’re involved.

While the Web is a part of our daily lives, web visibility lags far behind. Web operators seldom have a complete understanding of how visitors interact with their sites, how healthy their web properties are, what online communities are saying about their organizations, or what their competitors are up to. What little visibility they do have is fragmented and imperfect.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In recent years, advances in monitoring, search, data collection, and reporting have made it possible to build a far more comprehensive picture of your web presence.

This book will show you how to answer some fundamental questions about that presence:

• What did visitors do on my site?

• How did they go about doing it?

• Why did they do it in the first place?

• Could they do it, or was it broken or slow?

• What are people saying about my organization elsewhere?

• How do I compare to my competitors?

Answering these questions means integrating many disciplines: web analytics, user surveys, usability testing, performance monitoring, community management, and competitive analysis.

At first, this might seem like a daunting task. There are hundreds of tools from which to choose, ranging from free to extremely expensive. There are millions of sites to track and more visitors to watch. Many stakeholders—each with their own opinions—probably care about your website, including investors, executives, marketers, designers, developers, and support teams.

We hope to arm you with a good understanding of the various technologies at your disposal so that you can craft and implement a strategy for complete web monitoring.

How to Use This Book

This book is divided into five sections.

• Part one—Chapters 1 through 4—looks at the need for complete web monitoring. Because every business is different, we look at how the business you’re in affects the metrics and performance indicators that matter to you. We suggest you read through this section of the book to get an understanding of the scope of web visibility.

• Part two—Chapters 5 through 7—shows you how to understand what people did on your website. This goes beyond simple analytics, encompassing things like usability, recording interactions, and surveying visitors to better understand their needs. Each chapter offers an introduction and history of the technology, a framework for thinking about it, implementation details, and a look at how to share the resulting data within your organization. You can consult each chapter when it’s time to roll out that kind of visibility.

• In part three—Chapters 8 through 10—we cover web performance monitoring. This is the complement to part two, looking at the question of whether visitors could do things, rather than what they did. After reviewing the elements of web performance, we look at synthetic testing and real user monitoring (RUM). For an understanding of web performance, read Chapter 8; when it’s time to deploy performance monitoring, review Chapters 9 and 10.

• Part four—Chapters 11 through 16—looks outward toward the rest of the Internet. This includes communities, both external and internal, as well as competitors. We look at the emergence of online communities and how companies are using them successfully today. We offer a framework for thinking about communities, and look at eight common community models and ways of monitoring them. Then we take a quick look at the internally facing communities. Finally, we show how to track your competitors with many of the tools we’ve covered for watching your own sites. If you’re involved in community monitoring or competitive analysis, you should read through this part of the book.

• Part five of the book—Chapters 17 and 18—discusses how to integrate and consolidate multiple kinds of monitoring data so you have a holistic view. We then consider what lies ahead for web monitoring and invite you to continue the discussion with us online.