Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors

Do you really understand your online presence? Are you confident that visitors can use your website? Do you know their motivations? How do online communities perceive your company? To innovate and adapt your business quickly, you must know the answers to these questions.

Complete Web Monitoring demonstrates how to measure every aspect of your web presence — including analytics, backend performance, usability, communities, customer feedback, and competitive analysis — whether you're running an e-commerce site, a community, a media property, or a Software-as-a-Service company. This book's concrete examples, clear explanations, and practical recommendations make it essential for anyone who runs a website.

With this book you will:

• Discover how visitors use and interact with your site through web analytics, segmentation, conversions, and user interaction analysis
• Find out your market's motivations with voice-of-the-customer research
• Measure the health and availability of your website with synthetic testing and real-user monitoring
• Track communities related to your online presence, including social networks, forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, and social news aggregators
• Understand how to assemble this data into clear reports tailored to your organization and audience

You can't fix what you don't measure. Complete Web Monitoring shows you how to transform missed opportunities, frustrated users, and spiraling costs into online success.

"This is a very comprehensive view of just about everything one needs to know about how websites work and what one needs to know about them. I'd like to make this book required reading for every employee at Gomez." — Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez

Alistair Croll is an analyst at research firm Bitcurrent, where he covers emerging web technologies, networking, and online applications. Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded Coradiant, a leader in online user monitoring, as well as research firm Networkshop. He has held product management positions with 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology. Alistair contributes to industry events such as Interop (where he runs the Cloud Computing and SaaS tracks), Structure, Mesh and Web2Expo. He also writes for a variety of blogs ( http://www.linkedin.com/in/alistaircroll) and is the author of numerous articles on Internet performance, security, cloud computing, and web technologies. Alistair co-authored Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Applications (1999) from Prentice-Hall.

Sean Power spends way too much time on the computer and needs to get out more. He has worked as a web systems administrator since the mid 90s, has worked with online communities for companies such as MTV Northern Europe, and helped users reduce the headaches of managing and monitoring web infrastructures through Coradiant, a web performance monitoring vendor. Prior to working at Coradiant, he was technical reviewer for the Addison-Wesley book Troubleshooting Linux Firewalls.

Sean is currently working as community gardener for Akoha, a company pioneering the industry of "social games", where he handles all things community and analytics. This puts a mile on his face, and lets him sleep well at night.

He completes his full plate by supporting the companion website to the book he wrote with Alistair Croll, Total Web Monitoring, published by O'Reilly.

In his spare time, Sean makes sure that servers stay up and curses spammers in the EFnet IRC community and occasionally updates his personal music related blog, when he's not writing web optimization articles.

You can find out more about him on LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/slpower), hear him ramble away on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/seanpower), or read about other stuff he's thinking of at the website he shares with Alistair, http://www.totalwebmonitoring.com.

• Chapter 1: Why Watch Websites?
• Chapter 2: What Business Are You In?
• Chapter 3: What Could We Watch?
• Chapter 4: The Four Big Questions

• Chapter 5: What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
• Chapter 6: How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability
• Chapter 7: Why Did They Do It?: Voice of the Customer

• Chapter 8: Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
• Chapter 9: Could They Do It?: Synthetic Monitoring
• Chapter 10: Could They Do It?: Real User Monitoring

• Chapter 11: What Did They Say?: Online Communities
• Chapter 12: Why Care About Communities?
• Chapter 13: The Anatomy of a Conversation
• Chapter 14: Tracking and Responding
• Chapter 15: Internally Focused Communities
• Chapter 16: What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors

• Chapter 17: Putting It All Together
• Chapter 18: Whats Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring