Synopses & Reviews
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
Synopsis
Do you know the true value of your website to your organization? Complete Web Monitoring shows you how to integrate several different views of your online business -- including analytics, back-end performance, usability, communities, customer feedback, and competitive analysis -- into one clear picture that reveals the health and effectiveness of your web presence at any given moment. Complete Web Monitoring combines real-world examples, clear explanations, and practical recommendations in an engaging, easy-to-read format. For anyone involved in running a website, from web operators to e-business professionals, this book is a must-have. With Complete Web Monitoring, you will:
Discover how visitors use your site, employing web analytics and tools for customer feedback Determine if visitors are able to use the site as both you and they intend, using technologies that evaluate the health of your site's back-end performance Learn how visitors interact with your site, with tools to measure the effectiveness of usability and navigation Track all the communities related to your online presence: social networks, groups and mailing lists, forums, blogs, microblogs, real-time chat, wikis, and social news aggregators
You can't fix your mistakes if you don't know what they are. With the tools and advice in Complete Web Monitoring, you can learn how to avoid missed opportunities, frustrated users, and spiraling costs.
Synopsis
"Total Web Monitoring" shows readers how to keep track of their Web site's performance on the server, connect with users on the interface side, and how their site compares with the competition.
About the Author
Alistair Croll has been an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker for nearly 20 years. Hes worked on a variety of topics, from web performance, to big data, to cloud computing, to startups, in that time.
In 2001, he co-founded web performance startup Coradiant, and since that time has also launched Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, the Bitnorth conference, the International Startup Festival and several other early-stage companies.
Alistair is the chair of O'Reilly's Strata Conference, Techweb's Cloud Connect, and the International Startup Festival. Lean Analytics is his fourth book on analytics, technology, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Montreal, Canada and tries to mitigate chronic ADD by writing about far too many things at Solve For Interesting.
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.
Table of Contents
Dedication; Preface; How to Use This Book; What Will and Won't Be Covered; Who You Are; What You Know; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; How to Contact Us; Vendor Policy; Safari® Books Online; Reviewers; Acknowledgments; The Business Of Web Monitoring; Chapter 1: Why Watch Websites?; 1.1 A Fragmented View; 1.2 Out with the Old, in with the New; 1.3 A Note on Privacy: Tracking People; Chapter 2: What Business Are You In?; 2.1 Media Sites; 2.2 Transactional Sites; 2.3 Collaboration Sites; 2.4 Software-as-a-Service Applications; Chapter 3: What Could We Watch?; 3.1 How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?; 3.2 Where Is My Traffic Coming From?; 3.3 What's Working Best (and Worst)?; 3.4 How Good Is My Relationship with My Visitors?; 3.5 How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?; 3.6 How Am I Doing Against the Competition?; 3.7 Where Are My Risks?; 3.8 What Are People Saying About Me?; 3.9 How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?; 3.10 The Tools at Our Disposal; Chapter 4: The Four Big Questions; 4.1 What Did They Do?; 4.2 How Did They Do It?; 4.3 Why Did They Do It?; 4.4 Could They Do It?; 4.5 Putting It All Together; 4.6 Analyzing Data Properly; 4.7 A Complete Web Monitoring Maturity Model; Web Analytics, Usability, and the Voice of the Customer; Chapter 5: What Did They Do?: Web Analytics; 5.1 Dealing with Popularity and Distance; 5.2 The Core of Web Visibility; 5.3 A Quick History of Analytics; 5.4 The Three Stages of Analytics; 5.5 Implementing Web Analytics; 5.6 Sharing Analytics Data; 5.7 Choosing an Analytics Platform; 5.8 The Up-Front Work; 5.9 Web Analytics Maturity Model; Chapter 6: How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability; 6.1 Web Design Is a Hypothesis; 6.2 Seeing the Content: Scrolling Behavior; 6.3 Proper Interactions: Click Heatmaps; 6.4 Data Input and Abandonment: Form Analysis; 6.5 Individual Visits: Replay; 6.6 Implementing WIA; 6.7 Issues and Concerns; 6.8 Web Interaction Analytics Maturity Model; Chapter 7: Why Did They Do It?: Voice of the Customer; 7.1 The Travel Industry's Dilemma; 7.2 They Aren't Doing What You Think They Are; 7.3 What VOC Is; 7.4 What VOC Isn't; 7.5 Four Ways to Understand Users; 7.6 Kicking Off a VOC Program; 7.7 Deciding Who to Ask; 7.8 Encouraging Participation; 7.9 Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats; 7.10 Voice of the Customer Maturity Model; Web Performance and End User Experience; Chapter 8: Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management; 8.1 What's User Experience? What's Not?; 8.2 The Anatomy of a Web Session; 8.3 Wrinkles: Why It's Not Always That Easy; 8.4 Other Factors; 8.5 Measuring by Hand: Developer Tools; 8.6 Places and Tasks in User Experience; 8.7 Conclusions; Chapter 9: Could They Do It?: Synthetic Monitoring; 9.1 Monitoring Inside the Network; 9.2 Monitoring from Outside the Network; 9.3 Different Tests for Different Tiers; 9.4 Beyond a Simple GET: Compound Testing; 9.5 Configuring Synthetic Tests; 9.6 Aggregation and Visualization; 9.7 Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats; 9.8 Synthetic Monitoring Maturity Model; Chapter 10: Could They Do It?: Real User Monitoring; 10.1 RUM and Synthetic Testing Side by Side; 10.2 How We Use RUM; 10.3 Capturing End User Experience; 10.4 Deciding How to Collect RUM Data; 10.5 RUM Reporting: Individual and Aggregate Views; 10.6 RUM Concerns and Trends; 10.7 Real User Monitoring Maturity Model; Online Communities, Internal Communities, and Competitors; Chapter 11: What Did They Say?: Online Communities; 11.1 New Ways to Interact; 11.2 Consumer Technology; 11.3 Vocal Markets; 11.4 Where Communities Come from; 11.5 Online Communities on the Web; Chapter 12: Why Care About Communities?; 12.1 The Mouth of the Long Funnel; 12.2 A New Kind of PR; 12.3 Support Communities: Help Those Who Help Themselves; 12.4 Risk Avoidance: Watching What the Internet Thinks; 12.5 Business Agility: Iterative Improvements; 12.6 Getting Leads: Referral Communities; Chapter 13: The Anatomy of a Conversation; 13.1 The Participants: Who's Talking?; 13.2 The Topics: What Are They Talking About?; 13.3 The Places: Where Are They Talking?; Chapter 14: Tracking and Responding; 14.1 Searching a Community; 14.2 Joining a Community; 14.3 Moderating a Community; 14.4 Running a Community; 14.5 Putting It All Together; 14.6 Measuring Communities and Outcomes; 14.7 Reporting the Data; 14.8 Responding to the Community; 14.9 Community Listening Platforms; 14.10 Community Monitoring Maturity Model; Chapter 15: Internally Focused Communities; 15.1 Knowledge Management Strategies; 15.2 Internal Community Platform Examples; 15.3 The Internal Community Monitoring Maturity Model; Chapter 16: What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors; 16.1 Watching Competitors' Sites; 16.2 Do I Have Competitors I Don't Know About?; 16.3 Are They Getting More Traffic?; 16.4 Do They Have a Better Reputation?; 16.5 Are Their Sites Healthier Than Mine?; 16.6 Is Their Marketing and Branding Working Better?; 16.7 Are Their Sites Easier to Use or Better Designed?; 16.8 Have They Made Changes I Can Use?; 16.9 Preparing a Competitive Report; 16.10 Competitive Monitoring Maturity Model; Putting It All Together; Chapter 17: Putting It All Together; 17.1 Simplify, Simplify, Simplify; 17.2 Drill Down and Drill Up; 17.3 Visualization; 17.4 Segmentation; 17.5 Efficient Alerting; 17.6 Getting It All in the Same Place; 17.7 Tying Together Offsite and Onsite Data; Chapter 18: What's Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring; 18.1 Accounting and Optimization; 18.2 From Visits to Visitors; 18.3 From Pages to Places and Tasks; 18.4 Mobility; 18.5 Standardization; 18.6 Agencies Versus Individuals; 18.7 Monetizing Analytics; 18.8 A Holistic View; 18.9 A Complete Maturity Model; 18.10 A Complete Perspective; 18.11 The Unfinished Ending; KPIs for the Four Types of Site; Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Media Sites; Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Transactional Sites; Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Collaborative Sites; Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to SaaS Sites; Colophon;