Complete Web Monitoring

The Tools at Our Disposal

Clearly, there are many metrics and KPIs to gather in order to understand and improve your online presence. Fortunately, there’s a wide range of tools available for watching yourself online. The trick is to use the right technologies to collect the metrics that matter the most to your business.

At the broadest level, there are three categories of monitoring technology you can use to understand web activity. You can collect what users do from various points in the web connection; you can use search engines that crawl and index the web, and may send you alerts for changes or keywords; and you can run scripts that test your site directly.

Collection Tools

There are many ways to collect visitor information, depending on how much access you have to your servers, the features of those visitors’ browsers, and the kind of data you wish to collect.

Collection can happen on your own machines, on intermediate devices that collect a copy of traffic, through a browser toolbar, or on the visitor’s browser. It may also happen with third-party services like FeedBurner (for RSS feeds) or Mashery (for APIs and web services) that proxy your content or manage your APIs.

The volume of data collected in these ways grows proportionally with traffic. Collecting data may slow down your servers, and may also pose privacy risks. You also need to consider what various collection methods can see, since they all have different perspectives. An inline sniffer can’t see client-side page load ...