Complete Web Monitoring

Implementing WIA

Now that you know which questions you want to answer with WIA, it’s time to implement it. Which tools you use will depend on what kinds of interaction you want to watch, and how much you need to drill down into individual visits.

Knowing Your Design Assumptions

Your first step is to map out your application and identify all of the assumptions you’ve made. There will be lots of them, so focus on these three:

Those that drive your business

These may include steps in a funnel, an invitation cycle, publishing content, or making a purchase. This is where you can maximize the effectiveness of your site and optimize conversions.

Those that drive support and helpdesk calls

Which pages make subscribers call you? Which pages give visitors the most ways to do the same things? Where do people usually get stuck? This is how you’ll address usability and find problems you haven’t identified.

Those that drive productivity

If there’s an action, such as upvoting a topic, adding a comment, updating a record, or browsing through a catalog, in which visitors spend most of their time, analyze it. This is your best chance to improve the efficiency of the application.

Once you’ve chosen the parts of your site to instrument, start collecting a baseline. Soon, you’ll know what “normal” is. You’ll have a pattern of clicks, or know which parts of a form make people leave, or know how far visitors scroll, and you can start testing variants on those forms much as you would for page analytics.

Deciding ...