Complete Web Monitoring

Chapter 17. Putting It All Together

So far, we’ve looked at the many kinds of data you need to monitor, both on your site and elsewhere on the Internet. It’s a deluge of data, and you can spend your entire day analyzing it, leaving you little time for anything else.

The final step in complete web monitoring is putting it all together. This is hard work: while many organizations are now recognizing the need for complete web monitoring, few understand how to assemble it into a single, coherent whole.

But assemble it you must. Silos of web visibility lead to the wrong conclusions. Imagine, for example, a website redesign. If conversions go down following the design, you might assume that the design was a failure. If your service provider had a problem that made pages slow at the same time, however, you can’t tell whether the redesign was at fault or was, in fact, better.

With many moving parts behind even a simple website, having one part affect others is commonplace: conversions are down because people can’t understand a form field; a page isn’t usable because third-party content isn’t loading; a synthetic test is pointed at part of the site visitors never frequent; a survey gets no responses because the SSL certificate is broken.

In the end, you need to tie together performance, usability, web analytics, and customer opinion to get a complete picture. Here are some of the reasons for doing so.

Simplify, Simplify, Simplify

With so much data at your disposal, your first instinct may be to ...