Complete Web Monitoring

Chapter 18. What’s Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring

“Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door ... I betook myself to linking fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—what this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore meant in croaking ‘Nevermore.’”

--Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven,” 1845

In the first chapter of this book, we said that smart companies make mistakes faster. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that smart companies adapt faster, learning from their mistakes and forever tightening the feedback loop between what they attempt and what they achieve.

The monitoring tools and measurement techniques we’ve covered in this book are your eyes and ears, giving you an ever-improving view of your entire online presence. We’ve tried to lay out some fundamental principles within these pages: determine your goals, set up complete monitoring, baseline internally and externally, write down what you think will happen, make some changes, experiment, rinse, and repeat.

If writing this book has taught us anything, however, it’s that the technology of web monitoring is changing more quickly than we can document it. New approaches to improving visibility surface overnight, and things that were nascent yesterday are mainstream today.

In the course of researching and writing the text, we’ve talked to over a hundred companies building monitoring technologies—some still stealthy—and this has afforded a tantalizing glimpse of what’s coming.

Accounting and ...