Complete Web Monitoring

From Pages to Places and Tasks

We’ve looked at the concept of places and tasks several times in this book: as a way to think about your website, as a means of defining analytics metrics, and as a tool for understanding the end user experience you need to measure.

The shift from document-centric monitoring to a places-and-tasks model is inevitable. We simply don’t use the Web as a set of pages any more. Startups like Kissmetrics are poised to take advantage of this shift in the fundamental structure of web monitoring.

This will change what we monitor. For places, we’ll care about efficiency and productivity; for tasks, we’ll focus on effectiveness and abandonment. We’ll also use new metrics, such as the number of times a user undoes a particular action, to measure efficiency and effectiveness.

Instrumenting places and tasks requires the collection of many new metrics, often from sources that can’t simply be instrumented with JavaScript: email campaigns, URL shorteners, RSS feeds, site crawlers, dynamic ad content, and inbound calls. The collection infrastructure needed to launch a complete web monitoring service will become far more significant and will require the integration of many different disciplines.