Chapter 11. How Your Visitors Feel: User-Facing Metrics
IT OPERATORS ONCE CONCERNED THEMSELVES only with the health of their underlying infrastructure. The thinking went something like this: if the platforms on which the application was running were healthy, the user experience was good, too.
Today, we know this is not the case. A far larger percentage of the applications we build are web based and face a vast, unknown user base. End-user metrics are as critical to the success of a website as backend metrics. What's more, sudden problems with end-user metrics such as availability and page latency are often the first sign that something's wrong with the infrastructure.
Web operators need to know about four major categories of end-user measurements, as shown in Table 11-1.
Table 11-1. The four kinds of end-user metrics
Type of metric | What it's used for | Questions it answers | Who cares most about it |
|---|---|---|---|
Web analytics | Tracks visitors as they use the site to see whether they did what you wanted them to | What percentage of visitors bought a product? Which segment of visitors is most likely to invite friends? Which content makes people stay longer? | Marketers and merchandisers, product managers |
Web performance | Measures the health of the site from the outside perspective | How long does it take to deliver a page to a visitor? Where is the site slowest from? What percentage of the time is the site working properly? | IT operators and those responsible for service levels |
Web Interaction Analytics ... |
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