Home Page Icon
Home Page
Table of Contents for
Complete Web Monitoring
Close
Complete Web Monitoring
by Sean Power, Alistair Croll
Complete Web Monitoring
Complete Web Monitoring
Preface
How to Use This Book
What Will and Won’t Be Covered
Who You Are
Conventions Used in This Book
Using Code Examples
How to Contact Us
Vendor Policy
Safari® Books Online
Reviewers
Acknowledgments
I. The Business Of Web Monitoring
Out with the Old, in with the New
A Note on Privacy: Tracking People
Transactional Sites
Business Model
Collaboration Sites
Business Model
Software-as-a-Service Applications
Business Model
3. What Could We Watch?
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Conversion and Abandonment
Click-Throughs
Offline Activity
User-Generated Content
Subscriptions
Billing and Account Use
Where Is My Traffic Coming From?
Referring Websites
Inbound Links from Social Networks
Visitor Motivation
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
Site Effectiveness
Ad and Campaign Effectiveness
Findability and Search Effectiveness
Trouble Ticketing and Escalation
Content Popularity
Usability
User Productivity
Community Rankings and Rewards
How Good Is My Relationship with My Visitors?
Loyalty
Enrollment
Reach
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
Availability and Performance
Service Level Agreement Compliance
Content Delivery
Capacity and Flash Traffic: When Digg and Twitter Come to Visit
Impact of Performance on Outcomes
Traffic Spikes from Marketing Efforts
Seasonal Usage Patterns
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Site Popularity and Ranking
How People Are Finding My Competitors
Relative Site Performance
Competitor Activity
Where Are My Risks?
Trolling and Spamming
Copyright and Legal Liability
Fraud, Privacy, and Account Sharing
What Are People Saying About Me?
Site Reputation
Trends
Social Network Activity
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
API Access and Usage
Mashups, Stolen Content, and Illegal Syndication
Integration with Legacy Systems
The Tools at Our Disposal
Collection Tools
Search Systems
Testing Services
4. The Four Big Questions
What Did They Do?
How Did They Do It?
Why Did They Do It?
Could They Do It?
Putting It All Together
Analyzing Data Properly
Always Compare
Segment Everything
Don’t Settle for Averages
A Complete Web Monitoring Maturity Model
Level 1: Technical Details
Level 2: Minding Your Own House
Level 3: Engaging the Internet
Level 4: Building Relationships
Level 5: Web Business Strategy
The Watching Websites Maturity Model
II. Web Analytics, Usability, and the Voice of the Customer
5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
Dealing with Popularity and Distance
The Core of Web Visibility
A Quick History of Analytics
From IT to Marketing
JavaScript collection let marketing bypass IT
Search engines changed the reports marketers wanted
Service models meant pay-as-you-go economics
From Hits to Pages: Tracking Reach
From Pages to Visits: The Rise of the Cookie
From Visits to Outcomes: Tracking Goals
From Technology to Meaning: Tagging Content
An Integrated View
Places and Tasks
Places are where users hang out
Tasks occur when users have a mission
A new way to look at sites
What can you do to get started?
The Three Stages of Analytics
Finding the Site: The Long Funnel
Direct traffic
Organic search
Paid search and online advertising
Referrals
Linkbacks
The long funnel
Using the Site: Tracking Your Visitors
Where did they come in?
Places and tasks revisited
Segmentation
Goals
Putting it all together
Leaving the Site: Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow
Abandonment and bounce rate
Attrition
Desirable Outcomes
Tracking referrals and ad clicks
Implementing Web Analytics
Define Your Site’s Goals
Set Up Data Capture
Server logs
Server agents
Man in the middle: Traffic capture
Static image request
JavaScript
Comparing data capture models
Set Up Filters
Identify Segments You Want to Analyze
Tag Your Pages to Give Them Meaning
Campaign Integration
Go Live and Verify Everything
Is performance still acceptable?
Are pages instrumented properly?
Are goals properly configured to measure conversions?
Are tags working correctly?
Sharing Analytics Data
Repeat Consistently
Start Experimenting
Repeat and ramp
Choosing an Analytics Platform
Free Versus Paid
Real-Time Versus Trending
Hosted Versus In-House
Data Portability
The Up-Front Work
What You Get for Free
What You Get with a Bit of Work
What You Get with a Bit More Work
What You Get with a Lot of Work
Web Analytics Maturity Model
6. How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability
Web Design Is a Hypothesis
Four Kinds of Interaction
Seeing the Content: Scrolling Behavior
Scrolling As a Metric of Visibility
Paying attention
Your mileage will vary
Proper Interactions: Click Heatmaps
Usability and Affordance
Analyzing Mouse Interactions
Segmenting clicks
Data Input and Abandonment: Form Analysis
Individual Visits: Replay
Stalking Efficiently: What You Replay Depends on the Problem You’re Solving
Post-launch usability testing: Are my designs working?
Conversion optimization: why aren’t conversions as good as they should be?
Helpdesk support: Why is this visitor having issues?
Incident diagnosis: Why is this problem happening?
Test case creation: What steps are needed to test the app?
Dispute resolution: How do I prove it’s not my fault?
Retroactive Segmentation: Answering “What If?”
Implementing WIA
Knowing Your Design Assumptions
Deciding What to Capture
Instrumenting and Collecting Interactions
Inline WIA
Client-side WIA
Service versus software
Sampling and completeness
Filtering and content reduction
Augmenting visits with extraction and tagging
Tying WIA to other sources
Web Interaction Analytics Maturity Model
7. Why Did They Do It?: Voice of the Customer
The Travel Industry’s Dilemma
They Aren’t Doing What You Think They Are
What VOC Is
Insight and Clues
Subjective Scoring
Demographics
Surfographics
Cookie disambiguation
Familiarity with web technologies
Collection of Visit Mechanics Unavailable Elsewhere
What VOC Isn’t
It’s Not a Substitute for Other Forms of Collection
It’s Not Representative of Your User Base
It’s Not an Alternative to a Community
It’s Not a Substitute for Enrollment
Four Ways to Understand Users
Kicking Off a VOC Program
Planning the Study
The goals of the study
The Kinds of Questions to Ask
Segmentation
Evaluation
Recall
General feedback and exploration
Mindset
Designing the Study’s Navigation
Branching logic
Randomizing questions
Control questions
Why Surveys Fail
Don’t ask for frequency of visits
Don’t ask about subscription rates
Don’t ask what they just did
Don’t use VOC to determine web performance
Don’t ask about loyalty
Don’t ask for demographic data that you can get from other sources
Don’t ask questions they can’t answer
Don’t ask too many questions
Don’t ask a question that won’t reveal anything
Always give visitors an out
Discourage lingering
Provide room for subjective feedback when no answer applies
Integrating VOC into Your Website
Trying the Study
Choosing Respondents
Recruitment
Interception
Self-selection and feedback buttons
An overview of VOC methods
Deciding Who to Ask
Private Panels
Disqualifying Certain Visitor Types
Encouraging Participation
Getting Great Response Rates
The risks of rewards
Setting Expectations
Permission to Follow Up
Improving Your Results
High recruitment bounce rates
Low recruitment response rates
Poor interception response rates
Poor start rates
Poor completion rates
Large number of disqualified responses
Analyzing the Data
The importance of segmentation and representation
Analyzing integer data
Displaying numerical breakdowns
Ordinal data
Open-ended data
Integrating VOC Data with Other Analytics
Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
Learning What to Try Next
Becoming Less About Understanding, More About Evaluating Effectiveness
You May Have to Ask Redundant Questions
III. Web Performance and End User Experience
8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
What’s User Experience? What’s Not?
ITIL and Apdex: IT Best Practices
Why Care About Performance and Availability?
Establish agreed-upon baselines
Detect and repair errors to reduce downtime
Measure the effectiveness of a change
Know the impact of an outage
Resolve disputes with end users
Estimate future capacity requirements
Things That Affect End User Experience
Availability
Performance problems
The Anatomy of a Web Session
Finding the Destination
Establishing a Connection
How TCP works
Deciding which port to use
Setting up the connection
Securing the Connection
Retrieving an Object
The initial response: HTTP status codes
Object metadata: Describing what’s being sent
Preparing the response
Sending the response
Getting a Page
Doing lots of things at once: Parallelism
Interpreting the page
Assembling the objects
A timeline of page milestones
Getting a Series of Pages
Wrinkles: Why It’s Not Always That Easy
DNS Latency
Multiple Possible Sources
Global Server Load Balancing
Content delivery networks
Slow Networks
Low bandwidth
Hops—devices between your browser and your destination
Congestion and packet loss
Turns: Back and forth is the real problem
Fiddling with Things: The Load Balancer
Distributing load
Avoiding broken machines
Address translation
Consolidating requests
Compressing and encrypting responses
Server Issues
Server OS: Handling networking functions
Web service: Presentation layer, file retrieval
Dynamic tier: Application logic
Storage tier: Data, state persistence
Third-party components: Web services, transaction processing
Permissions and authentication
The relationship between workload and performance
The end result: Wide ranges of server responsiveness
Client Issues
Desktop workload
The browser
Browser compatibility
Stylesheets and page layout
Processing the page
Prefetching
Other Factors
Browser Add-ons Are the New Clients
Timing User Experience with Browser Events
Nonstandard Web Traffic
RSS feeds and podcasts
Peer-to-peer clients
A Table of EUEM Problems
Measuring by Hand: Developer Tools
Network Problems: Sniffing the Wire
Application Problems: Looking at the Desktop
Internet Problems: Testing from Elsewhere
Places and Tasks in User Experience
Place Performance: Updating the Container
Task Performance: Moving to the Next Step
Conclusions
9. Could They Do It?: Synthetic Monitoring
Monitoring Inside the Network
Using the Load Balancer to Test
Monitoring from Outside the Network
A Cautionary Tale
What Can Go Wrong?
Why Use a Service?
Different Tests for Different Tiers
Testing DNS
Getting There from Here: Traceroute
Testing Network Connectivity: Ping
Asking for a Single Object: HTTP GETs
Beyond Status Codes: Examining the Response
Parsing Dynamic Content
Checking data persistence: Database access and backend services
Beyond a Simple GET: Compound Testing
Getting the Whole Picture: Page Testing
Monitoring a Process: Transaction Testing
Data Collection: Pages or Objects?
Page detail
Object detail
Error recording
Is That a Real Browser or Just a Script?
Browser simulation
Browser puppetry
Configuring Synthetic Tests
Test Count: How Much Is Too Much?
Test Interval: How Frequently Should You Test?
Problem detection: Availability testing
Baselining and planning: Performance testing
Client Variety: How Should I Mimic My Users?
Browser type
End user bandwidth
Geographic Distribution: From Where Should You Test?
Putting It All Together
Setting Up the Tests
Setting Up Alerts
Aggregation and Visualization
Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
No Concept of Load
Muddying the Analytics
Checking Up on Your Content Delivery Networks
Rich Internet Applications
Site Updates Kill Your Tests
Generating Excessive Traffic
Data Exportability
Competitive Benchmarking
Tests Don’t Reflect Actual User Experience
Synthetic Monitoring Maturity Model
10. Could They Do It?: Real User Monitoring
RUM and Synthetic Testing Side by Side
How We Use RUM
Proving That You Met SLA Targets
Supporting Users and Resolving Disputes
“First-Cause” Analysis
Helping to Configure Synthetic Tests
As Content for QA in New Tests
Capturing End User Experience
How RUM Works
Server-Side Capture: Putting the Pieces Together
Client-Side Capture: Recording Milestones
What We Record About a Page
Performance metrics
Headers and DOM information
Error conditions
Page content
Correlational data
External metadata
Deciding How to Collect RUM Data
Server Logging
How server logging captures user sessions
How server logging captures timing information
Server logging pros and cons
Reverse Proxies
How reverse proxies capture user sessions
How reverse proxies capture timing information
Reverse proxy pros and cons
Inline (Sniffers and Passive Analysis)
How inline devices capture user sessions
How inline devices capture timing information
Inline device pros and cons
Agent-Based Capture
How agents capture user sessions
How agents capture timing information
Agent pros and cons
JavaScript
How JavaScript captures user sessions
How JavaScript captures timing information
JavaScript pros and cons
JavaScript and Episodes
How Episodes works
The right answer: Hybrid collection
RUM Reporting: Individual and Aggregate Views
RUM Concerns and Trends
Cookie Encryption and Session Reassembly
Privacy
RIA Integration
Storage Issues
Exportability and Portability
Data Warehousing
Network Topologies and the Opacity of the Load Balancer
Real User Monitoring Maturity Model
IV. Online Communities, Internal Communities, and Competitors
Consumer Technology
Where Communities Come from
Digital Interactions
Making It Easy for Everyone
Online Communities on the Web
Deciding What Mattered
Email for Everyone, Everywhere
Instant Gratification
Everyone’s a Publisher
Microblogging Tells the World What We’re Thinking
12. Why Care About Communities?
The Mouth of the Long Funnel
A New Kind of PR
Broadcast Marketing Communications
Online Marketing Communications
Viral Marketing: Pump Up the Volume
The Bass Diffusion Curve
Community Marketing: Improving the Signal
Support Communities: Help Those Who Help Themselves
What Makes a Good Support Community?
Risk Avoidance: Watching What the Internet Thinks
Business Agility: Iterative Improvements
A Climate of Faster Change
Getting Leads: Referral Communities
13. The Anatomy of a Conversation
The Participants: Who’s Talking?
Internal Community Advocates
Executive sponsor
Administrators
Moderators
Subject matter experts
External Community Members
Power laws and community members
Long tail of freaks
Fans and contributors
Lurking, occasional, and bursty users
Disengaged users
The Topics: What Are They Talking About?
The Places: Where Are They Talking?
Different Community Models
User Groups, Newsgroups, and Mailing Lists
Forums
Real-Time Communication Tools
Social Networks
Blogs
A note on megablogs
Wikis
Micromessaging
Asymmetric following
Fluid relationships
Follower count
Limited context
Extensible syntax
The constraints of brevity
An open API
Social News Aggregators
Combined Platforms
Why Be Everywhere?
Monitoring Communities
14. Tracking and Responding
Searching a Community
Searching Groups and Mailing Lists
Searching Forums
Searching Real-Time Chat Systems
Searching Social Networks
Searching Blogs
Searching Wikis
Searching Micromessaging Tools
Searching Social News Aggregators
Cross-Platform Searching
Joining a Community
Joining Groups and Mailing Lists
Joining Forums
Joining Real-Time Chat Systems
Joining Social Networks
Joining Blogs
Joining Wikis
Joining Micromessaging Tools
Joining Social News Aggregators
Moderating a Community
Moderating Groups and Mailing Lists
Moderating Forums
Moderating Real-Time Chat Systems
Moderating Social Networks
Moderating Blogs
Moderating Wikis
Moderating Micromessaging Tools
Moderating Social News Aggregators
Running a Community
Running Groups and Mailing Lists
Running Forums
Running Real-Time Chat Systems
Running Social Networks
Running Blogs
Running Wikis
Incipient links
What operating a wiki can show you
Running Micromessaging Tools
Running Social News Aggregators
Putting It All Together
Measuring Communities and Outcomes
Single Impression
Read Content
Used the Site
Returning
Enrolled
Engaged
Spreading
Converted
Reporting the Data
What’s in a Community Report?
The Mechanics of Tracking the Long Funnel
Custom URLs
The three-step personal invite
Using campaign URLs and URL shortening
Facebook and other multisite trackers
Responding to the Community
Join the Conversation
Amplify the Conversation
Make the Conversation Personal
Community Listening Platforms
How Listening Tools Find the Conversations
How Tools Aggregate the Content
River of news to tap into the feed
Keyword summary to see what’s being discussed
Influencer scores to see who’s got clout
Threading and drill-down to look at the people
Graphs over time to understand how much
Sentiment analysis to understand tone and mood
How Tools Manage the Response
Community Monitoring Maturity Model
15. Internally Focused Communities
Knowledge Management Strategies
Internal Community Platform Examples
Chat
Social Networks
Wikis
Micromessaging Tools
Social News Aggregators
The Internal Community Monitoring Maturity Model
16. What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors
Watching Competitors’ Sites
Do I Have Competitors I Don’t Know About?
Are They Getting More Traffic?
Do They Have a Better Reputation?
PageRank
SEO Ranking
Technorati
Are Their Sites Healthier Than Mine?
Is Their Marketing and Branding Working Better?
Are Their Sites Easier to Use or Better Designed?
Have They Made Changes I Can Use?
Preparing a Competitive Report
What’s in a Weekly Competitive Report
Communicating Competitive Information
Competitive Monitoring Maturity Model
V. Putting It All Together
17. Putting It All Together
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Drill Down and Drill Up
Visualization
Segmentation
Efficient Alerting
Getting It All in the Same Place
Unified Provider
Data Warehouse
Merging visitor data: The mega-record
ETL: Getting the data into the warehouse
The Single Pane of Glass: Mashups
Browser mashup
Desktop mashup
Site mashup
Roll your own mashup
Building a feed with Yahoo! Pipes
Comparing apples to apples
Alerting Systems
Tying Together Offsite and Onsite Data
Visitor Self-Identification
Using Shared Keys
18. What’s Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring
Accounting and Optimization
From Visits to Visitors
Personal Identity Is Credibility
From Pages to Places and Tasks
Mobility
Blurring Offline and Online Analytics
Standardization
Agencies Versus Individuals
Monetizing Analytics
Carriers
Search Engines
URL Shorteners
Social Networks
SaaS Providers
A Holistic View
The Move to a Long Funnel
A Complete Maturity Model
A Complete Perspective
The Unfinished Ending
A. KPIs for the Four Types of Site
Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Media Sites
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Where Are My Risks?
What Are People Saying About Me?
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Collaborative Sites
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Where Are My Risks?
What Are People Saying About Me?
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to SaaS Sites
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Where Are My Risks?
What Are People Saying About Me?
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
Index
Colophon
Search in book...
Toggle Font Controls
Playlists
Add To
Create new playlist
Name your new playlist
Playlist description (optional)
Cancel
Create playlist
Sign In
Email address
Password
Forgot Password?
Create account
Login
or
Continue with Facebook
Continue with Google
Sign Up
Full Name
Email address
Confirm Email Address
Password
Login
Create account
or
Continue with Facebook
Continue with Google
Prev
Previous Chapter
Cover
Next
Next Chapter
Complete Web Monitoring
Complete Web Monitoring
Table of Contents
Preface
How to Use This Book
What Will and Won’t Be Covered
Who You Are
What You Know
Conventions Used in This Book
Using Code Examples
How to Contact Us
Vendor Policy
Safari® Books Online
Reviewers
Acknowledgments
I. The Business Of Web Monitoring
1. Why Watch Websites?
A Fragmented View
Out with the Old, in with the New
A Note on Privacy: Tracking People
2. What Business Are You In?
Media Sites
Business Model
Transactional Sites
Business Model
Collaboration Sites
Business Model
Software-as-a-Service Applications
Business Model
3. What Could We Watch?
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Conversion and Abandonment
Click-Throughs
Offline Activity
User-Generated Content
Subscriptions
Billing and Account Use
Where Is My Traffic Coming From?
Referring Websites
Inbound Links from Social Networks
Visitor Motivation
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
Site Effectiveness
Ad and Campaign Effectiveness
Findability and Search Effectiveness
Trouble Ticketing and Escalation
Content Popularity
Usability
User Productivity
Community Rankings and Rewards
How Good Is My Relationship with My Visitors?
Loyalty
Enrollment
Reach
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
Availability and Performance
Service Level Agreement Compliance
Content Delivery
Capacity and Flash Traffic: When Digg and Twitter Come to Visit
Impact of Performance on Outcomes
Traffic Spikes from Marketing Efforts
Seasonal Usage Patterns
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Site Popularity and Ranking
How People Are Finding My Competitors
Relative Site Performance
Competitor Activity
Where Are My Risks?
Trolling and Spamming
Copyright and Legal Liability
Fraud, Privacy, and Account Sharing
What Are People Saying About Me?
Site Reputation
Trends
Social Network Activity
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
API Access and Usage
Mashups, Stolen Content, and Illegal Syndication
Integration with Legacy Systems
The Tools at Our Disposal
Collection Tools
Search Systems
Testing Services
4. The Four Big Questions
What Did They Do?
How Did They Do It?
Why Did They Do It?
Could They Do It?
Putting It All Together
Analyzing Data Properly
Always Compare
Segment Everything
Don’t Settle for Averages
A Complete Web Monitoring Maturity Model
Level 1: Technical Details
Level 2: Minding Your Own House
Level 3: Engaging the Internet
Level 4: Building Relationships
Level 5: Web Business Strategy
The Watching Websites Maturity Model
II. Web Analytics, Usability, and the Voice of the Customer
5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
Dealing with Popularity and Distance
The Core of Web Visibility
A Quick History of Analytics
From IT to Marketing
From Hits to Pages: Tracking Reach
From Pages to Visits: The Rise of the Cookie
From Visits to Outcomes: Tracking Goals
From Technology to Meaning: Tagging Content
An Integrated View
Places and Tasks
The Three Stages of Analytics
Finding the Site: The Long Funnel
Using the Site: Tracking Your Visitors
Leaving the Site: Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow
Desirable Outcomes
Implementing Web Analytics
Define Your Site’s Goals
Set Up Data Capture
Set Up Filters
Identify Segments You Want to Analyze
Tag Your Pages to Give Them Meaning
Campaign Integration
Go Live and Verify Everything
Sharing Analytics Data
Repeat Consistently
Start Experimenting
Choosing an Analytics Platform
Free Versus Paid
Real-Time Versus Trending
Hosted Versus In-House
Data Portability
The Up-Front Work
What You Get for Free
What You Get with a Bit of Work
What You Get with a Bit More Work
What You Get with a Lot of Work
Web Analytics Maturity Model
6. How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability
Web Design Is a Hypothesis
Four Kinds of Interaction
Seeing the Content: Scrolling Behavior
Scrolling As a Metric of Visibility
Proper Interactions: Click Heatmaps
Usability and Affordance
Analyzing Mouse Interactions
Data Input and Abandonment: Form Analysis
Individual Visits: Replay
Stalking Efficiently: What You Replay Depends on the Problem You’re Solving
Retroactive Segmentation: Answering “What If?”
Implementing WIA
Knowing Your Design Assumptions
Deciding What to Capture
Instrumenting and Collecting Interactions
Issues and Concerns
What if the Page Changes?
Visitor Actions WIA Can’t See
Dynamic Naming and Page Context
Browser Rendering Issues
Different Clicks Have Different Meanings
The Impact of WIA Capture on Performance
Playback, Page Neutering, and Plug-in Components
Privacy
Web Interaction Analytics Maturity Model
7. Why Did They Do It?: Voice of the Customer
The Travel Industry’s Dilemma
They Aren’t Doing What You Think They Are
What VOC Is
Insight and Clues
Subjective Scoring
Demographics
Surfographics
Collection of Visit Mechanics Unavailable Elsewhere
What VOC Isn’t
It’s Not a Substitute for Other Forms of Collection
It’s Not Representative of Your User Base
It’s Not an Alternative to a Community
It’s Not a Substitute for Enrollment
Four Ways to Understand Users
Kicking Off a VOC Program
Planning the Study
The Kinds of Questions to Ask
Designing the Study’s Navigation
Why Surveys Fail
Integrating VOC into Your Website
Trying the Study
Choosing Respondents
Deciding Who to Ask
Private Panels
Disqualifying Certain Visitor Types
Encouraging Participation
Getting Great Response Rates
Setting Expectations
Permission to Follow Up
Improving Your Results
Analyzing the Data
Integrating VOC Data with Other Analytics
Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
Learning What to Try Next
Becoming Less About Understanding, More About Evaluating Effectiveness
You May Have to Ask Redundant Questions
Voice of the Customer Maturity Model
III. Web Performance and End User Experience
8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
What’s User Experience? What’s Not?
ITIL and Apdex: IT Best Practices
Why Care About Performance and Availability?
Things That Affect End User Experience
The Anatomy of a Web Session
Finding the Destination
Establishing a Connection
Securing the Connection
Retrieving an Object
Getting a Page
Getting a Series of Pages
Wrinkles: Why It’s Not Always That Easy
DNS Latency
Multiple Possible Sources
Slow Networks
Fiddling with Things: The Load Balancer
Server Issues
Client Issues
Other Factors
Browser Add-ons Are the New Clients
Timing User Experience with Browser Events
Nonstandard Web Traffic
A Table of EUEM Problems
Measuring by Hand: Developer Tools
Network Problems: Sniffing the Wire
Application Problems: Looking at the Desktop
Internet Problems: Testing from Elsewhere
Places and Tasks in User Experience
Place Performance: Updating the Container
Task Performance: Moving to the Next Step
Conclusions
9. Could They Do It?: Synthetic Monitoring
Monitoring Inside the Network
Using the Load Balancer to Test
Monitoring from Outside the Network
A Cautionary Tale
What Can Go Wrong?
Why Use a Service?
Different Tests for Different Tiers
Testing DNS
Getting There from Here: Traceroute
Testing Network Connectivity: Ping
Asking for a Single Object: HTTP GETs
Beyond Status Codes: Examining the Response
Parsing Dynamic Content
Beyond a Simple GET: Compound Testing
Getting the Whole Picture: Page Testing
Monitoring a Process: Transaction Testing
Data Collection: Pages or Objects?
Is That a Real Browser or Just a Script?
Configuring Synthetic Tests
Test Count: How Much Is Too Much?
Test Interval: How Frequently Should You Test?
Client Variety: How Should I Mimic My Users?
Geographic Distribution: From Where Should You Test?
Putting It All Together
Setting Up the Tests
Setting Up Alerts
Aggregation and Visualization
Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
No Concept of Load
Muddying the Analytics
Checking Up on Your Content Delivery Networks
Rich Internet Applications
Site Updates Kill Your Tests
Generating Excessive Traffic
Data Exportability
Competitive Benchmarking
Tests Don’t Reflect Actual User Experience
Synthetic Monitoring Maturity Model
10. Could They Do It?: Real User Monitoring
RUM and Synthetic Testing Side by Side
How We Use RUM
Proving That You Met SLA Targets
Supporting Users and Resolving Disputes
“First-Cause” Analysis
Helping to Configure Synthetic Tests
As Content for QA in New Tests
Capturing End User Experience
How RUM Works
Server-Side Capture: Putting the Pieces Together
Client-Side Capture: Recording Milestones
What We Record About a Page
Deciding How to Collect RUM Data
Server Logging
Reverse Proxies
Inline (Sniffers and Passive Analysis)
Agent-Based Capture
JavaScript
JavaScript and Episodes
RUM Reporting: Individual and Aggregate Views
RUM Concerns and Trends
Cookie Encryption and Session Reassembly
Privacy
RIA Integration
Storage Issues
Exportability and Portability
Data Warehousing
Network Topologies and the Opacity of the Load Balancer
Real User Monitoring Maturity Model
IV. Online Communities, Internal Communities, and Competitors
11. What Did They Say?: Online Communities
New Ways to Interact
Consumer Technology
Vocal Markets
Where Communities Come from
Digital Interactions
Making It Easy for Everyone
Online Communities on the Web
Deciding What Mattered
Email for Everyone, Everywhere
Instant Gratification
Everyone’s a Publisher
Microblogging Tells the World What We’re Thinking
12. Why Care About Communities?
The Mouth of the Long Funnel
A New Kind of PR
Broadcast Marketing Communications
Online Marketing Communications
Viral Marketing: Pump Up the Volume
Community Marketing: Improving the Signal
Support Communities: Help Those Who Help Themselves
What Makes a Good Support Community?
Risk Avoidance: Watching What the Internet Thinks
Business Agility: Iterative Improvements
A Climate of Faster Change
Getting Leads: Referral Communities
13. The Anatomy of a Conversation
The Participants: Who’s Talking?
Internal Community Advocates
External Community Members
The Topics: What Are They Talking About?
The Places: Where Are They Talking?
Different Community Models
User Groups, Newsgroups, and Mailing Lists
Forums
Real-Time Communication Tools
Social Networks
Blogs
Wikis
Micromessaging
Social News Aggregators
Combined Platforms
Why Be Everywhere?
Monitoring Communities
14. Tracking and Responding
Searching a Community
Searching Groups and Mailing Lists
Searching Forums
Searching Real-Time Chat Systems
Searching Social Networks
Searching Blogs
Searching Wikis
Searching Micromessaging Tools
Searching Social News Aggregators
Cross-Platform Searching
Joining a Community
Joining Groups and Mailing Lists
Joining Forums
Joining Real-Time Chat Systems
Joining Social Networks
Joining Blogs
Joining Wikis
Joining Micromessaging Tools
Joining Social News Aggregators
Moderating a Community
Moderating Groups and Mailing Lists
Moderating Forums
Moderating Real-Time Chat Systems
Moderating Social Networks
Moderating Blogs
Moderating Wikis
Moderating Micromessaging Tools
Moderating Social News Aggregators
Running a Community
Running Groups and Mailing Lists
Running Forums
Running Real-Time Chat Systems
Running Social Networks
Running Blogs
Running Wikis
Running Micromessaging Tools
Running Social News Aggregators
Putting It All Together
Measuring Communities and Outcomes
Single Impression
Read Content
Used the Site
Returning
Enrolled
Engaged
Spreading
Converted
Reporting the Data
What’s in a Community Report?
The Mechanics of Tracking the Long Funnel
Responding to the Community
Join the Conversation
Amplify the Conversation
Make the Conversation Personal
Community Listening Platforms
How Listening Tools Find the Conversations
How Tools Aggregate the Content
How Tools Manage the Response
Community Monitoring Maturity Model
15. Internally Focused Communities
Knowledge Management Strategies
Internal Community Platform Examples
Chat
Social Networks
Wikis
Micromessaging Tools
Social News Aggregators
The Internal Community Monitoring Maturity Model
16. What Are They Plotting?: Watching Your Competitors
Watching Competitors’ Sites
Do I Have Competitors I Don’t Know About?
Are They Getting More Traffic?
Do They Have a Better Reputation?
PageRank
SEO Ranking
Technorati
Are Their Sites Healthier Than Mine?
Is Their Marketing and Branding Working Better?
Are Their Sites Easier to Use or Better Designed?
Have They Made Changes I Can Use?
Preparing a Competitive Report
What’s in a Weekly Competitive Report
Communicating Competitive Information
Competitive Monitoring Maturity Model
V. Putting It All Together
17. Putting It All Together
Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Drill Down and Drill Up
Visualization
Segmentation
Efficient Alerting
Getting It All in the Same Place
Unified Provider
Data Warehouse
The Single Pane of Glass: Mashups
Alerting Systems
Tying Together Offsite and Onsite Data
Visitor Self-Identification
Using Shared Keys
18. What’s Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring
Accounting and Optimization
From Visits to Visitors
Personal Identity Is Credibility
From Pages to Places and Tasks
Mobility
Blurring Offline and Online Analytics
Standardization
Agencies Versus Individuals
Monetizing Analytics
Carriers
Search Engines
URL Shorteners
Social Networks
SaaS Providers
A Holistic View
The Move to a Long Funnel
A Complete Maturity Model
A Complete Perspective
The Unfinished Ending
A. KPIs for the Four Types of Site
Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Media Sites
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Where Are My Risks?
What Are People Saying About Me?
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Transactional Sites
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Where Is My Traffic Coming from, and Why?
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Where Are My Risks?
What Are People Saying About Me?
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to Collaborative Sites
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Where Are My Risks?
What Are People Saying About Me?
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
Tailoring the Monitoring Mix to SaaS Sites
How Much Did Visitors Benefit My Business?
Where Is My Traffic Coming from?
What’s Working Best (and Worst)?
How Good Is My Relationship with My Users?
How Healthy Is My Infrastructure?
How Am I Doing Against the Competition?
Where Are My Risks?
What Are People Saying About Me?
How Are My Site and Content Being Used Elsewhere?
Index
Add Highlight
No Comment
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click
here
login for view all page.
Day Mode
Cloud Mode
Night Mode
Reset