- Complete Web Monitoring
- Transactional Sites
- Collaboration Sites
- Software-as-a-Service Applications
- 3. What Could We Watch?
- 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 Visitors?
- 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?
- The Tools at Our Disposal
- 4. The Four Big Questions
- 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
- The Three Stages of Analytics
- Implementing Web Analytics
- Sharing Analytics Data
- Choosing an Analytics Platform
- The Up-Front Work
- Web Analytics Maturity Model
- 6. How Did They Do It?: Monitoring Web Usability
- Web Design Is a Hypothesis
- Seeing the Content: Scrolling Behavior
- Proper Interactions: Click Heatmaps
- 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?”
- Stalking Efficiently: What You Replay Depends on the Problem You’re Solving
- Implementing WIA
- 5. What Did They Do?: Web Analytics
- 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
- What VOC Isn’t
- 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
- 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
- Deciding Who to Ask
- Encouraging Participation
- Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
- III. Web Performance and End User Experience
- 8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
- What’s User Experience? What’s Not?
- The Anatomy of a Web Session
- Wrinkles: Why It’s Not Always That Easy
- DNS Latency
- Multiple Possible Sources
- Slow Networks
- Fiddling with Things: The Load Balancer
- 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
- Other Factors
- Measuring by Hand: Developer Tools
- Places and Tasks in User Experience
- Conclusions
- 9. Could They Do It?: Synthetic Monitoring
- Monitoring Inside the Network
- Monitoring from Outside the Network
- Different Tests for Different Tiers
- Beyond a Simple GET: Compound Testing
- Configuring Synthetic Tests
- Aggregation and Visualization
- Advantages, Concerns, and Caveats
- Synthetic Monitoring Maturity Model
- 10. Could They Do It?: Real User Monitoring
- RUM and Synthetic Testing Side by Side
- How We Use RUM
- Capturing End User Experience
- Deciding How to Collect RUM Data
- RUM Reporting: Individual and Aggregate Views
- RUM Concerns and Trends
- Real User Monitoring Maturity Model
- 8. Could They Do It?: End User Experience Management
- IV. Online Communities, Internal Communities, and Competitors
- 12. Why Care About Communities?
- 13. The Anatomy of a Conversation
- The Participants: Who’s Talking?
- The Topics: What Are They Talking About?
- The Places: Where Are They Talking?
- 14. Tracking and Responding
- Searching a Community
- Joining a Community
- Moderating a Community
- Running a Community
- Putting It All Together
- Measuring Communities and Outcomes
- Reporting the Data
- Responding to the Community
- Community Listening Platforms
- Community Monitoring Maturity Model
- 15. Internally Focused Communities
- 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?
- 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
- Competitive Monitoring Maturity Model
- V. Putting It All Together
- 17. Putting It All Together
- 18. What’s Next?: The Future of Web Monitoring
- 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 Media Sites
- 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
Recall the places-and-tasks model we outlined in Chapter 5. It’s not just a good way to understand what users did—it’s also useful for thinking about their experiences on your website.
If the page is a place, we can measure the initial loading as outlined earlier. At some point, the page is loaded, and the user can interact with it. Something triggers a change to the place:
Minor input, such as dragging an item into a shopping cart or upvoting a story.
Client-side scripts that periodically refresh a display.
Client-side prepushing (the opposite of prefetching), in which the browser sends content to the server ahead of time. This is a common pattern in blogging (saving a draft of a post) or webmail (uploading an attachment in the background).
Server events that push new content out to the client across a nailed-up HTTP connection or a web socket.
These updates take time to load and may have errors, but they’re only a small fraction of a full page retrieval. It’s not correct to measure these updates as a sequence of events the way we do for pages. Instead, it’s more accurate to describe them the way we would describe bandwidth: the delay between the server sending new content and the user seeing it. Place performance should therefore be described in terms of the frequency of updates and the latency with which the page is updated or the display refreshed.
Traditionally, the focus of monitoring is on tasks—and their abandonment—rather than on places. We expect users to move toward a particular outcome. This may still be within a single page (for example, a Flash shopping cart), but we have to measure the progress toward that outcome using a blend of analytics and performance metrics. These can include:
Delay in loading the next step in the task
Abandonment at each step
The time the user spends thinking (considering an offer, filling out a form)
The start of a task is the moment the visitor clicks on the link to begin that task (for example, the Enroll button).
An organization with a mature monitoring strategy could map out places and tasks on its website, assign performance metrics to each of them (with a particular focus on latency in places and productivity in tasks) and tie this to business outcomes from analytics tools. This would provide a unified view of web health across the entire website that linked user experience to business goals.
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