As we’ve looked at various forms of monitoring, we’ve considered a maturity model that begins with basic technical visibility and moves toward a more integrated, comprehensive perspective of your entire online presence. Table 18-1 shows the questions an organization is trying to answer at each level of maturity.
Table 18-1. The questions an organization answers at each level of web monitoring maturity across various forms of monitoring
Level 1 | Level 2 | Level 3 | Level 4 | Level 5 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Technical details | Minding your own house | Engaging the Internet | Building relationships | Web business strategy | |
Analytics | How many hits did I get? | How many conversions have I had? | What segments or sites are sending me the most, best traffic? | How loyal are my users, and what’s their lifetime value? What content works best for them? | What KPIs should I use to manage my organization? How are online and offline channels related? |
WIA | What did visitors see and click? | Where in a form or a page do users get stuck or abandon? How can I improve my design? | How do different visitor segments interact with my site? | How long does it take for people to learn the application? Where do they get stuck? Can I resolve their problems by having their sessions in my CRM? | Can I automatically serve optimal content and navigation for different segments and levels of visitor experience? How efficient/productive are users? |
VOC | What do emails and “contact us” forms say about visitor satisfaction? | When I intercept visitors, what do they tell me about my site, their perception of me, and their loyalty to my products or services? | When I engage my audience elsewhere on the Internet, what do they say? What’s their sentiment? How does word of mouth spread? | How does visitor feedback correlate with conversions? What do visitors tell me about my competitors? | How do I tie visitor sentiment to employee performance, software release success, and product road maps? |
Synthetic monitoring | Is my site up? How fast is it? | Are transactions working? When things are slow, which tier of the infrastructure is guilty? | How are the communities and third parties on which I rely working? How’s my CDN? Which parts of the Internet are slowest? Did I make my overall SLA? | How does my performance and availability affect my business? What are my aggregate scorecards? | What’s the best balance of performance, capacity cost, and revenue? What’s the business plan for uptime? Does IT get bonuses based on delivery? How cost-effective is our elastic capacity? |
RUM | What are the traffic flows? When a problem happens, what does the trace show me? | How fast are pages loading for actual users? Which pages, servers, and objects are slowest? How healthy are transactions for actual users? | Which segments of visitors are most correlated with performance issues? Who are my worst-served customers? For whom were SLAs violated? | How did the latest release affect user experience? What’s a given user’s lifetime SLA? | How do online incidents tie back to CRM and support response? Have I automated the refund and dispute resolution process with RUM data? |
External community | Am I being discussed? | Do I have a presence? Are people engaging with me on my own site? | Are they listening to & amplifying me? What’s sentiment like? Which messages work best with which communities? | How does the “long funnel” affect my revenues? What’s the lifetime engagement of a visitor across all social networks? Who are my most vocal/supportive community members? | What will the community buy? How do I automatically match the right messages to each audience? How does my community help itself? Is virality a part of business planning? |
Internal community | How much information have we generated? | How good is the information we’re generating? What’s most and least used? How easily can employees find it? | How integrated is KM with corporate culture? What are people sharing most and least? | What’s the payoff? How does KM improve per-employee contribution or reduce per-employee cost? How are people connecting with one another? Are our collective guesses good? | What does our organization know? What is our organizational knowledge worth? How can we use better KM posture to improve competitive position? Are we hiring and firing based on employee knowledge contribution? |
Competitors | What are my competitors doing? | How does my site compare to competitors'? Is it as fast? As easy? | Am I more popular than competitors? Better ranked? More adopted by certain segments? | How loyal are my customers? What can they tell me about my positioning versus others? | Is competitive analysis pulling data from VOC, community, and EUEM? How should competitors’ strategies affect my own? |
Ultimately, your complete web monitoring strategy needs to span both your site and the other sites and communities that affect your business. It needs to track visitors through their offsite activity, arrival, usage, and long-term engagement. It must monitor how they help your business, and how they refer others to you.