Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors [Paperback]

Alistair Croll (Author), Sean Power (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 26, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0596155131 | ISBN-13: 978-0596155131 | Edition: 1 Original

Do you really understand your online presence? Are you confident that visitors can use your website? Do you know their motivations? How do online communities perceive your company? To innovate and adapt your business quickly, you must know the answers to these questions.

Complete Web Monitoring demonstrates how to measure every aspect of your web presence -- including analytics, backend performance, usability, communities, customer feedback, and competitive analysis -- whether you're running an e-commerce site, a community, a media property, or a Software-as-a-Service company. This book's concrete examples, clear explanations, and practical recommendations make it essential for anyone who runs a website.

With this book you will:

• Discover how visitors use and interact with your site through web analytics, segmentation, conversions, and user interaction analysis
• Find out your market's motivations with voice-of-the-customer research
• Measure the health and availability of your website with synthetic testing and real-user monitoring
• Track communities related to your online presence, including social networks, forums, blogs, microblogs, wikis, and social news aggregators
• Understand how to assemble this data into clear reports tailored to your organization and audience

You can't fix what you don't measure. Complete Web Monitoring shows you how to transform missed opportunities, frustrated users, and spiraling costs into online success.

"This is a very comprehensive view of just about everything one needs to know about how websites work and what one needs to know about them. I'd like to make this book required reading for every employee at Gomez." -- Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Alistair Croll has been an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker for nearly 20 years. He’s worked on a variety of topics, from web performance, to big data, to cloud computing, to startups, in that time.

In 2001, he co-founded web performance startup Coradiant, and since that time has also launched Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, the Bitnorth conference, the International Startup Festival and several other early-stage companies.

Alistair is the chair of O'Reilly's Strata Conference, Techweb's Cloud Connect, and the International Startup Festival. Lean Analytics is his fourth book on analytics, technology, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Montreal, Canada and tries to mitigate chronic ADD by writing about far too many things at Solve For Interesting.

Sean Power spends way too much time on the computer and needs to get out more. He has worked as a web systems administrator since the mid 90s, has worked with online communities for companies such as MTV Northern Europe, and helped users reduce the headaches of managing and monitoring web infrastructures through Coradiant, a web performance monitoring vendor. Prior to working at Coradiant, he was technical reviewer for the Addison-Wesley book Troubleshooting Linux Firewalls.

Sean is currently working as community gardener for Akoha, a company pioneering the industry of "social games", where he handles all things community and analytics. This puts a mile on his face, and lets him sleep well at night.

He completes his full plate by supporting the companion website to the book he wrote with Alistair Croll, Total Web Monitoring, published by O'Reilly.

In his spare time, Sean makes sure that servers stay up and curses spammers in the EFnet IRC community and occasionally updates his personal music related blog, when he's not writing web optimization articles.

You can find out more about him on LinkedIn (http://linkedin.com/in/slpower), hear him ramble away on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/seanpower), or read about other stuff he's thinking of at the website he shares with Alistair, http://www.totalwebmonitoring.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 672 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 Original edition (June 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596155131
• ISBN-13: 978-0596155131
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 1.3 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #484,768 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Author, analyst and entrepreneur who's somehow turned chronic ADHD into speaking with smart people about interesting things.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A new paradigm for monitoring your business's online presence September 23, 2009

By Lenny Rachitsky

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book will change the way you think about your online business. From page performance, to conversions, to user experience, to social media, "Complete Web Monitoring" covers the gamut of tools, techniques, and services that exist today to help you truly optimize the success of your online business.

The book breaks down all online business into four categories: Media, Transaction, Collaboration, and SaaS. Throughout the book, as you learn about the various flavors of analytics, usability, surveys, page performance, monitoring, online community management, collaboration...and how all of this fits together...you are given specific, direct, and actionable steps to take that apply to your specific business model. For example, "Transaction" businesses must focus on conversions, uptime of the checkout process, and what customers are saying about their products. "SaaS" companies should focus on the performance of their most common paths through the application, popularity of specific features, and the user experience of the holistic product.

The amount of data and the number of tools at your disposal are overwhelming. At times this book is rather overwhelming. Choosing between an analytics provider, a monitoring service, or a social media tracking service could keep you from actually accomplishing real work. Sometimes too much choice and too much data is a very dangerous thing. It's important to remember to step back, remember the goals behind your measurements, and focus on solving the problems of your customers. With that in mind, the lessons learned in this book will help you zero in on optimizing those end goals.

"Complete Web Monitoring" is valuable for the same reason it is difficult to categorize. The various tools and services that you learn about are generally used by many different departments across an organization, all for very different reasons, generally without any sort of collaboration. What you realize reading this book is that there is a lot more to the success of your business than the limited visibility you get from using these tools independently. To truly understand how your business is doing, and how you can improve not only revenue but also how you build your business, you need a holistic picture that includes data from numerous sources. "Complete Web Monitoring" gives you more then anything I've come across previously in giving you the tools, pointing you to the techniques, and teaching you to focus on what is most important.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, One Stop Shop for Achieving Complete End User Satisfaction September 16, 2009

By Ismail Elshareef VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This book is ultimately about the End-User. The content of this book is designed to answer the following four questions (in order) about the End-Users:

- What did they do?
- How did they do it?
- Why did they do it?
- Could they do it?

To answer the first question, a closer look at data warehouse and web analytics is in order. The authors talk about that in detail, listing tools and services that address various issues often faced in collecting user data. The second question, "how did they do it?" is answered through constant monitoring of your site's usability and engagement, both of which are explained well in this book. The third question is about user interaction and feedback. The authors attempt to answer this question by explaining the process of VOC, or Voice of Customer, and all the details it entails.

The most important content in this book, I believe, is laid out in the three chapters dedicated to answering the fourth question, "could they do it?"

The first chapter talks about Frontend Performance and End-User Experience. The topic of Frontend Performance is relatively new and the list of books dedicated to it is growing rapidly with Steve Souders' books on top of the list.

The second chapter tackles Synthetic Monitoring and its advantages and drawbacks. Following that, the authors move into Real User Monitoring in the third and last chapter attempting to answer this question.

The authors then dedicate what I think is too much content to communities and competitors and how monitoring them can help you better your site. Although the information is useful, I feel it took away from the focus of the book but not too much to be a distraction.

The authors then close the book with a recap and a look at the future of web monitoring. Both chapters are very useful and give a much needed perspective.

All in all, this is an excellent book for any serious web entrepreneur and for all online businesses that hold "User Experience" paramount in their business objectives.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent depth of coverage October 13, 2009

By Steve S.

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

The authors to an excellent job at covering the material. I especially liked the fact that they understand web sites are multi-faceted and thus generate information from different perspectives with each perspective giving their own view of what is happening and thus how the site can be improved. The authors have also clearly been involved with properties that tie into larger infrastructures through their reference to adjacent components like load balancers and how the web and these devices interact.

The tone of the book is friendly and easy to follow (typical of O'Reilly books) and its easy to crack open a section and skim through that to get useful information quickly.

The book is a little on the long side, though I don't think I'd want it to be shorter. This can make it appear at first glance to be intimidating, but tone removes that barrier quickly.

Five stars for depth of coverage. I recommend it to anyone that is responsible in any way for a web site. You don't know what you can be told about your site's users until you've taken the time to go through this book.