Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

I oversee a domain that receives 20-30k visitors per day and while I had a pretty solid handle on analytics Alistair and Sean really gave me some key concepts that have improved how we look at our analytics and the actions we take based on them.

After reading Complete Website Monitoring you will walk away with actionable ideas that you can easily convey to management and that will positively affect your bottom line.