Every business needs to know
how it is doing. That's the idea behind exit surveys,
customer feedback forms, suggestion boxes and other
devices. Without feedback from the customer, monitoring
inventory, expenses, revenue and other benchmarks,
a business can take a quick slide down a slippery
slope, without the owner ever seeing it coming –
or being able to stop the slide.
Webmasters also have things they should
be monitoring on their websites. Most of these can be
classified as traffic related or server performance
related. Here is my top ten list.
Monitoring website traffic
Traffic totals. You want
to know how much traffic you are generating. If the
line on the graph is heading down, you know you have
to find out why.
Referrers. It's not
enough just to know how many visitors you are getting.
You need to know where they are coming from. I discovered
I was getting a lot of visitors from a Thanksgiving
site. They were all being funneled into my Thanksgiving
Happiness article. Suddenly I knew I should get more
links from other Thanksgiving sites. Valuable information.
Searches. Much to my
surprise, my happiness site started getting a ridiculous
number of hits from the search for "hairdressers". It
just so happens I wrote a humor column on a hairdresser
experience. I was surprised to see it getting so much
traffic for such a generic, competitive search term.
If that had been a term of a little more relevance for
me, this information would have lead me to properly
optimize the page and get even more traffic.
Pages viewed per visit.
If people visit only one page per visit, you have some
work to convince them to visit more pages, like those
that make you money.
Pages visited. So you
threw up on your site something cool as an add-on. How
were you to know that other webmasters would link to
it and send a whole bunch of traffic your way? Well,
now you know, so add some copy to the page to pull visitors
into the rest of your site.
Monitoring website performance
Forms. Are they all functioning?
A good website monitoring service can keep tabs on them
for you. The last thing you want is to have lost hundreds
or thousands of subscribers because a sign-up form stopped
functioning
Shopping carts. Slow
and complicated shopping carts are responsible for an
estimated $25 billion in lost sales. Make sure yours
is functioning properly. A good website monitoring service
can watch this for you, too.
Download speed. Clear
your cache and test your pages. Hmm. Maybe those images
are a bit large. Time to compress them, or even remove
some. Remember that some people are on a much slower
connection than you are. I use a satellite connection
sometimes, but when I don't, my connection speed is
28K.
Server speed. re there
problems with server speed? Maybe not where you are,
but on the other side of the world. Global website monitoring
can alert you to a transatlantic connection problem,
so you can take it up with your web hosting service.
Server accessibility.
All the web hosts promise 99% accessibility. But is
that for real? Who monitors them? By one estimate, 75%
of inaccessibility is not on the hosting server, but
rather on the Internet's backbone network and in global
routing. A global website monitoring service can help
identify the problem, so that you can work with your
web hosting company to resolve it before too many sales
are lost.
Fun. If you are not
having fun, audition for that drummer position in the
local band. There is no point spending your life doing
something that bores you. Webmastering should be fun.
