5 Monitors for Ultimate Business Performance: Part 3 Web Traffic Monitoring

3. Web Traffic Monitoring (a.k.a. Visitors Tracking, Hit Counters, Web Analytics, Web Statistics) – monitors website page views and visitors. It is possible to monitor web traffic via 3 different techniques: a) by including visible or invisible html code into web pages which sends requests to an external counter b) by using web log analyzers like open source Webalizer or c) by using network sniffers. The last is quite rare and only used by large Internet portals. Now html code options becomes more popular especially when users don’t have access to the server for example in case of blog service providers.

Who should use it: business owners, IT, web marketers, webmasters, web developers.

Usage examples: Demographics of the visitors may provide better understanding from where users visit the website. Unique visitors trend also shows how well is site promoted. Referrers and keywords analysis are useful for search engine optimization and search engine marketing. QA and Web developers may perform load analysis and also find most popular browsers and OS so they can check and optimize the site for these platforms.

5 Important Website Metrics Business Should Monitor

1. HTTP Uptime. HTTP uptime monitoring is important because each time website is down it a) reduces website ranking by search engines b) reduces website traffic and income c) waste PPC budget

2. External HTTP response time. Response time is a measure for user experience. When website is slow it significantly reduces user satisfaction.

3. Web Traffic Statistics. It is important by itself to analyze website visitors demographics, used browsers, referrers, etc. But it can provide more insights if combined with other metrics. For example web traffic measurement together with HTTP checks may help to find load problems when site performs slow in case of increased traffic, or together with search engine monitoring it will help to understand who is referring to your site and how much the traffic depends on the position on Google and other search engines per keywords which drive traffic towards your site.

4. Search Engine Position. Internet marketers need to watch daily website position in major search engines for sometimes hundreds of keywords which relates to website content. It helps to fine-tune search engine optimization campaigns and do competitive analysis.

5. Social Media references (Buzz Monitoring). Social Media and book-marking sites are getting more importance as a way to bring more traffic and conduct online PR campaigns for building Internet brand and reputation.

Ideally you need to have all these metrics real-time at the same dashboard in order to have full picture of your website performance. Monitis provides on-demand http and web traffic monitoring; Semonics service from the same vendor provides search engine and social media monitoring, MyBuzzMonitor could also help to stay informed and also show your reputation to your website visitors via live widget you can place into your blog or web page.

Merging of Web Analytics and External Monitoring

Good blog post A view of the web analytics market. In the author words:

My take is also that monitoring will eventually be much closer to web analytics ... and end-to-end monitoring of the user experience will play a bigger role. It's obvious that a degraded web performance or poorly performing enterprise systems have a direct impact on conversion and outcomes on the frontline. Unless I'm mistaken, this is not measured by any of the ASP-based solutions.

That is actually what Monitis website performance monitoring service is providing. Having traffic and response time charts helps to notice a degraded web performance correlation with web load.