Every business needs to be monitored for how it is fairing. Monitoring is the main concept behind every suggestion boxes, exit surveys, customer feedback forms and many other devise. Without feedback form from the customer, revenue, monitoring inventory, expenses and other benchmarks, a quick slide down or a slippery slope can be taken by a business, without the owner ever seeing it coming or being able to stop the slide.
Webmasters should also be monitoring on their websites. Most of the points can be classified as traffic related or server performance related. Here is the list of my points, which will be helpful to monitor your website.
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 Linkedin. They were all being funneled into my Article on “Free Internet Marketing Methods That is Blogging”. Suddenly I knew I should get more links from other social bookmarking sites. Valuable information.
Searches: Much to my surprise, my site started getting a ridiculous number of hits from the search for ” Blogging “. It just so happens I wrote a humor column on free Internet marketing methods . 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: Are 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.
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Tuesday, 31. March 2009
I’ve got one of the 28k connections too. It makes blogging so much fun 8=P
Anyway, what I’m interested in is some way of testing how well my host is responding, not how fast I’m getting stuff through my end. Are there tools out there to do that?
Also, is there a way to screen out the visits to my sites that are from me? For the blogs it could just ignore everything within the wp-admin subdirectory and that would catch most of it. I can’t really do it by IP address since I’m coming through different IP’s at different times and their all assigned by the ISP’s dynamically.
It is all fun though. I’d never make it as a drummer so I’ll have to stick with this 8=)