Web monitoring is a skill you will have to learn after you have created your first website.There are four main areas of monitoring you will need to concentrate on: traffic monitoring, server performance monitoring, internet usage monitoring and availability monitoring. Because you will need to know how each website is performing for your business, you must do site tracking. You can use the website data you collect to make adjustments so your visitors have the best experience possible. Hopefully, this will translate into more sales and happy customers.
Traffic Monitoring
Of all the things we monitor, traffic is probably the most important aspect for our businesses. Without website traffic our businesses will go belly up in no time at all. You should keep an eye on the following online statistics:
Website hits – You want to know how many visitors you are generating. If the line on the graph is heading down, you know you have to find out why. In your WordPress blog, you can install the StatPress plugin. StatPress will give you information about the visitors coming to your blog.In your websites, you may want to track visitors using software like Google Analytics or StatCounter.com. Both of these methods involve setting up an account and then adding some code to the pages of your website. You can add this same code to your squeeze pages and sales pages, too. This gives you a lot of information about visitors.
Referrers – It’s not enough just to know how many visitors you are getting. You need to know where they are coming from. The idea here is to use tracking codes. Each location that you use to drive traffic should pass a code to your autoresponder or to the code which is counting visitors. The code is saved so you know where the visitors are coming from. In this way you can “split-test” different website pages and find out which are more effective.
Keyword Searches – One way to check to see how your website is doing is to use SpyFu.com. SpyFu will give you some information about keywords and adwords your competitors use. You should do keyword research for each piece of content you intend to add to your website to determine if you are using the most targeted keywords possible. When you use targeted, long-tail keywords you will get a higher ranking from the search engines. This in turn will increase your traffic.
Pages Viewed Per Visit – If people visit only one page per visit, you have some work to convince them to visit more pages, especially those that make you money. One way to do this is to include links to other pages at the end of articles or make suggestions about your other offerings using visual ques.
Pages Visited – The idea here is to know where your visitors go when they arrive at your site. If there are pages on the site that are popular but others not getting any attention, you may have to revamp the keywords on the page. If you add a fancy add-on which other webmasters link to and send a whole bunch of traffic your way, then make the most of that by adding some copy to encourage the visitors to check out other pages. Keep the visitors on the site as long as you can.
Server Performance Monitoring
While these online statistics mentioned are very important, you should check to see that the server which is running your website is also performing well. You should occasionally check the server for email warnings, and watch for errors in the event logs and error logs . On a regular schedule, you should visit your website and check the following areas of concern:
Web 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. If you are running a WordPress blog there are plugins you can install which will help you check for broken links. If your visitor clicks on a link and it goes nowhere, he will become quickly frustrated. Install the Broken Link Checker plugin to make sure the links are all 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.
Server Speed – If you are not running on a private server, there could be problems with server speed. Sometimes your location plays a part in how fast your website is loading. It may be fast where you are, but on the other side of the world, it’s slower. Global website monitoring can alert you to a transatlantic connection problem, so you can take it up with your web hosting service. Most often, if your website is slow, you need look at individual pages and page object load times. If it remains slow, try to relocate your website to a faster server at your hosting site.
Download Speed – Clear your cache and test your pages in a few different browsers. Try Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Bing. Is it slow? Maybe the images are a bit too large? Time to compress them, or even remove some, or change the way they load. Remember that some people are on a much slower connection than you are. Another approach can be to use a service like Amazon’s S3. With the advent of video streaming, web developers and internet marketers are using Amazon Web Services S3 to store and serve their PDF, audio, and video and offer fast download speeds.
Internet Usage Monitoring
Disk Space Monitoring – In the Cpanel for your website you can also monitor disk space utilization. If you have a website that grows over time you should watch that your disk usage does not exceed the limits. If you find that you are reaching a limit. Talk to your host provider to purchase more disk or consider archiving or deleting some data.
Bandwidth Utilization – If there is a lot of traffic to your site you may have increase the bandwidth throttle. Giving your site more bandwidth will allow fast downloads and page loads. However, watch that you don’t give one site so much bandwidth that other sites suffer. Limiting bandwidth for a site that becomes a server hog may be necessary. You can increase or decrease bandwidth in the CPanel for your website.
Database Monitoring – If you are running a website that interacts with a database, remember to check the database alert logs for errors and correct any problems you find. If you think the website is slow, the database may be the culprit. Rebuilding indexes, or doing a repair function can sometimes fix a slow running query. Before doing anything to a database it is important to do a full backup first.
Availability Monitoring
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 backbone network and in global routing. If you have a reliable host server, you should enjoy relatively fast reliable server performance.
All of this information is good to know and understand. Sometimes you will not be able to control things. You may have budget constraints or there may be no feasible way to make things faster until technology improves. The best way to keep abreast of your business is to create a list of items which you methodically check daily, weekly, and monthly. Try to automate as much of this checking as you can, so your business can run on autopilot as much as possible.
