Preface

This is a book about achieving complete web visibility. If you’re involved in something web-based—and these days, everything is web-based—you need to understand the things on the Web that affect you. Of course, today, everything affects you, which means looking far beyond what visitors did on your site to the communities and competitors with which you’re involved.

While the Web is a part of our daily lives, web visibility lags far behind. Web operators seldom have a complete understanding of how visitors interact with their sites, how healthy their web properties are, what online communities are saying about their organizations, or what their competitors are up to. What little visibility they do have is fragmented and imperfect.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In recent years, advances in monitoring, search, data collection, and reporting have made it possible to build a far more comprehensive picture of your web presence.

This book will show you how to answer some fundamental questions about that presence:

• What did visitors do on my site?

• How did they go about doing it?

• Why did they do it in the first place?

• Could they do it, or was it broken or slow?

• What are people saying about my organization elsewhere?

• How do I compare to my competitors?

Answering these questions means integrating many disciplines: web analytics, user surveys, usability testing, performance monitoring, community management, and competitive analysis.

At first, this might seem like a daunting task. There are hundreds of tools from which to choose, ranging from free to extremely expensive. There are millions of sites to track and more visitors to watch. Many stakeholders—each with their own opinions—probably care about your website, including investors, executives, marketers, designers, developers, and support teams.

We hope to arm you with a good understanding of the various technologies at your disposal so that you can craft and implement a strategy for complete web monitoring.