10 Things You Should Be Monitoring On Your Website

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.

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.

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.

Copyright 2001, SmallBiz Publishing.

BB Lee is Editor of SmallBizBits Newsletter. Join Our List Of
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