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Tomorrow I will be attending the Web Analytics Congres 2010 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It will be my third year. Still a visitor, no speaking engagement for me yet. I am always inspired by other speakers and always end up thinking to myself “what can I possibly add to this”? There already is so much info out there already. Maybe I should finish one of those many books in the bookcase. One that jumps to mind is Bob Etherington’s “Presentation Skills for Quivering Wrecks“.

Nervosity aside, I still think that the current speakers circuit is a bit flooded, though. I usually end up choosing for quality in a local event over quantity (although I would never turn down a chance to go to a foreign event such a eMetrics). One person that I am really looking forward to seeing at the Web Analytics Congres 2010 in Amsterdam tomorrow is Sean Power who will co-host the “Complete Web Monitoring Workshop” with MeasureWorks’ Jeroen Tjepkema. Sean, who states in his Slideshare profile that he is a Community Gardner in Akoha, is also the co-author of “Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors“. I met Sean several months ago in a pub in Amsterdam after being invited to an informal dinner organised by Usabilla’s Paul Veugen. A lively guy who enthusiastically talked, but also listened. A trait that is not always presence in the guru realms of the internet kingdom.

A month later I joined in on a webinar hosted by Gomez which was co-hosted by Sean Power. Sean spoke about the impact of performance on visit duration, customer satisfaction and ecommerce. In the webinar Gomez and Sean presented some facts from a recent Aberdeen Group study. The study revealed that website performance could have a significant effect on all of the above facets. The study showed that a 1 second delay in response from a web server had:

• -11% impact on pageviews
• -7% impact on conversion
• -16% impact on customer satisfaction<!–more–>

The impact on customer satisfaction was astonishing. The study further showed that 75% of visitors abandoned the website due to poor performance during peak usage times and that 30% packed up and went directly to a competitor. For enterprise sites, this impact is siginificant and could leave a huge whole in turnover.

Gomez and Sean went on to discuss the 7 different types of data that web analytics won’t be able to tell you, hence his evangelistical approach to ‘Complete Web Monitoring’. As far as performance was concerned, the 7 answers (although slightly Gomez product orientated) you won’t easily get from your web analytics solution are:

1. How fast is fast enough, in your industry, for your business and your customers?
2. How is your conversion rate impacted by website regional response times?
3. How fast do you need to be on ALL browsers to support business goals?
4. How are pageviews and time on site (or conversions) affected by 3rd party performance?
5. Are you losing sales due to poor performance on some mobile devices and service providers?
6. How many customers are you losing during peak periods due to capacity issues?
7. How will Web Performance problems affect customer satisfaction today and your business goals tomorrow?

At work, I have had to deal with several of these issues already. We had some extra tools in place to monitor the effects of some of these issues (see how I am avoiding naming them… some things you just can’t discuss on your blog…). We were able to relate certain problems to loss in revenue and a reduction in customer satisfaction to some server issues we had been experiencing. Tools that we used were mainly Watchmouse and Kampyle. With these tools we monitored and were able to act on website performance, mostly latency, and respond to visitors being affected by the dimished server response times by responding to their feedback or evening having our contact center respond directly via phone.

Think of this for a second:

With the above analysis, content items such as Content Delivery Networks, Site Search, Web Analytics, Streaming Data and Ad Networks are scrutinized. What are the exact business requirements and how do/will they affect your business goals? The bottom line is that every aspect of your website will have an impact on experience, so choose wisely and monitor results.

So what does Complete Web Monitoring entail? Well, a lot more than customer feedback and performance tracking.

As you can see, Complete Web Monitoring takes into account all facets of your online presence.

• Web Analytics – What did they do?
• Web Performance – Could they do it?
• Web Interaction Analytics – How did they do it?
• Voice of Customer – Why did they do it?
• Community Engagement – What are they saying?
• Competitive Analysis – What are they plotting?

Not every topic will be as ‘hot’ for every company. Where I work, (sole) Web Analyst at TUI Netherlands, Community Engagement is still in its infant stage (and that’s still pushing it). This year I have introduced Web Performance, Web Interaction Analytics and Voice of Customer into the organisation. Although implementing can be easy, involving management and making sure action is taken on your analysis is a whole different challenge all together as it is with most companies. The effort being done, and which should be started up at any company, should be encouraged. The time to act is now, start picking the low hanging fruit as soon as you can.

Web Analytics is just a small part of an integral monitoring solution. It shouldn’t be undervalued as a source of insights, but remember that there are plenty of more things impacting experience and sales than you first might think. Check out the concept of Complete Web Monitoring and try and find the gems in the rough in the online arena for your boss, I am sure he will give you that parking space at the office enterance soon enough!

I am looking forward to the workshop tomorrow and to learning more about correlation between disparate data sources and management adoption (how do we get the HiPPO on our side). If you will be there too, give me a shout on Twitter.

Below is a Slideshare document by Alistair Croll, also co-author of ”Complete Web Monitoring: Watching Your Visitors, Performance, Communities, and Competitors“. Feel free any of your own workfloor experiences on the topic.