Website Monitoring 101 - Part1

Welcome to the first part of ‘Website Monitoring 101’ series.

In this post series, we are going to examine all the ins and outs of website monitoring and more importantly, how you can maximize the effectiveness and ultimately the profitability of your website monitoring. Let’s begin by looking at what is website monitoring, how you use it and some of the advantages and disadvantages of doing so.

What Is Website Monitoring?

Website monitoring is the process of testing and verifying that end-users can interact with a Website or Web application from different locations through the day. Website monitoring is used to ensure that sites are live and responding to viewers, to generate trends that show performance over time, and highlight a range of factors that could affect the functionality of a Website. Website monitoring services also help you benchmark your Website against the performance of your competitors to help you determine how well your site is performing.

Keeping your Website performing consistently and available at all times is essential to the success of your online business. Website monitoring helps you ensure that your Website is functioning optimally and is accessible to Internet users every second. From checking Website average load time on a regular basis to alerting you of problems from locations around the world, a good vendor guarantees that your Website functions flawlessly.

Conclusion: In this first ‘What is Website Monitoring’, you have been introduced to why ‘Website Monitoring’ is so effective.

In next posts, we will expand on the information introduced in this first part by looking at some more advanced ‘website monitoring’ strategies, tactics and ideas.

Related Links

Free Website Monitoring

Website Monitoring Software

Web Page Monitoring from end user's perspective

Are you taking advantage of holiday opportunities?

Mobile websites are important for all retailers because they’re far more discoverable than apps, which require a download from an app store.

During the holidays, you may be tempted to collect buyer information. Although this is a common practice in social retail, companies should weigh what’s gained in collecting junk data against the potential loss of real prospects by introducing multiple barriers to consideration of your merchandise.

Be sure to utilize an integrated and branded campaign across multiple platforms to reach as many potential customers as possible during the holiday season. In addition, mobile coupons are on the rise and can be a perfect addition to your mobile strategy this holiday season.

In a recent infographic, Microsoft Tag reported that 20% of smartphone users currently acquire and redeem mobile coupons on a regular basis, with that number expected to grow to 30% by 2013.


Related Articles

1. Its that time of year again - getting ready for the holidays!
2. Can the right mobile optimization trick be a treat for customers?
3. Can your customer rely on your mobile site?

Mobile website or HTML5 app.

HTML5 was heralded as the magic that would allow developers to build websites that would work on any and every platform. While some of that promise has been realized, it’s not proven completely to be the hoped-for panacea. It does generally work well, though not without the need for tweaks to ensure proper functionality across many devices.

HTML5 can be used to make a cross-platform mobile website, or a mobile website that masquerades as an app. Its advantages are that it is cheaper to build; largely cross-platform compatible; easy to update; available through any browser, and therefore discoverable through search; and easier to test than apps.

The downside is HTML5 mobile websites are slower than apps and cannot leverage all of the device’s functionality, such as camera, GPS, etc.

Hybrid. Is it an app or isn’t it? Sometimes only the developer knows for sure. A hybrid app takes an HTML5 website and wraps it in a thin native wrapper. It attempts, with some success, to combine the best of both worlds: the easy updatability of an HTML5 site and some of the speed, offline capabilities, and native functionality of an app. It’s more affordable to build than a fully native app; is distributed through app stores; and requires similar testing to a native app.

Related Links:

App, Website, Or Both?

Fast, Fun & Touch-Friendly: The New Rules For Tablet Websites

Cloud application performance monitoring

Don't let your site go dark this holiday season.

Keynote is helping retailers to get ready for the holiday shopping season with a free offer for website monitoring and mobile testing. Retailers, in particular, have no time to waste to prepare for this coming holiday shopping season. Mobile is expected to be responsible for retail site visits during this year's holiday season.

Keynote Web Performance Monitoring allows you to:

• Obtain accurate, real-time data about your site’s overall performance, speed and availability
• Measure rich Internet applications and track the performance of third party content on your site
• Know how your shoppers in New York City, San Francisco and any other city around the world may be experiencing you site

Be sure your site can handle the traffic on Black Friday, Cyber Monday or any other day of the week – 24 / 7/ 365.

Get your 7 days of free website monitoring – today.*


Related Articles:

1. Can your customer rely on your mobile site
2. Free Website monitoring
3. Is your mobile site up to speed for back to school shoppers?

Norway: Google Analytics Violates Privacy

The Norwegian Data Protection Authority announced recently that use of Google Analytics on national government websites is a violation of Norwegian privacy law.

According to PC World, the agency found that Google Analytics collects IP addresses along with certain behavioral information in a manner that makes the website operator unable to control the usage of any data gathered. This inablity to authoritatively control user data was found to be a violation of the privacy policies applied to government websites, and thus a violation of Norwegian privacy law.

While this finding only relates to the use of Google Analytics by certain Norwegian government websites, the agency did not address the privacy compliance implications of usage by privacy organizations. However, website publishers who use Google Analytics to measure website traffic should probably review their privacy policy to ensure that it addresses the ambiguities raised by third party analytics and behavioral monitoring tools.

Source: Keynote

Related Articles

1. Web Privacy Monitoring
2. Web Privacy Tracking
3. Website Privacy Policy Requirements
4. Third Party Cookies
5. Tracking Cookies

Can your customer rely on your mobile site?

We often talk about speed and optimization, but site reliability is just as important to get your customers to repeatedly visit to your mobile site and build brand loyalty. According to the Keynote Mobility Survey, 48% of smartphone users experienced a problem with loading errors and the inability to open the page.

This can be a frustrating experience for mobile users and a good reason to either not come back or visit your competitors mobile site. 

There are a few standard practices to combat the pitfalls of bad performance, and continuous monitoring & testing is the best way to find out when and where your mobile site is failing. Finding issues before your customers do and fixing them quickly is the key to scoring well in terms of website reliability. 

Who does reliability right?

Keynote keeps running measurements of mobile websites from several industries on our KeynoteMobile Performance Indices. On any given week we can see different companies at the top of the list for reliability. But if you follow the weekly indices long enough you'll see that the companies that rank best tend to be the same, suggesting a greater attention to mobile website availability. For the week ending September 9th, here's who were on top

Learn more about:

1. Why Web Load Testing?

2. How to monitoring site

3. Free website monitoring 

Is your mobile site up to speed for back to school shoppers?

It’s back to school time, is your site ready to handle the traffic?
Over the past year we've seen quite a few retailers jump on the mobile bandwagon recognizing that mobile shopping is now mainstream. Innovative new social shopping applications like Zoomingo, Wrappand even one launched by Seventeen Magazine, are inspiring a new age of mobile consumers to shop at the tip of their fingers.

According to Keynote Competitive Research’s mobile user survey, 47 percent of smartphone owners use their phones to purchase products and services.The survey also shows that mobile shoppers like their apps, but they like the mobile web even more. Along with the increased number of users shopping on mobile, the tightening of expectations continues when it comes to performance and the user experience.

According to NRF's Back to School Cheat Sheet, 43.8% of U.S. tablet owners will use their tablets to research products and compare prices this season. The survey also found that 28.4% of shoppers with children in grades K-12 will make a purchase with their tablet; slightly more, 34.5%, will purchase college items via their mobile devices.

Considering that 16 percent of mobile users will not return or wait for a website to load if it takes too long  to load and six percent will go to a competitor’s website (Keynote Competitive Research 2012), making sure a site is optimized for mobile is critical for this back-to-school shopping season.
If your mobile site isn't up to speed, here are some basic tips:

• Considering Data URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers).
• Lighten the load on your home page with fewer objects and smaller images.
• Display a clean, simple mobile-friendly user interface. Remove all content a mobile user doesn't need.
• Optimize your website for the mobile screen following mobile design best practices for better usability and performance.
• Create a unique site for tablet users. Don't send them to a smartphone or desktop site.
• Monitor your mobile website's availability around the clock.  Mobile shopping isn't necessarily a Monday - Friday (9am - 5pm) activity.

You don’t want your mobile site to add to the stress of any back to school shopping, so be sure your mobile site is geared up to go.