The funny thing about monitoring is that there’s a ton of data to collect, but few people know where to start. A few months ago, Steve Souders, one of the co-chairs of Velocity, asked us if we’d teach a workshop to try and fix this.
It’s a reworking of many of the things we cover in the book, plus an attempt to explain the math and reporting in an accessible way. Here’s the slide deck.
Alistair and I can’t wait for our Applied Communilytics session tomorrow at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. We have an all-star lineup speaking with us during the day.
We’ll hear from 5 guests in “blitz-sessions”; 15 minutes interviews.
We’ll also have a panel with some brilliant folks that are working to support social media analytics practitioners. We’ll talk about the present and future of social media, concentrating on “quick wins” for analytics geeks. The panelists include:
The schedule for our day is as follows:
You still have time to register! Here’s a 25% off discount code if you’d like to attend: websf10ac25
We hope to see you there!
Disclaimer 1: All site-related data found in this post comes from compete.com. The company was kind enough to give us a “pro account” to help us research the O’Reilly book that we wrote called Complete Web Monitoring (thanks, you rock!). However, compete.com did not sponsor this post (nor did any company, for that matter). And yes, we know – compete.com numbers are simply estimates.
Disclaimer 2: I (Sean) worked for Akoha as Community Gardener while we launched at TechCrunch50 2008; but I’m now doing metrics, web analytics, performance, and social computing consulting. The views found below are mine, and do not reflect those of Akoha in any way. For the record, Akoha is awesome!
About us: This post was written by Sean Power with Alistair Croll.
Dear TechCrunch50 Startups,
Congratulations. You made the list. You’re finally launching, and that pent-up frustration of not being able to tell people about it for a month is almost at an end. Now, you have to live with a weekend of cold, hard fear that your demo will explode. You’ve got an interesting week ahead, and I know you’re short on sleep, so let me get to the point quickly.
You’re probably excited about the TC50 bump. I first saw the term used by Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital on the RedEye VC blog. The bump refers to the pounding your website is about to experience from TC50 attendees, readers, bloggers and their friends. It’s not to be underestimated. Here’s a glimpse at how the bump looked like for all TC50 startups in 2008. If you squint a little, you’ll see Akoha somewhere in there!:
This is an unprecedented influx of attention. It may be the single biggest traffic spike you’ll ever experience. Thousands of visitors will drive by your site, stay for a minute, and leave — never to return. After the bump, you’ll feel a tremendous rush of adrenaline, then deep, soul-sucking disillusionment as your traffic dwindles back to its former levels.
Don’t waste this opportunity. If you take the right steps, you can make the most of your fifteen minutes of fame.
Woohoo! We had a great time presenting at eMetrics this week. The presentation was about the different ways that you can monitor web performance and how it really impacts the bottom line (how you can avoid losing money!). Enjoy :)
We’re doing a presentation that’s excerpted from the book at DemoCamp Guelph tonight. Should be an interesting conversation; we have an “exercise” planned. Sean can’t be here (he was at Podcamp and has to get real work done after a weekend of editing the 400+ figures in the text!) but will be joining on Twitter. If you have photos from the event, or questions for Sean, we’ll be using the #CWM hashtag (for Complete Web Monitoring, the title of the book.)
One of the projects we’ve been working on is trying to create a single, comprehensive overview of the Complete Web Monitoring process. Here’s where we’re at (and an early glimpse at a poster we’re working on.)
First of all, a complete monitoring strategy includes the many questions a web analyst needs to answer:
Any strategy also has to look at several different stages in monitoring:
If these look somewhat like Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics, it’s because he’s awesome and we borrow heavily from his thinking on startup metrics. Anyway, this PDF is a work in progress of trying to align the big questions analysts need to answer with the various stages of visitor engagement. Once we sex it up a bit, we’ll make some posters.
I’ll put the DemoCamp slides up here shortly.
I presented the first Watching Websites presentation at PodCamp toronto on Saturday, February 21st. I got off to a slow start, but found my wind about 10 minutes into the presentation and slammed the 80+ audience members over the head with different ways to measure their sites. Overall, it went really well, and we got lots of great comments from the presentation. Also, the slidedeck was featured as “Presentation of the Day” on slideshare! Nice!
Anyways, here’s the presentation, without annotation.
You can reach Alistair on his Twitter feed or me (Sean) on mine if you have any questions.
Enjoy!
I’m on my way to Boston for the first annual Web Experience Forum. It looks like an amazing lineup of speakers, and I’m hoping to find attendees with lots of war stories and anecdotes to add color to the book. (Incidentally, if you’re such a person, feel free to fill out our Watching Websites survey and let us know if we can contact you.)
The forum is a three-day event, with some heavyweights like the always-provocative Jakob Nielsen speaking. (Jakob’s keynote, “You are Doomed,” promises to be equal measures controversial and entertaining.)
Something I like about the event is the “ExperienceExchange” sessions, a fireside chat for web operators. Too often, industry events are just a blur of monologues; we’ve seen great success with informal events like Bitnorth and Interop’s Unconference, and I’m really looking forward to this part of the itinerary.
I’ll post the slides for my session (The Modern Web’s Many Moving Parts, part of the “Technology Ecosystem of the Web Experience — A Hitchhikers Guide” track) here shortly.
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Alistair Croll & Sean Power on Complete Web Monitoring and Web Operations
