Watching Websites is a book that Alistair and I are writing. If I had to summarize the book in three words, I’d say, “complete web visibility.”

But there’s a lot more to it than three words can easily explain.

I know there’s something wrong with my site. But I’m fed up with fixing whatever just broke. I’m fed up with my own users telling me when things are slow. I’m fed up with trying to figure out where people are getting stuck, or why they can’t do something. And I have neither the money nor the patience to keep playing whack-a-mole and guessing what’s going to break next. I need to know what to watch, and how to watch it, so I’m not caught by surprise.

I know my community is out there, but I’m hard pressed to find good information on who they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.  Just like you, reading the page right now.  Seriously, who are you? (No, really, tell me. Srlsy.)  I mean, I know I’m being talked about (maybe by you!) and it’d be sorta nice to join that conversation.

I also know my competitors are up to nefarious mischief. I’d like to know what they’re plotting.  I’m tired of being the last guy at the party to know that they’ve just launched a product like mine.

See how I bolded three words there?  Ohhyea.  That’s the point of the book: Complete visibility of every website that can affect your business: Your own, your communities’, and your competitors.

But enough about us; let’s talk about you.

You probably know you need to see what’s going on with your website. But explaining why you need that visibility to your boss, your company, or your investors is frustrating. You’ve probably searched a bit for solutions, but there’s no holistic framework to fit them in. So you have siloes of technology, spray-painted all sorts of enticing colors by vendors’ marketing departments. You’re probably tired of finding out that your latest fixes didn’t work, or had unintended consequences, or just made things worse. And you probably have too much data at your fingertips, but too few ideas of how to use it or which numbers really matter.

In Watching Websites, we’ll cover:

• What kinds of businesses exist on the web, and how that affects their monitoring strategies.
• What big questions you need to answer about your own site. (Spoiler alert–There are four: What did my users do? Could they do it? Why did they do it? How did they do it?)
• A deep dive into the monitoring technologies that answer those questions, including web analytics, device monitoring, synthetic testing, real user monitoring (RUM), web interaction analytics (WIA), Voice of the Customer (VOC), competitive monitoring, and community monitoring.
• A frank talk about the tools that are out there (from the free ones to the really really expensive ones), and why some are awesome and others suck.
• Maturity models.  Fancy-pants words for a “game plan” that tells you how to get from where you are today to where you want to be.
• Tons of anecdotes from people like you. Technology books are boring! They become much more fun when you fill them with trainwrecks, horror stories, and told-you-so, it-could-never-happen-here narratives. (Feel like sharing? Like we said, we want to hear about it.

Hopefully, it’ll also have a balance of useful insight, healthy irreverence, and straight talk.

But let’s talk about what the book isn’t. It’s not a web analytics book. It’s not going to be an operational manual. I won’t teach you how to install Nagios, and Alistair won’t show you how to design a user-monitoring packet sniffing device. That would be kind of creepy, anyway. It’s also not a theoretical book.  This isn’t a thesis (I couldn’t be farther away from a Ph.D if I tried).  Finally, this book does not teach you how build an online business.  It teaches you how to monitor it, so that you can excel using the great resources that are out there already.

We see this book as the ultimate companion to some of the greatest writing and blogging on the subject of web visibility. That means sites from folks like Dave McClure and his pirates!  It means Avinash and what he’s been saying about simple, meaningful metrics that cut through the noise (and we want to tie his awesome book on analytics to factors like usability and performance. Steve Souders and Cal Henderson did an amazing job at telling us how to make sites faster and build scalable sites; we want to show you how to prove it worked, and make that part of a systemic monitoring process.

You might be a CEO. Maybe you’re into startups and serial entrepreneurship. Or perhaps you’ve got a monitoring team under you in a Fortune 500 company. This is an O’Reilly book that’s actually being written with you in mind.

On the other hand, you might be a web analyst hungry to learn about the other monitoring silos. Perhaps you’re a web operations jock(ette) that’s been tasked with knowing “if the website is doing ok”. Maybe you run the load-balancers, or the EC2 instances, and you just want to know more about what’s going on. Now what? Start Watching Websites.

Alistair and I have been thinking about this stuff for a while.  I’ve been flipping back and forth doing online community and operational stuff. Alistair has been busy starting companies, writing books, and running conferences. We both love numbers, metrics, KPIs, and actionable results a bit too much. And we want to share what we’ve learned from you with everyone else, both online (here) and in the book

If you have any questions, you can find out how to reach us here.

What you watch depends on the business you’re in. Different businesses have different definitions of success, and as such, different metrics to track. They also have different user communities and competitors, meaning they need to watch the Web beyond their own sites in different ways.

Consider a search engine and an e-commerce site.

The search engine wants to show people content, serve them some advertising that’s relevant, send them on their way, and make some money for doing so. For them, it’s good when people leave—as long as they go to the right places when they do. In fact, the sooner someone leaves the search engine for a paying advertiser’s site, the better, because that visitor has found what he was looking for.

By contrast, the e-commerce site wants people to arrive (preferably without going through a search engine because they won’t have to pay for the advertising) and stay as long as possible, filling their shopping cart and buying all sorts of things beyond what they originally intended.

The operators of those sites not only track different metrics, they want different results from those metrics. And that’s just for the sites they run themselves. The retailer might care about competitors’ pricing on other sites; the search engine might want to know it has more results, or better ones, than others. Both might like to know what the world thinks of them in public forums, or whether social networks are driving significant amounts of traffic to their sites.

While every site is unique and has distinct metrics, your website probably falls into one of four main categories.

• A transactional site wants visitors to complete a transaction—normally a purchase. There’s an “ideal path” through the site, resulting in a transaction of some kind. This can also be enrollment (signing up for an email) or lead generation (asking a salesperson to contact them), so the outcome can happen in the real world, too.
• A media property provides content that attracts and retains an audience, and makes money from that content through sponsorship, advertising, or affiliate referrals. Search engines, newspapers, well-known bloggers, and others are in this category.
• A collaborative site is where visitors generate the content themselves. Wikis, news aggregators, user groups, classified ad listings, etc., in which the value of the site is largely derived from things created by others fall into this group.
• A Software-as-a-service (Saas) application is a hosted version of software someone might buy. Here, users expect reliability and may pay a monthly per-seat fee to use the service. Revenues come from subscriptions.

It’s common for portions of a site to fall into several of these categories. An analyst firm that sells reports is a media property and a transactional site at the same time. A popular blog is as much about collaborative comments its users leave as it is about Google Adwords on the pages. A video upload site is a media property filled with content users provide. And a free-to-try SaaS site that encourages users to subscribe to a premium version has a transactional aspect.

The key is to decide which of these categories you’re concerned with, and then determine which metrics and tools you should use to understand your web properties, your community, and your competitors. There are many metrics—like performance and availability, for example—that matter to every website; there are others, such as content creation, that matter only to collaboration sites.