Synthetic Monitoring
More than ever, businesses rely on website traffic and e-commerce to maximize sales and brand awareness.
Not only is it important to provide consumers with instant access to information about your business, but impulsive buyers expect to have purchasing power at all times. With such dependence on web presence, analytics are a crucial tool to help businesses understand not only who they are interfacing with, but how those user experiences are driving (or impeding) sales.
Here are only a few of the metrics website owners should be aware of to ensure their sites are running as efficiently as possible:
Uptime
Uptime is a term of measurement calculating the uninterrupted time a computer has been running. Monitoring uptime will help prevent systemwide crashes and is generally an indicator of an operating system’s overall stability. Regularly checking uptime is liking having a heart examination. There will inevitably be performance issues, so it’s necessary to be immediately alerted when the system sputters to prevent it from being entirely compromised.
Load Tolerance
While it’s important to draw more customers to your website, it’s equally important to have a system in place that can handle the demands caused by high volumes of web traffic. Regular stress tests will provide feedback about the capacity of your network, including whether or not it is at its limit and slowing down individual users’ experiences.
Page Speed
Web speed is a vital metric for ensuring consumers will be granted access to your business. Consumers are fickle though, and on average they wait only 3 seconds for a page to fully load before abandoning the site in favor of another (often competing) service. Such a narrow threshold is proof that it is crucial to continually measure the effectiveness of each page connected to your business to ensure that consumers or prospective clients will not be dissuaded from continuing onward.
Error Messages
While your homepage might be in top working order, ancillary links and pages may not be as well-maintained. Dead links that direct users to “404s” are a sure way to ruin a web experience. Run routine tests on all links and aspects of your website to guarantee that links route users properly and that all data is linked correctly.
Geographic Performance
With the so-called “global village” created by the web and international commerce, consumers from around the world can now easily access any business or service by browsing the Internet. By tracking your page’s global performance, you make it possible for your business to grow an international audience and vastly increase brand awareness. Focus on areas that show signs of growth potential or increase reach in territories that lag behind other well-performing areas.