“Habit #5: Business technology leaders manage computing and communication
professionally and cost-effectively through negotiated service-level agreements
(SLAs) and measurement best practices.”
According to Stephen J. Adriole and data collected at Cutter Consortium
since 2001 (Andriole, S.J. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Technology leaders,
Communications of the ACM, March
2007, Volume 50, Number 3).
Measurement skill is important for the Business Leader. Leaders must be aware of what is happening in their industry and in their environment. If something cannot be measured it cannot be improved. If metrics are not explicit it is not easy to communicate and set goals. Not possible to excel. It is like driving a car without a dashboard.
There are different sort of metrics related to the execution of IT resources which directly affect the business. We
already discussed availability and response speed at our previous post Monitis’ 5 easy steps for delivering the ultimate web user experience. Step 1: Response & Availability. Availability metrics show managers how long their site is running and how well it is serving the users. Slow response outcome is similar to site outage; most users will not wait more than 4-8 seconds for the page to load, they will just go to another page. It is a good practice of managers to closely watch the availability metrics and set a target SLA (Service Level Agreement) even when customers don’t requested it. The SLA is a goal that a Business Leader communicates to their IT department (“Provide 99.9% uptime” or “Provide average response time bellow 500 msec to the US market”) and monitis services can help to measure the execution .
In this post we discuss the next important metrics group related to website traffic. It shows how many
users the website is serving at any interval. The important metrics are number of unique visits and page views (we will discuss other related metrics in other posts). These metrics show how much potential online revenue your site may have if successfully convert the visitors into customers. The more traffic your site receives the more is its business potential and value.
There are two scenario of visitor tracking metrics usage:
1) Visitor tracking metrics shows how well the Company PR, Sales and Marketing works. Business Leader can communicate goals back to the Sales and Marketing Department using these metrics (e.g. “Increase traffic
by 20% for the next month”).
2) In combination with the response speed it provides more insights about site technical performance. For example if in case of high traffic a site response speed significantly decreases, it is a clear indication that the IT need to take
closer look on the server load capacity. Business Leader can control and communicate goals to IT Department using the combination of both metrics (e.g. “Provide bellow 1 sec response time during 1000 visitors per hour traffic”)
Monitis supports both practices, which actually makes the service such unique. The first ‘marketing’ case is supported with other web analytic sites, but the aggregated statistics and response speed makes also the second case possible, thus closing the gap between IT and Business. In the chart bellow it shows no problem with the load:
The visitor tracking monitoring can be started easily, without much technical knowledge and within minutes. Click on Visitors Tracking in the menu. It will open a form like this:
Enter site URL and title, then click add. It will add a new widget at the monitis dashboard, showing something like this:
Copy the code from the box and paste it into the HTML page you want to monitor just before the body tag. It will be absolutely not visible to end users.
Here we go. Now if you choose chart view on the widget you show see something like this:
Technorati Tags: monitis, mon.itor.us, webanalytics, analytics, visitors, webstatistics, uptime, availability, monitoring, website, webmaster, cio, ceo, ebusiness, SLA
