Web analytics can give second shot at sales

David M Williams
Wednesday, 03 December 2008 19:09

IT Industry - Market

The heart of the WAM, the “secret” behind it if you will, is that instead of just pinging a site or testing a URL for a response it ran pre-composed scripts to test a perfect walkthrough of a web application.

Let me clarify: the WAM came in two fundamental parts. The first was a scripting mechanism that allowed a web site walkthrough to be captured. The second was a script interpreter that replayed these walkthroughs.

Should any part of the walkthrough fail the WAM would notify stakeholders immediately. This meant that a far greater range of problems would be flagged.

The web server may be functioning, the home page may come up – but perhaps the database server is down and products aren’t being listed. Or the authentication mechanism is failing. Or the checkout process is broken. Any of these steps not behaving as expected, according to a live actual walkthrough, would raise an alert.

Of course, not every person who uses a web site follows the perfect route. In this case, the WAM also actively logged the way each user interacted with the site.

Firstly, this permitted their actions to be reviewed and fed back into the scripting engine so that additional realistic inputs could be used for testing.

Secondly, and importantly, if a visitor abruptly stopped working with your site this can be reviewed because their steps have been recorded. Analysing this data yields a potential goldmine of information.

It might be the case that the user hit a problem. It could be the web site breaks but the underlying fault only manifests itself with specific inputs.

Or, it might be that the visitor just changed their mind and decided to abandon their shopping cart. Here’s where web site monitoring can be seen in a new light. It’s not just about ensuring the lights are on but giving the business a genuine opportunity to recapture business that otherwise would have just walked away.

What other scenarios might be flagged? Can you check these yourself?

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