04/16/2014

How Website Monitoring Can Add Value to Your Analytics Software

Most webmasters know the value of good website analytics software. They also know the value of a quality website monitoring service. The question is, as a webmaster, do you know the ways in which these two services can work together to strengthen the efficiency of your site while minimizing website downtime and maximizing business profits?

What Do Website Analytics Do?

Analytics software measures, collects, and analyzes data about your website, providing you with reports for purposes of optimizing your website and its usage. While this type of software performs a number of functions, one of its main features is that of measuring web traffic trends and current web traffic. While this information is helpful in understanding how effective your marketing campaigns are and how popular your website is becoming, the knowledge has much more to offer than just that. It can also help you determine if perhaps your site's traffic is having an impact on your site's performance and even its uptime.

What Does a Website Monitoring Service Do?

A website monitoring service alerts you the moment your website goes down, but that is far from the only function these services perform. In addition, a quality website monitoring service can also alert you if your site begins to experience performance issues, such as issues with slow page load times.

How Can the Two Work Together?

You can use your analytics software and your website monitoring service to determine what type of impact your traffic may be having on the performance of your site. For example, let's say you notice spikes of traffic or an upward trend of traffic when you look at your analytics report. You can then check your website monitor to determine if these traffic changes are having an impact on the performance of your site. If you notice that the increased traffic has resulted in a downward turn of your site's performance, you can take measures to correct the issue. For example, you can increase the bandwidth of your hosting plan or change your hosting to a dedicated server if you are currently using a shared server.

Stand-Alone Tools Can Work Well Together

While many webmasters know the value of both website monitoring service and website analytics software, not everyone understands that these two tools can work well together when you know how to put them to proper use. The next time a traffic increase is indicated on your analytics report, check your website monitoring service to see if there has been a change to your site's performance. If the increase in traffic is indeed affecting the performance of your site, your website monitor can alert you to this fact so you can take proper measures and get your site's performance back up to par, perhaps even preventing a complete outage of your website.