How to Monitor Website Traffic using Statistical Process Control Charts
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In this article, you will learn how to construct statistical process control charts. These charts serve as a tool to monitor your website traffic's stability. The objective is accurate problem detection without the risk of facing "out of control" situations common among web masters, SEOs and online business owners. This article is the first part of a two-part series.
The main benefit is to let a webmaster or SEO professional actually spot problematic scenarios which are not included in web analytic software packages (such as Google Analytics and Stat Counter). A control chart lets you systematically detect out-of-control situations and let the website in charge correct the problem as early as it happens.
This is a two-part tutorial. The first part discusses the manual computation methods to help you grasp key concepts for constructing control charts. The second part illustrates the shortcut process of constructing the chart and establishes standard reporting methods using MS Excel that are usable in the day-to-day monitoring of website traffic done either by the webmaster, SEO professional or online business owner.
What is an SPC Control Chart?
To easily understand a control chart, let’s compare it to some standard web analytic charts, like this one from Google Analytics:
As you can see, all it shows is the basic plot of daily website traffic. It does not tell you whether the traffic is stable or if your web site is facing an out-of-control situation. This is where SPC control charts can be very helpful. With problems immediately and accurately detected, traffic can be restored to its normal (stable) level, thus NOT affecting the sales and profitability of the website.
Below is a sample control chart using an Upper Control Limit (UCL), Lower Control Limit (LCL) and the average line:
The pink line is the UCL, the green line is the average line and below that is the LCL (violet line). The blue line depicts the actual daily fluctuations of website traffic. Using the rules for detecting out-of-control points in the control chart, any webmaster or SEO professional can accurately detect the presence of a real problem.
As you can see, every control chart should have the actual line chart of the website traffic, the UCL line, LCL line and the center (average) line. How to construct this chart is the subject and objective of this tutorial.
Next: Steps in Constructing Control Charts >>
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