Performance monitoring strategy

Good monitoring does more than collect charts. It should quickly show what changed, where a problem appeared, what evidence supports a hypothesis and who makes the next decision.

Establish a baseline

Before a change, we record the period, pages, market, device and data source. Otherwise it is unclear whether we are comparing the same process. Search visibility is kept separate from behaviour after arrival.

Combine appropriate sources

Search Console provides impressions, clicks, queries and pages in Google results, while analytics describes behaviour on the website. We document differences between systems instead of forcing their numbers to match.

Documentation: Google Search Central.

Annotate changes

Content publication, migration, outages, campaigns and measurement changes receive a date and scope. This helps investigate plausible relationships, although timing alone does not prove causation.

Make alerts useful

Each alert has a threshold, period, recipient and expected action. We reduce notifications caused by small fluctuations. A sudden absence of data is first checked as a possible measurement failure.

Report decisions and limits

We present the result, comparison, affected pages and next check. Data delays, seasonality and method changes are made explicit. After implementing a recommendation, we return to the same scope.