Perhaps more startling is that more than 50 percent of these errors go undetected by the company's IT professionals, says Web monitoring provider Coradiant (coradiant.com), only to be discovered and remedied after they are reported by customers. 

Fortunately, companies that monitor their Web sites using a "blended" set of specialized performance monitoring tools are able to cut the number of undetected site errors down to 35 percent, says Coradiant. They can also address these problems much faster than their counterparts.

These were among the key findings in a recent survey conducted by King Research and commissioned by Coradiant. It was given to over 300 IT professionals, who evaluated the tools and methods used to monitor their companies' Web operations.

Coradiant says it sponsored the survey to learn more about its own product's efficiencies, with an eye to improving on them.

"We wanted to just really learn what people's problems were and how we can adjust our product over time to meet their needs," says Tom Clarkson, VP of marketing at Coradiant. "It really started out for an educational purpose."

Clarkson says the level of impact undetected site errors have on a company's business "depends on the importance of that Web site to the business." He places the greatest emphasis on e-commerce Web sites.

Over half of survey participants reported that they lost business as a direct result of any site errors.  

Similarly, site problems can greatly affect cost-saving Web sites that provide self-serving opportunities, such as banking sites. These online services help to reduce the company's operational costs, so any problems that surface can result in lost business. On the other hand, a branding Web site or front page of a larger corporation is not as mission-critical, meaning site errors would only have a minor impact on that company.

Upon reviewing the results of the survey, Coradiant found that organizations that deploy a blended monitoring solution that includes more than one tool are more successful in finding and fixing problems.

"We found that if people do any monitoring at all, even if they used a single tool, they've pretty much cut down on the number of complaining users by half," says Clarkson. "For those who used more than one kind of tool, they were able to get it down to about 70 percent."

In fact, 90 percent of problems of companies that used a comprehensive blended monitoring solution were able to fix any problems that occurred within half a day - a significant improvement over organizations that did not use this approach.

Coradiant says its own monitoring solution, TrueSight TS-520 real-user monitor, improves overall site performance by repairing discovered errors.

TrueSight TS-520 keeps track of Web-user sessions in real-time and provides built-in service level reporting and incident management capabilities.

Clarkson says that when TrueSight TS-520 is coupled with the other Coradiant services, organizations have a greater chance of finding and rectifying any problems that occur.

"It's really a good combination of device level monitoring tools, user monitoring tools and Web analytics tools blended together to really look at the total problem," says Clarkson.