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Louise Arnold

8 reasons why you need synthetic monitoring

Monitoring digital performance on your website means you can continue to deliver an outstanding user experience through thick and thin. There’s monitoring and monitoring, though. Unless you monitor web performance in the same way that users experience a site, system errors can simply go unnoticed.

Only by understanding how your website performs from an end user perspective can you work out which technical issues are most disruptive before resolving them swiftly and effectively.

Tribe’s cloud-based synthetic journey monitoring solution, together with our team’s expert human insight simply provides the most accurate and actionable data available. Here’s why you should put it at the top of your to-do list:

1. So you can walk in your customer’s shoes

Tribe’s synthetic monitoring solution takes a ‘mystery shopper’ approach to web performance monitoring, launching realistic journeys through your site and making intelligent choices from page content just like your regular visitors. It’s the fastest and most effective route to identifying and resolving critical performance issues before they impact your customers.

2. To ensure a fast and error-free online user experience on any device..

It’s important to understand how well your website is performing across a range of platforms and devices, so shoppers enjoy a fast and frictionless journey, however and wherever they’re accessing your site. Unless you tailor web performance to meet user expectations – delivering swift page loading, for instance – you’ll find it hard to engage and retain visitors. And you’ll likely be the last to know, as unhappy users facing unacceptable delays simply switch to competitor sites.

3. …While allowing you to prioritise mobile.

The overwhelming majority of users are likely to be browsing your site from a smartphone or tablet. Last year, Google announced that mobile-first indexing would be the default approach for all new web domains, making it more crucial than ever that your site is optimised for mobile. Our service uses realistic synthetic monitoring on real mobile browsers to track iPhone, iPad and Android journeys across your site, giving uniquely realistic visibility of your mobile experience.

4. To monitor end-to-end performance and availability, 24/7.

Round-the-clock performance and web availability have become essential if you aim to deliver the kind of online experience that turns visitors from curious browsers into loyal and evangelical customers. It’s why you can’t afford to let performance errors go undetected, day or night. A consistent, reliable UX is the key to keeping customers on-side, which means it’s crucial that web managers are immediately alerted to performance issues and tech teams have swift access to the data they need to resolve them.

5. To quickly identify problems and pinpoint their root causes

Monitoring your website gives you an objective, consistent view of how your website is performing from your visitors’ perspective and flags glitches before they become an issue. We’ll script journeys that will flag critical issues for the most complex of sites, freeing your tech team to double down on the problems that have the biggest impact on your bottom line but that also return the best customer experience – in turn, maximising conversions and reducing abandonment.

6. So you can fast forward error resolution with neat tools like Video Replayer

If you don’t diagnose, isolate and resolve glitches quickly, you’ll run the risk of negatively impacting the user experience (UX). Sometimes even the most savvy tech teams can find it tricky to pin down problems, especially if your website is complex or relies on multiple third-party components to operate at full throttle. Happily, thinkTRIBE’s award-nominated Video Replayer provides a step-by-step account of the moments running up to the point at which an error occurred, allowing you to gain a deeper insight into the user journey and to decide how best to assign technical resources for the greatest benefit

7. To monitor SLA agreements and optimise third-party performance

Most ecommerce sites rely on a selection of third-party services to deliver a dynamic user experience with content-rich functionality. This could include the provision of back-office services such as card processing, intelligence-led tracking and analytics operations or UX-focused tasks like personalisation. The drawback is that each third party represents a potential point of failure that could affect performance. thinkTRIBE’s synthetic monitoring service will flag any performance issues promptly, prioritising issues requiring immediate action, as well as measuring the impact on the UX. It will also help you to hold third-party providers to account, ensuring they are operating as contracted and tracking performance over time.

8. So you can share customer-centric data across the business

Sharing the issues and challenges that affect web performance and impact the quality of the UX across tech and business teams is key to making long-term, bottom-line gains. While unreliable or foggy data has the potential to cause rifts, the best data – clear and customer-centric – can provide increased opportunities for profitable inter-departmental collaboration. With our help, your teams can share accurate data that’s crucial to improving the UX and solving problems as they arise.

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