Online businesses rely on monitoring web performance to enable the delivery of a consistently good user experience (UX).
It’s a mistake, though, to think that web analytics can deliver the same level of detail as a managed performance monitoring service – or, indeed, to assume that all monitoring services are the same.
While web analytics can tell you what your performance levels are like, they can’t tell you why. By contrast, accurate real-time monitoring allows you to get closer to your users and to see your site through their eyes. If you know how browsers and buyers are experiencing your website, you can swiftly identify, prioritise and improve the performance of customer journeys, guaranteeing dependable performance across a variety of platforms and devices.
Moreover, by taking thinkTRIBE’s approach and following precisely in your users’ footsteps – doing quite literally what your users do – you can not only understand how your site is performing from an end-user perspective but also discover if their behaviour is adversely impacted by tech issues. Are they dropping out when service slows at busy periods in certain parts of the user journey, for instance, or when pages return unexpected or inaccurate content?
Making data work harder
It’s become the norm for organisations to collect lots of data – and with good reason: after all, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
With the advent of web analytics over the last decade or so, it’s easy to pull a bewildering array of figures from users browsing your web pages. But not all data is of equal value when it comes to informing your business decisions. It’s perfectly possible to be monitoring tons of web metrics without actually capturing your users’ experiences, for example.
Effective monitoring of your website gives you an objective, consistent view of how your website is performing from your visitors’ perspective and provides essential data that can be used to enhance the UX. It can spot the errors you might otherwise miss: this is crucial if problems are only occurring on a subset of pages or in certain product categories.
Journeys that are scripted to replicate real traffic patterns will flag mission-critical issues, freeing tech teams to target the problems that not only impact your bottom line but that also return the best customer experience.
Creating successful collaborative processes
Sharing this customer-centric performance analysis across tech and business teams provides greater opportunities for productive inter-departmental collaboration, too. Through careful monitoring, your teams can review accurate data that’s crucial to improving the UX and solving problems as they arise. Monitoring will also help manage third-party services. Most eCommerce sites have come to rely on multiple third-party services to deliver the content-rich functionality customers demand, including personalisation and card processing services.
Each third party represents a potential point of failure, though. Effective monitoring can track performance and flag issues promptly before they impact the UX, helping to hold third-party providers to account, and ensuring they are fulfilling their contracted SLAs.
Leveraging your platform
24/7 performance and web availability are no longer optional for online brands looking to turn occasional visitors into loyal ambassadors. Performance monitoring that’s as close as possible to the real UX is essential. It’s about experiencing exactly what your users experience; it’s about improving organisational outcomes by uniting technical and business teams; and it’s about optimising the speed and performance of your website to ensure you’re always ready to serve your growing audience.
Discover how thinkTRIBE can help. Download our latest white paper, check out our mobile monitoring pages or call to request a demo