Driving traffic to your online store is no longer a metric for success. This is because converting visitors into buyers and eventually, loyalists is getting increasingly tougher. Most online businesses struggle with average conversion rates of 2.5-3% despite the high traffic.
Why do shoppers abandon their purchases? Is it due to poor experience or some issue they are facing? Real user monitoring allows e-commerce companies to get in-depth insights into website performance issues and user experience that impact buyer intent and conversion rates.
Real-user monitoring is a critical part of performance monitoring. It allows e-commerce teams to discover what real users are experiencing on the website and the hiccups they are facing. For instance, broken user interfaces, slow sites or servers, 404 errors, broken internal links, and more.
In this post, we will share the top benefits RUM offers to boost website performance, customer shopping journeys, and revenue.
Components of Real User Monitoring and How it Works
Real user monitoring counts on several components that work together to detect issues. The components shared in this graphic determine how RUM data is used and how it functions.
Data Collection
RUM uses JavaScript, log files, error logs, and load balancing to capture all the user and performance data in real time. This includes the collection of information like the page load time, user interactions, system crashes, and network issues from the browser or user’s device.
Each of these data points offers a comprehensive picture of the user experience, allowing e-commerce teams to identify issues and optimize performance.
For instance, error logs and log files offer insights into backend processes like server response time and error messages that help spot technical issues that impact user experience. Similarly, load-balancing data shows how traffic distribution affects performance across various servers.
Transmission Protocol
Transmission protocol allows the gathered data to be transferred to a centralized monitoring system. Thus, all the data is on a single platform for improved communication, visibility, coordination, and tracking, thereby enhancing the team’s ability to manage issues. This has a direct impact on the response time in case of an emergency.
Sessionization
Sessionization compiles data into records. Sessions are central to tracking what real users are experiencing. RUM heavily relies on monitoring these sessions to record actions and log the browser or device, or the specific pages where the error has occurred. It monitors problems like navigation issues, server and database errors, slow response times, and more. However, tracking a part of that user session alone will not give you the insights you need to understand what is impacting UX.
Data Storage
This comprises the infrastructure to store the data and run the root cause analysis collected from various sources.
Reporting
RUM analytics offers insightful reports in the form of graphs and charts that allow teams to make informed decisions. The analytics goes beyond parsing basic error logs. It analyzes user segments, page performance, availability, etc.
Thus, with a real user monitoring tool, you can monitor –
- Page load times
- Resource load times
- Website interactions like bounce rates, number of clicks to purchase, traffic, third-party dependencies, and more
- Form interaction
- Errors
- Browser and device type
- Navigation paths
RUM differs from synthetic monitoring which relies on scripted transactions and emulated user behavior to gather data. On the other hand, RUM captures data from actual users in real time as they interact with the website.
Benefits of Real User Monitoring
RUM is beneficial because it focuses on shoppers who could be lost owing to poor user experience stemming from errors and flaws. Let’s take a deep dive into the benefits of real user monitoring.
Real-Time Visibility into the Website Performance
A simple JavaScript error is enough to hugely impact the website’s performance. Through RUM you get a viewpoint of how a user interacts with the website and spot unforeseen issues. For instance, how quickly your site’s pages load in various locations and across browser versions.
Analysis of Frontend Performance
Frontend performance analysis involves monitoring the speed of the website interface during loading and interactions. RUM allows you to focus on frontend metrics like page load times, resource loading, rendering speed, and user interactions. Thus, the team can use this data to spot optimization opportunities, enhance code quality, and boost user experience.
End-to-End Visibility of the User Journey
With such end user experience monitoring you get end-to-end visibility of the user’s journey when they interact with the website. Tracking the entire buyer lifecycle provides a comprehensive view of user behavior.
Thus, it offers detailed information on user paths, pain points, and successful interactions, allowing you to detect bottlenecks that impact UX. These insights can be leveraged to create smoother user flows and enhanced user satisfaction.
Ease of Monitoring Service Level Targets
SLAs (service-level agreements) strengthen user trust in a service. RUM can be used to monitor service level agreements to show how you are meeting your SLA. For instance, application uptime, failure rates, and more. Thus, you can exceed user expectations and improve conversion rates.
Ability to Track High-Value Pages
High-value pages like the checkout page or the sign-up page are crucial in e-commerce. Usually, the lead developer or engineer is responsible for monitoring and prioritizing these fixes. RUM allows you to discover high-value pages that need instant fixes. It offers charts and analytics while tracking the relevant real user metrics.
Improved Developer Productivity
Developers usually spend a lot of time manually spotting issues and solving them. Real user monitoring offers the development team complete visibility of issues, enabling them to prioritize time-sensitive ones impacting UX. This allows them to make data-driven decisions, ensuring faster issue resolution.
Moreover, RUM assists in resource optimization by identifying performance bottlenecks. Thus, developers can allocate resources wisely, thereby lowering infrastructure expenses related to improving code, delays due to third-party services, and server usage. All this improves developer productivity, system performance, and reliability.
How Noibu Compares to RUM Solutions
Discovering what your real users are experiencing is important. However, relying on a real user monitoring solution isn’t enough. You need a platform that’s much more than RUM. Its functionality should fill the gap in your tech stack by not just keeping your front end healthy (site stability + error-tracking) but also directly correlating the errors to the revenue impact.
RUM solutions have several limitations that Noibu overcomes:
- They prioritize based on occurrence rates, not by impact on revenue. So, you aren’t alerted on conversion-impacting issues or sales downtimes that are effortlessly achieved with Noibu because of its automatic issue prioritization
- They fail to offer business-level reporting. In fact, they fail to offer an easy-to-understand explanation of error codes for non-technical or business teams
- They aren’t tailored for e-commerce operations. Unlike Noibu, they do not offer indications of checkout abandonment, issues with payment gateways, and other signs of e-commerce user frustration
- They need additional resources to manually link customer complaint tickets to bugs, making the process time-consuming and imprecise
- They are not prescriptive and do not provide potential fixes for bugs while Noibu goes beyond just spotting bugs. It’s a plug-and-play platform that recommends fitting fixes
How Noibu Stands Out as an End to End E-commerce Monitoring Solution
Unified monitoring across the front and back end
Traditionally, front and backend data is siloed in separate point solutions. Noibu’s unified monitoring helps in collecting and analyzing this data in a single platform.
Noibu offers automatic error detection for both JavaScript errors and server-side issues, ensuring the holistic health of your e-commerce platform. Its unified monitoring allows e-commerce developers to correlate performance metrics, traces, logs, and in real-time on a single dashboard.
Automatic issue prioritization and alerting
Noibu detects and prioritizes all website errors automatically based on their impact on revenue and conversions. It collects all data related to the issue, assigns a descriptive title and Error Signature, and provides all the necessary details your developers need to efficiently resolve errors. The platform also alerts on issue occurrences, solved issue occurrences, and the necessary technical information needed to resolve them. By relying on Noibu for error monitoring, teams have been able to reduce their error resolution time by 70%.
Issue details and explanation
Along with technical details, Noibu also provides AI-generated explanations of issues for non-technical teams so they can understand site errors better and visualize their impact.
Session replays
Noibu’s Session Playback feature recreates the shopper’s journey, offering insights into the session timeline, which documents each event throughout the session recording, including error encounters, web vital scores, page lifecycle events, user clicks, and HTTP events to help you recreate the issue and visualize the user journey for quick error resolution.
Flexible SDK
Noibu’s flexible SDK enables the creation of custom attributes like Customer ID, campaign details, logged-in status, A/B testing results, and more. Besides JS, it supports React & Vue.js SDK.
Summing Up
Common website errors and user friction can have a lasting impact on shopper trust, retention, and sales. RUM aims to offer the necessary real user monitoring data to address these issues and boost website performance.
However, when it comes to procuring a robust and tailored approach for e-commerce platforms that helps correlate site issues to revenue impact, Noibu stands out. If you are looking for a platform that understands and caters specifically to your e-commerce needs, count on Noibu. The platform serves as a co-pilot when it comes to delivering superior user experiences and boosting conversions and revenue. Sign up for a demo with our experts to see Noibu’s magic in action and instantly spot issues and prioritize them based on business impact.
