In the dynamic world of eCommerce, user experience is the cornerstone of success. With studies suggesting that a one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% loss in conversions, the need for efficient performance monitoring is more crucial than ever.
Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools, which track and analyze user interactions with websites in real time, have gained popularity in this sphere. And standing tall amidst traditional RUM tools is Noibu – an innovative website monitoring platform engineered explicitly for eCommerce businesses.
Unlike standard RUM solutions, Noibu brings to the table a suite of advanced functionalities that help eCommerce websites significantly boost performance and conversions. In this article, we’ll delve deep into the key differences between standard Real User Monitoring tools and Noibu, as well as the reasons you should use Noibu if you run an eCommerce business.
What Is Real User Monitoring and Why Is It Important for eCommerce?
RUM, or Real User Monitoring, is performance monitoring that analyzes user transactions on a business’s website or application. It offers critical insights into how real users interact with a system, providing a comprehensive overview of the site performance from users’ perspective.
Here’s why RUM is important for eCommerce:
User experience: The success of an eCommerce business heavily depends on the shopping experience it provides to its customers. RUM provides real-time insights into how users interact with the website, identifying any issues or bottlenecks that may be affecting their journeys towards checkout. By addressing these issues proactively, businesses can improve user experience and user satisfaction.
Performance optimization: RUM can help identify performance issues that may not be noticeable during testing but can significantly impact real users. These might include slow page load times, malfunctioning checkout processes, or problems with site navigation. By resolving these issues, businesses can enhance the overall performance of their site, which can lead to increased user engagement and higher conversion rates.
Business decisions: The data obtained from RUM can inform business decisions. By understanding user behavior and preferences, businesses can optimize their offerings and marketing strategies. This could include identifying popular products, refining site layout and design, or tailoring promotions to user behavior.
What are APMs and How Do They Relate to RUM?
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) systems provide a holistic view of application performance, encapsulating a suite of capabilities aimed at tracking, analyzing, and enhancing the user experience and overall site functionality. APMs specialize in back-end monitoring. On the other hand, RUM is a user-centric approach that captures and analyzes real user data to enhance the end-customer experience. It is only one of the components within the larger APM ecosystem.
RUM offers unique insights into end-user experiences, tracking interactions within web browsers and relaying these events to the APM Server. RUM functionality is typically designed to be framework-agnostic and compatible with any front-end JavaScript application, which captures user interactions and transmits these events to the APM server, where they can be analyzed and utilized for performance optimization. The APM server enriches RUM data to provide enhanced insights into application performance.
While APM gives a complete picture of application performance, including infrastructure planning and code optimization, RUM hones in on real user experiences and interactions, offering insights into user behavior as well as an analysis of user journeys.
Real User Monitoring vs. Noibu: Key Differences
RUM platforms monitor and record user interactions with a website to determine whether users are being served quickly and where they encounter errors. Noibu is much more than a RUM platform – its functionality fills this gap in your tech stack by ensuring your front-end is healthy from a site stability and error-tracking standpoint, while also directly correlating errors with revenue impact.
Let’s look at a few distinctive features of Noibu:
Automatic prioritization and alerting: Noibu automatically prioritizes all detected issues by revenue/conversion impact and ease of resolution, as well as alerting on issue occurrences, solved issue re-occurrences, and technical information required to resolve them.
Unified monitoring across the front and back end: Noibu boasts an automatic detection system for both JavaScript and server-side issues, keeping your eCommerce platform’s holistic health in check.
Robust business reporting: Another significant advantage of Noibu is its extensive focus on business performance metrics, providing reports on revenue recovered, conversion improvements, and project goal progression. It also offers a dedicated, enterprise-grade support team, as well as automated monthly and quarterly business review reports.
Quick customer service ticket identification: With Noibu, you can quickly link customer complaints to their corresponding session and the related actionable issue through its Session Search feature.
Session Replay: Noibu’s Session Replay feature allows you to access 100% of sessions captured from shoppers on your website to review the issue from the user’s perspective.
Flexible SDK: Noibu’s SDK allows for the creation of custom attributes like Customer ID, campaign details, logged-in status, A/B testing results, and more. It also supports native React & Vue.js SDK.
Visible conversion improvements: Noibu’s dashboard offers a snapshot of the conversion increase over time, highlighting the tangible benefits and long-term value of using the platform.
Reduced investigation and resolution time: AI features like issue explanation and solution inspiration, detailed developer insights, and page lifecycle events all aid in reducing the time taken to investigate and resolve issues by taking you to the exact line of code that needs fixing (even for minified code!).
By offering this wide range of features, Noibu not only sets itself apart from standard RUM tools but also provides a more targeted, efficient, and impactful solution for eCommerce businesses. In other words, If your eCommerce company uses Noibu, there is no need to run another RUM platform.
Key Advantages of Using Noibu vs. RUM
Finally, let’s consider the main advantages of Noibu against other Real User Monitoring solutions.
Intelligent Issue Prioritization
While traditional RUM tools prioritize issues based on the frequency of occurrence, assuming that the more frequently an issue occurs, the more significant its impact is, Noibu adopts a more business-oriented approach.
Noibu is unique in its automatic issue prioritization, ranking them based on their impact on conversions and revenue as well as ease of resolution. It also alerts you to conversion-impacting issues, sales downtimes, and both the occurrence and recurrence of resolved issues. Additionally, it aids in prioritizing technical debt and provides issue trend reporting.
Helps Correlate Support Tickets to Site Errors
With conventional RUM tools, linking customer complaints to actionable issues is a manual, time-consuming, and often imprecise process. On the other hand, Noibu stands out by promptly identifying customer complaints, correlating the session with the issue, and tracing it back to its root cause, thus making the process more efficient and actionable.
Clear Understanding of Error Codes
While many RUM tools don’t provide an easy-to-understand explanation of error codes, which means businesses need to rely on session recordings, Noibu simplifies this process. It enables you to understand the issue instantly without the need to watch a video, saving you time and effort.
Recommended Fixes using AI
Noibu goes beyond just identifying issues. Rather, it’s a plug-and-play solution that also recommends potential fixes for identified bugs, a feature typically absent in standard RUM tools.
eCommerce-specific Data Collection to Debug
Noibu collects specific information tailored to eCommerce platforms, such as indications of checkout abandonment, use of multiple payment gateways, and other signs of user frustration, aiding the developer team in debugging the issues more quickly. Furthermore, Noibu records page lifecycle events at the session level, further accelerating the debugging process.
Final Thoughts
While Real User Monitoring tools offer valuable insights into application performance from an actual user’s perspective, Noibu stands out with its robust and tailored approach for eCommerce platforms.
Its unique features, such as automatic detection of both front-end and back-end issues, intelligent prioritization and alerting based on conversion and revenue impact, as well as its focus on eCommerce-specific data, make it a powerful ally for an eCommerce business. The ability to capture all user sessions and swiftly link customer complaints to actionable issues adds to its appeal, reducing investigation and resolution times significantly.
In the increasingly competitive eCommerce space, choosing a platform like Noibu that understands and caters specifically to your needs can make all the difference in delivering superior user experiences and boosting conversions.
Whether you’re an established online retailer or a growing eCommerce business, understanding these differences can guide you in selecting the right tools to elevate your digital performance to new heights. If you’re looking to explore Noibu for your online store, sign up for a free checkout audit to get insights into errors that could be slowing down your site.
