Last year, ecommerce accounted for 13% of total retail sales, up from 11.6% in 2016. Online retail grew faster than in any year since 2011. Ecommerce is growing again, and your focus should be on website performance for exceptional user experience.
You already understand that exceptional website performance can help you keep customers. It’s too easy to lose them: 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. Even if they don’t abandon, whether or not they convert can be affected by page speed: faster pages, more conversions. Customers expect performance and speed, no matter what device they use. You need to prevent frustrating website problems before they drive customers to your competitors. And your current users might not be having the great experience you think they are. Why?
The problem could be a user’s device limitations, like slow hardware, poor connectivity, or even a high-distraction environment. Device limitations can cause your website to seem slow or buggy. The problem could also be that different browsers or browser versions have trouble loading specific pages, making the experience frustrating. Or, a local public cloud outage could be the problem, making your website simply unavailable.
Wherever the problem exists, it affects your customers’ experience. So how do you find existing experience problems? How do you help prevent them before they happen? How do you diagnose an experience problem?
Uptime monitoring and page speed are basic elements of helping ensure a good user experience. Pingdom is designed to provide both of these monitoring techniques. And now, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) goes beyond these basic elements to help you monitor all user interactions on your website.
DEM helps ensure an optimal experience at each customer contact point, helping to identify problems before customers drop off in frustration. DEM includes two kinds of monitoring: synthetic transaction monitoring and real user monitoring.
Synthetic transaction monitoring helps you design an optimal user experience by scripting and simulating critical user actions—login, shopping cart checkout, and payment transactions —and then recording performance data of the simulated tasks. Simulating actions that are critical for the business provides a picture of the customer experience during your design process and provides you with troubleshooting information before a problem can affect your business.
Synthetic transaction monitoring with the Pingdom® solution is designed to let you automatically test steps by running them at set intervals, and then receive an alert if there’s a failure. During a redesign, you can test the performance of your user’s tasks on your website to identify potential issues that may cause users to drop off.
Real user monitoring can allow you to record all visitors’ interactions with your website. You can “experience” your website from their point of view. You can trace errors quickly and diagnose the specific problem that users are experiencing in real time and offers a more accurate test of the users’ experience.
Pingdom displays real user data in a view that is manageable and easily understood, even by non-technical staff members. You can filter the resulting data by browser and platform type, location, and time so that you can analyze specific user segment experiences. You can share easy-to-understand reports with team members by simply sending a link. Since Pingdom can retain data up to 13 months, you can also easily analyze performance over time and find usage patterns. Pingdom tools provide you with powerful analytics to help you make data-driven decisions for website experience optimization.
Keeping your users’ experience in mind during design and redesign tasks is key. Synthetic transaction monitoring combined with real user monitoring can give you a more complete view of the customer experience.
Identifying experience problems before they affect users helps improve the digital experience for your customers, which should help to keep them on your site and buying your products.
