Real User Monitoring (RUM) tools can help you improve clients’ digital experience and convert online visitors faster. To get the most out of these tools, it’s important to understand what they are and how they work.

What is Real User Monitoring?

RUM works by analyzing how online visitors interact with an application or website. It looks at everything from HTTP requests to page load events to frontend application crashes. It is also called end-user experience monitoring, real user measurement, or digital experience monitoring. Think of this as a type of analytics, where you’re looking at certain interactions between users and your website. That might include browser types, page views, or click types. But it doesn’t tell you how satisfied your online visitors are.

General analytics only gives you high-level information about your clients’ experience, like where the traffic to your site is coming from. But it doesn’t help you learn how to convert those leads into customers. With RUM, you can control your visitors’ digital experiences and ensure that they’re satisfied. You can look at one or more user’s digital journey and look for anomalies. With these performance metrics, you can understand anything that goes wrong and where it happened. That way, you can fix it so other users won’t be impacted.

What You Can Learn

A tool like Pingdom RUM can help you see things like when and how a user made it halfway through your e-commerce store and went to another page. You can look at what might have gone wrong. Or you might notice that many users from a certain country using a particular browser can’t visit their website. Their connections might be timing out before your website loads. Monitoring everyone’s interactions with your site might help you see surprising behavior that you wouldn’t have otherwise detected. It’s about more than just seeing when your application is up or down. You get a detailed accounting of everyone’s interactions with your site.

Benefits of Monitoring

RUM software can help you with any number of tasks. For example, by using the data, you can understand what might be preventing an otherwise great experience for your online visitors. Then you can troubleshoot the issues. RUM also offers actionable insights so you can see right away how it is impacting your user experience. Not every user has the same connection speed or browser, so it’s good to test the performance over a variety of locations and operating systems. Each of these factors impacts what the experience will be like for your website visitors.

Some business owners don’t use RUM software because they’re afraid of slowing down their sites. But these tools are designed to be as unobtrusive and transparent as possible. They can monitor every client-server transaction while avoiding any disruptions to your users. If you do perceive any sluggishness, your developers can respond to the tools’ insights to improve the website’s performance. After all, the goal of doing web monitoring is to catch any potential issues. RUM tools are also easy to install and use.