In a survey by CMS Wire, 74% of respondents said that their company had increased its focus on supporting and improving digital experiences due to COVID-19. Additionally, 73% of those respondents cited that their company had made financial investments into the resources needed to support digital experiences with their brand. But when incorporating digital channels into your overall customer experience, a few obstacles begin to emerge.
In today’s B2B and B2C commerce landscape, your digital experience will be managed by multiple teams with different aims in the areas of marketing, security, application development, and content management. Well-meaning companies might hope that their teams work in sync, but instead, they can often miscommunicate which leads to issues around eCommerce performance.
Without effective processes operating at your business’s core, a poor digital customer experience could damage your brand’s reputation. A solution to this issue is putting the people and tools in place to monitor your digital experience.
In this article, we’ll discuss what digital experience monitoring is, the essential pieces to put in place to monitor digital experiences, and what metrics are being monitored. Then, we look at how digital experience monitoring relates to eCommerce performance.
What is Digital Experience Monitoring?
Digital experience monitoring consists of both application performance monitoring and end-user experience monitoring. The aim of digital experience monitoring is to create a single source of truth for your business to better understand your customers’ experiences across multiple interactions, channels, and products.
What are the Digital Experience Monitoring Essentials?
People and tools are the two key pillars of digital experience monitoring. In the ideal scenario, digital experience monitoring tools simplify your ability to improve your digital experience, such as curated dashboards (business, performance, infrastructure), an application for alerts across your eCommerce business, and complete end-to-end user monitoring.
A team of knowledgeable experts, whether internal or external, should use a digital experience monitoring tool to guarantee you are taking the right steps to ensure your success. With a team and tools in place, you will get practical insights that allow you to take a proactive approach to your digital customer experience and site performance.
During this process, your customers’ privacy must also remain paramount. Both tools and experts will also ensure that all the data collected will be anonymised and secured in the process of monitoring.
What do Digital Experience Monitoring Tools Measure?
A user’s digital experience is measured by different metrics including performance, security, mobile-friendliness, and HTTPS. Google analyses these components when deciding how to rank sites in their search results. The arrival of new digital experience monitoring tools is only a reflection of this need to follow Google’s increased focus on digital experience.
Digital experience monitoring tools perform similar functions across the industry: They present data that you can get through existing analytics services like Google Analytics but in more convenient and informative ways to help your business perform better in key areas like site performance.
Ultimately digital experience monitoring tools take raw data and present it to you in ways that are tailored to your particular business needs. Much of the focus is on the Core Web Vitals which are crucial performance measurements that you need to focus on for an improved eCommerce experience for your customers.
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Ecommerce Site Performance & Your Digital Customer Experience
A lot of the emphasis on digital experience monitoring relates to site performance. Site performance has always been a keyword in eCommerce, but a recent change in Google’s search algorithm means that performance directly influences where Google places your site in search results as well as your overall digital customer experience. Research carried out by Amazon, Google and Facebook has shown that improving page load performance has a positive impact on eCommerce stores, the reverse is also true—slower pages often lead to lost revenue and reduced trust in your brand.
Bounce rates are linked to eCommerce performance, and on average users expect your store pages to load in less than 3 seconds. In a study by Google, they confirmed that speed and bounce rate are closely related. When the speed of your website slows down, the bounce rate continues to go up. At a 1-second to 3-second loading rate, the bounce rate increases by 33%. And if it goes from 1 second to 5 seconds, the bounce rate increases to 90%. If you are unaware of your performance and the steps needed to improve it, you could face high bounce rates that damage your sales.
Digital Experience Monitoring: Taking A Proactive Approach to Site Performance
Despite the clear benefits of monitoring and improving site performance, many companies don’t understand how site performance affects their digital experience. The key to a successful eCommerce performance strategy is to first identify and fix the bottlenecks in your store. Then, you can begin to measure improvements and regressions. Lastly, and most importantly, you can monitor changes to in-store performance over time. This proactive approach will lead to numerous benefits from your improved site performance:
- Better First Impression
- Enhanced User Experience
- Improved Search Ranking
- Increased Conversions
While many companies are accelerating their digital commerce initiatives due to COVID-19, the user experience on your eCommerce site can still vary widely depending on your approach to digital customer experience. A proactive approach through digital experience monitoring is a key first step to ensure your site performance supports your digital future.
How Vaimo Improves Your Ecommerce Performance
Performance is a living entity just like SEO or marketing—it requires constant focus and improvement. We use a variety of tools to measure our client stores’ page speed, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Our internal monitoring systems are robust and are complemented by third-party digital experience monitoring tools like New Relic and performance analysis tools, such as BlackFire, to provide custom monitoring for business-critical services.
What happens after we analyse your site performance?
- You understand clearly if the problem lies within the website code or if the issue lies with the hosting platform, or both
- We narrow down performance problems and fix them
- Together, we monitor performance over time
Our performance audits involve a deep dive into core areas of the store to identify bottlenecks in the store infrastructure and codebase. We utilise lab data generated in a controlled environment to diagnose the root cause of performance problems. We also draw upon field data provided by Google and other data aggregators to give insight into how fast pages are loading for real users on your store.
With Vaimo, your site performance journey starts with purchasing a package that consists of a website performance tool, New Relic, and the guaranteed assistance of our experienced team of professionals. We already support many of our clients around the world with New Relic and other performance monitoring tools to embrace digital experience monitoring and improve their eCommerce performance.
Final Thoughts
The longer your pages take to load, the more degraded the experience is for your potential customers. First impressions matter and much like in a physical store, nobody wants a slow and frustrating experience. Understanding how your customers access your online store—and through which devices—is the first step to better optimise your website performance. Making a commitment to digital experience monitoring can ensure that your company is taking the appropriate steps to ensure eCommerce success. To learn more about how Vaimo can help you strengthen your digital experience, reach out to our team today.
