Managing Users
In order for your website enterprise to be a success, you must learn how to divide your priorities. While you must ensure the site is filled with accurate and helpful information, an administrator must also ensure the architecture and performance of a website meets the ever-tightening user performance demands. No matter how large or small your website may be, it’s imperative to remember that every visitor is unique, and so are their expectations regarding performance and functionality. In an attempt to satisfy varied user expectations and requirements, real user website monitoring techniques are imperative. This form of user/website monitoring focuses on end-user experiences by gathering a unique set of data values. By gaining real-user performance reports, administrator’s gain deeper insight into how their sites are viewed by visitors. These insights may navigate webmasters to improvements and alterations they otherwise would be unaware of.
Data From Real Users
While there are many other effective ways to monitor the performance and operation of a website, other performance monitoring techniques rely on synthetic user data. That is, data that’s collected from a computer-generated script, which interacts with your site – not data from a real-life user. Real user website monitoring provides data that correlates with an actual event, or user experience. It’s only with this data an administrator is able to view actual data values, such as:
- Performance based on geographic locations
- Most used browsers and its effect on website performance
- All platforms utilized to access a site; with data to delve into response times and click-out rates.
- Visualized performance metrics, which provide a clear and unobstructed view into the actual experiences had by users.
Real-Time Tracking and Feedback
The most well-equipped real user website monitoring solutions offer near-instant user tracking. This means system administrators are able to track the behavior and performance (interaction) of specific website elements for a specific user, or set of users. By gaining real-time monitoring feedback and reports, an administrator is capable of making last-minute adjustments and alterations to immediately support the highest performance and functionality level. There are a number of companies that offer solutions like that such as Pingdom and Uptime-Pal.
Excellent Companion for Active Monitoring Solutions
In order to provide your website with truly comprehensive monitoring and coverage, it’s essential to combine two types of monitoring techniques: active and real user (also known as passive monitoring). When an administrator runs both active and passive monitoring tools, they’re able to receive a complete solution for identifying errors and issues, according to WebHostingBuddy.com. These tools are able to provide unique measurements from synthetic and real users. By viewing and comparing these two reports, administrators are able to determine:
- The number of visitors that were impacted by website downtime or system outages.
- The number of errors and issues that directly influence user engagement, visitor conversion and abandonment percentage. With this information, error fixes and improvements can be prioritized based on importance.
- The root cause for website performance errors. By quickly revealing the exact cause of an error or issue, administrators may correct the error before it has time to affect user experience for a large number of visitors (read more information about that here).