Many businesses now use digital platforms to bring together vast communities of partners and customers, allowing for massive efficiency and scale. By enlisting Pingdom Real User Monitoring, it can help you to discover more about the user experience of your web service or application, and analyze these results to give your consumers a better overall experience. This article will help you to gain a better understanding of what real user monitoring is and how it may help your business. 

What is Real User Monitoring?

There are many ways that real user monitoring might be described, including short-hand RUM, digital experience monitoring, user monitoring, end-user experience monitoring, or real-user measurement. All of these names essentially refer to the same type of technology and give you a good indication of what's involved. With this technology, you can discover what the experience is like for individual users using your website or application. The technology collects performance measures straight from the end user's browser and it tracks essential data including functionality, availability, and responsiveness. For example, it can tell you the time it took for a certain page on your website to load. If you discover that a page on your site is lagging and taking too long to load, you can look into the issue and fix it, ensuring your user experience remains positive. 

How Does it Work?

Data is collected from real users while they are accessing your website or application at each visit. Every time someone uses your digital platform, the RUM will collect data on their experience. JavaScript's are used on each page, which gathers the data and sends it back for you to analyze.  Data can be arranged visually into tables and graphs for easier analysis. 

Why Use it for Your Business?

Ultimately, by enlisting the help of RUM, you can ensure that visitors to your website and/or mobile application have a better experience overall. Anything that is currently preventing them from doing so, such as a website crash or slow loading times, will be flagged for you through the data that is generated, and you can put steps in place to resolve any issues. If you were to simply make your user experience the best it can be for an operating system or browser such as Google, it would not account for the many other people that come across your website or application from a different form. By employing RUM, you can give everyone a good experience, no matter how they are accessing your digital platform.

What Does RUM Show You?

There are six main areas that RUM can support your website or web app:

• Data capture: collects valuable data such as load times of pages and JavaScript

• Sessionization: collates the data into records that contain actions, pages and timings of visits

• Problem detection: checks for any issues or behaviors that cause problems, such as any system problems, slow page loads etc. 

• Individual visit reporting: you can find out exactly what the experience is like for individual users, which allows you to see if from their perspective.

• Reporting and segmentation: this allows you to see the availability of pages when using different browsers and user segments.

Alerting: if any problems are found, you will receive an alert.