Real user monitoring (RUM) is a crowdsourcing technique to capture, analyze, and report a website’s performance as experienced by actual users. It helps you to answer some of the toughest questions regarding your user’s experience:
- How fast is your website actually loading on user’s browsers?
- How well are users able to load your website from various region of the world?
- Is everything on your website actually loading?
- How long is each user spending on each page?
- How many of your users are on a mobile device? Which browser? Is performance different depending on the OS or browser they are using?
- Are people abandoning your website because things are too slow?
In short, RUM helps you understand whether if you’re potentially losing revenue because someone got tired of the loading speed. Whether you’re refining a mobile commerce strategy or developing mobile-optimized websites, Real User Monitoring is extremely important regardless and should be adopted by every business with an online presence/solution.
RUM is a passive form of monitoring as the measurement only happen when a real customer visits a website. It collects data from a real user without having any additional load on the website.
One of its most common application is to crowdsources telemetry from millions of real users around the world to determine the most optimal routing for a region to a service, similar to how Google Traffic identifies congestions to provide the best routes for all drivers.
Benefits of RUM
Businesses rely a lot on the website to deliver their products, services, and reputation in the modern world.
One of the worst risks is an error-prone, problematic website after you’ve spent time working on promoting your site, only to have people visit it and find that it’s down. There are many reasons why a website does not perform, which can include hosting or server problems, issues with the Internet service or cloud providers, and other various issues.
By dynamically inserting a lightweight snippet of JavaScript into your pages, RUM measures actual page loads as they happen, enabling you to:
- Measure from end to end, i.e from the Real User browsers all the way to web servers. This ensures no part of the critical network, system or path is left out.
- Learn what proportion of users are confronting slow response times and examine the spread between those enjoying fast page loads and those probably frustrated by slower page loading
- Determine if your site performance is improving or declining, stable or erratic, or how performance is being affected by your latest release
- Compare response times across different groups of users, for example, between Android devices and iPhones
- With massive and comprehensive data collected, eBusiness can easily correlate the user performance distribution, trend and its impact on your business.