In the past year, there has been a surge of new online businesses because of the COVID-19 pandemic. One example is Facebook launching Facebook Shops last year. According to the United Nations, the e-commerce share of global retail trade had risen from 14% in 2019 to about 17% in 2020. However, with the new growth in online presence, businesses sometimes struggle to keep their website running and up to date, often due to a surge in traffic and demand.

Many businesses have started buying website monitoring software to track their web performance, but they can do a lot more than that. This article will explain why companies should consider using the advanced features of website monitoring software.

Top business goals related to website monitoring

Website monitoring solutions include performance metrics tracking, offering specific insights into the statistics such as interactions processed or response time. These products form a baseline for these metrics and monitor the applications for any variance from the baseline. The metrics are displayed in a variety of data visualizations for easy conceptualization. They are used by website administrators to manage websites and discover possible reasons for delays in response time. With the ability to identify and fix any performance issues, businesses can provide an optimal user experience.

The definition above only shows the basics of what website monitoring can do. Top vendors have a wide range of integrations that bring website monitoring to the next level. What customers should think about is that every vendor has basic website monitoring functionality, but what distinguishes them from others are the extra features that they provide for specific business goals. As more users are interested in buying this type of software, they should identify what business problem they are trying to solve or improve for these extra features.

According to G2 data, traffic to the website monitoring category has seen a 797% increase since the pandemic caused global lockdowns in April 2020 through April 2021. This signals that an increasing number of companies seek out and rely on website monitoring solutions to maintain their digital presence and website performance. As more customers started shopping online due to lockdowns, many websites experienced a surge of unexpected traffic that slowed down their sites. Website monitoring software helps by identifying what is slowing down the website and alerting the IT team immediately. The IT team can then fix the issue speedily to keep users happy. 

Revenue generation: Real user monitoring and digital analytics

For online businesses, less website load time equals higher conversion rates, which directly relates to sales. For Walmart, every one second of improvement in website load time equals a 2% increase in online revenue. For Amazon, a one-second page slowdown could cost them $1.6 billion in sales each year. 

Web page optimization is necessary, but where should the IT team begin? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of individual web pages within an enterprise web environment. Should the focus be on the homepage? Are other pages such as “on-sale” pages more important? What about the slowest pages? These are the most commonly asked questions by every front-end team. The answer can be found by integrating website monitoring software with other software. This is where real user monitoring and digital analytics software will help.

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) software, or real user monitoring (RUM) software, is used to discover, track, and optimize web-based resources and end-user experience. These tools monitor traffic, user behavior, and many additional factors to help businesses better understand their products’ performance and usability.

Digital analytics software tracks website visitors and measures web traffic. Marketers, web developers, and analysts use digital analytics suites to report on the effectiveness and popularity of web experiences and to determine how visitors are finding and interacting with their sites.

The key finding here is how customers interact with specific web pages. By using the two solutions above, companies should identify which pages have a direct relationship between conversion rate and load time. If that web page becomes slower or faster over time, does it impact conversion rate significantly compared to other web pages? High-impact web pages are where companies should start identifying optimization. 

The next step is recommended optimizations. Advanced RUM and digital analytics software automatically suggest different ways to improve site performance. 

The options are limitless depending on the vendors, so companies should identify specifically what business use cases they are seeking and how that relates to the software. For example, if the website conversion comes mostly from mobile devices and social media, the business should buy software that features mobile device optimization.

Operation management: content monitoring

As company websites grow in the amount of content and product offering, many of them find it difficult to track their website content changes. The reason is that in an enterprise-grade web operation, there are many different teams involved. There are front-end teams, back-end teams, operation teams, marketing teams, and so on. It is extremely difficult to communicate all the changes each team is publishing on each web page. 

The same problem occurs externally as well. Customers also interact with the website when they are ordering products. It is not uncommon for companies to cancel extra orders because their inventory database doesn’t reflect the inventory shown on their website. This decreases customer satisfaction because the web operation is flawed. 

How do companies solve this problem? While they can set up complicated enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, quick fixes are available too. Some website monitoring software vendors offer content monitoring capability that tracks changes to each web page. If the inventory is running low, the system alerts users that the web content needs to be updated by the web and SEO teams. Different roles can be assigned to different alert areas for the appropriate function teams. This effective content management will be automatically audited in real time so the internal teams and customers can see the reflected changes. 

Most organizations have agile development release code and content changes daily, so keeping track of how these factors impact digital performance is critical. Companies should identify what areas of online business they need to track and look for the content monitoring capability accordingly.

IT management: full infrastructure monitoring

There is a growing trend in monitoring space for the past few years called observability. Observability tools provide an integrated monitoring solution and single-pane-of-glass visibility across infrastructure, applications, and cloud services. They also serve as a primary source of collection, aggregation, and analysis of event logs, performance metrics, and event traces. These metrics are used to establish performance baseline metrics across a unified IT ecosystem. This is the system that tries to do it all. 

How does this help? For one, by gathering every bit of information available in the IT infrastructure system, AI can analyze this massive amount of information and find out what is wrong with the system. This is called AIOps software, or artificial intelligence for IT operations software, which describes using AI or machine learning to analyze large volumes of data across a variety of systems. AIOps platforms take advantage of this to accelerate issue identification and resolution by increasing root cause analysis (RCA) accuracy and proactive identification, which reduces time to resolution and helps improve service level agreement (SLA) adherence. 

Lastly, buying one complete solution can potentially save companies a significant amount of money. Buying multiple solutions and spending time to integrate them costs more money and time than buying one. The caveat to this approach is that the IT team needs to make sure that this solution fulfills their business requirements. If the IT team finds out that they need additional capability or customization from the software, vendors will charge extra to create a custom solution for them. Since the customer’s IT system is already locked in with the vendor, the vendor could charge a very steep price. Buyers are recommended to demo this kind of solution meticulously before signing the contract so that they don’t have to pay extra in the near future. 

Where to start?

G2 Grid® highlights industry Leaders and High Performers in the Website Monitoring category, to help buyers compare products and streamline the buying process.

Website monitoring and other monitoring spaces are changing at a rapid speed. Incumbent vendors constantly release new capabilities to retain customers from new competitors. While it is easier to convince top management to buy a well-established solution, buyers need to be aware that older companies are constantly publishing new code to integrate with their legacy code for additional capability. This approach makes their software less desirable than a completely new system. The reason is that as time passes by, developers have to constantly rewrite their legacy code to fit the new requirements. 

It’s common to reach a point where there’s too much technicality for developers to implement new features. The code is hacked around repeatedly and reaches the point of no return. Unless the vendor progressively deletes their legacy code and makes new code (an expensive approach), their products are just going to get more complicated and harder to use. Since this space is changing so rapidly, buyers should take an open-minded approach to demo new solutions that are less complicated to implement with new capabilities that older companies can’t offer.