Consider this scenario: you own an ecommerce store specializing in custom cases and skins for electronic devices like video game consoles, phones and tablets. Shoppers can upload an image to your site, fit and customize it for their device, add it to their cart, and have it mailed to them. Recently, you’re seeing a drop in sales, even though you just invested a decent chunk of your marketing budget in paid ad campaigns. Where do you start when figuring out why your conversion rate is tanking? 

Enter real user monitoring (RUM), the process of gaining visibility on how shoppers interact with your website. With real user monitoring, you can open a user session to discover that your store isn’t converting because a bug hides the “next” button on your store’s case customizer behind another element for users browsing on mobile Safari. The lack of this button means that anyone trying to shop on mobile gets stuck before completing their design, thus never reaching your checkout page. 

In this article, we’ll break down how leveraging RUM can protect your ecommerce sales, enhance user satisfaction, and keep customers coming back to your store. 

What is Real User Monitoring?

Real user monitoring is exactly what it sounds like: monitoring the experience of actual users on your website in real time. Instead of guessing how your site performs or relying solely on simulated tests and QA, RUM tracks actual visitors’ interactions and detects issues they encounter on your website. It enables ecommerce companies to gather information and insights regarding site performance issues and user experience (UX) problems that impact buyer intent and conversion rates. 

In practice, RUM typically uses a small script or snippet on your site (along with other backend logging) to collect data on what’s happening as people browse. It captures events such as page load times, clicks and taps, form submissions, and even browser errors or crashes as they occur. Each data point paints a comprehensive picture of the user’s journey, helping your team identify issues and optimize performance with objective evidence.

RUM is continuous and passive. It runs quietly in the background of your site without affecting site speed and automatically gathers data from every user visit. You don’t have to wait for a customer to send a complaint or for a QA tester to stumble on a bug; RUM alerts you to problems as soon as real users encounter them. This means you can quickly fix issues before they impact more shoppers or sales.

Synthetic Monitoring vs Real User Monitoring

There are two primary approaches to monitoring website performance: RUM and synthetic monitoring. Both methods have specific uses and should be used in tandem rather than relying on only one, or worse, neither.

Synthetic Monitoring

This method uses simulated users, essentially scripts or bots, to test your website’s pages and user flows. For example, a synthetic monitoring tool might mimic a customer adding an item to cart and going through checkout, and it will do this every 5 minutes from various server locations. Synthetic monitoring ensures that critical paths should work in theory and that your site is up and running.

Synthetic monitoring, however, only checks the scenarios you’ve scripted in advance. It can’t replicate the countless ways real shoppers might use (or misuse) your site. Synthetic tests also run in a controlled environment, so they might not catch issues caused by unusual user behaviour, specific browser quirks, network problems, or third-party plugins on the live site.

RUM (Real User Monitoring)

Instead of pretending to be a user, RUM watches the actual users. This means RUM can uncover issues that synthetic scripts miss. For instance, if a segment of Safari customers experiences a JavaScript error on the product page, a synthetic test in Chrome might never notice. 

Unlike synthetic tests, real user monitoring ensures you catch the unpredictable, real-world problems that occur as shoppers browse your store. It provides actual data on how your site performs for every customer in real-time, under real-world conditions (device types, connection speeds, geographic locations, etc.).

6 Ways RUM Saves Ecommerce Businesses from Lost Sales

While you should definitely employ both forms of monitoring, if you could choose only one, we suggest a RUM solution. Relying only on synthetic monitoring, you lack visibility into how actual users interact with your web pages and store. You might think all is well if your scripted tests pass, but you’ll be left with a huge blind spot.

For small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses, investing in real user monitoring can pay back many times over. Here’s why RUM is so powerful in boosting your customer experience and safeguarding your revenue:

1. Catch issues that hurt conversions before it’s too late: RUM provides real-time visibility into your website’s performance and errors. Even a simple bug on a single page can significantly impact your site’s performance and sales if left unchecked. This proactive awareness enables you to fix bugs or glitches long before they become widespread problems. Ultimately, you prevent lost sales by resolving conversion-blocking issues immediately rather than discovering them days or weeks later. As a result, fewer customers get frustrated and abandon their carts due to avoidable errors.

2. Improve overall site performance: Slow pages or downtime drive shoppers away. RUM continuously tracks front-end performance metrics for each user, such as page load times, time to interact, and other Core Web Vitals. With these insights, you can identify if a page or browser is consistently slow and then optimize it. This is vital because even a tiny slowdown can have real costs when it causes users to close tabs and abandon carts. 

3. Visibility on the customer journey: Real user monitoring lets you see exactly what your customers experience, from when they land on your homepage to when they check out (or drop out). With this end-to-end visibility into the user journey, you can spot where shoppers are encountering friction. For example, RUM data might reveal that many users who add a product to the cart never reach the checkout page because of an error at the shipping information step. Now, you can zero in on that area and fix whatever is causing the drop-off. By smoothing out the journey, you reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion rates.

4. Data-driven decisions/continuous improvement: With RUM, you’re not guessing why sales might be slow or why users leave; you have the data to be certain. Comprehensive reports and dashboards turn raw user data into actionable insights, often with easy-to-understand charts and metrics. This lets your team understand what’s going wrong and determine an action plan. For instance, RUM tools can show which pages are “high-value” and whether they’re experiencing issues. By focusing on the areas that matter most to revenue, you can prioritize fixes with the biggest business impact. Over time, this results in a more stable site and an improved user experience. Happy customers are more likely to return and recommend your store, which directly ties to higher lifetime value.

5. Protect your brand reputation and prevent revenue loss: Every error prevented or performance issue resolved is potentially a sale saved. Shoppers today have high expectations. Many will simply leave and buy from a competitor if your site is buggy or slow. By catching problems early, RUM helps you avoid negative experiences that could cost you not just a single sale, but a customer’s future loyalty. 

6. Faster issue resolution: When an issue arises, RUM makes diagnosing it much quicker and easier. A good RUM platform will capture detailed information about errors (such as error codes, browser details, and user actions leading up to the issue) and often provide complete session replay. This context means your developers don’t have to spend hours trying to reproduce a bug in the dark; they can see exactly what happened. Companies that leverage RUM can reduce error resolution time by 70%, a massive win for any ecommerce team. Plus, your development team can devote more time to improving the site (or adding new features) rather than firefighting bugs once they become a problem.

The Best Real User Monitoring Tool for Ecommerce

As an ecommerce agency always looking for ways to ensure our clients increase revenue and reduce the time spent hunting down and fixing bugs, we love recommending Noibu’s RUM capabilities as a solution. Noibu is tailored for ecommerce and can track revenue-impacting metrics like cart abandonment, checkout errors, performance issues, and bugs. 

Noibu is much more than a RUM tool. It continuously monitors your site traffic and detects errors as soon as they occur, 24/7. But it doesn’t stop at just finding and flagging errors; it also prioritizes issues based on their impact on revenue and conversions. This means if a bug is hurting your sales, such as a checkout error affecting 5% of transactions, Noibu will flag it as a high priority. Less critical issues, like a minor UI bug on a seldom-viewed page, won’t distract you. 

This intelligent prioritization is a secret weapon for our clients, as many RUM solutions simply list errors by frequency, leading teams to chase numerous minor bugs while overlooking a major conversion blocker. Noibu closes that gap by automatically highlighting what matters most to your bottom line.

While some tools only focus on errors, Noibu combines error monitoring, performance tracking, and user experience analytics. It’s an end-to-end ecommerce monitoring solution. This means, in addition to catching bugs, Noibu also tracks page load times, Core Web Vitals, and other performance metrics via its dashboard, giving you a unified view of frontend and backend health. With all this data consolidated in a single platform, you can correlate a spike in error messages with a slow server response, for example. 

To cap it all off, Noibu’s session replay feature enables teams to view errors exactly as they happened and watch issues occur in real time. This is great for development teams and for less technical team members, like managers or marketing leads, who don’t need a computer science degree to understand website issues. 

Traditional RUM tools might overwhelm you with raw data, but Noibu’s platform translates issues into business terms, showing, for instance, how a specific error in the checkout is affecting your sales funnel or revenue. It provides funnel impact analyses and clear indicators of issues like checkout abandonment or payment failures tied to errors.

How Blue Badger Simplifies Noibu Implementation

At Blue Badger, we understand that many business owners lack the technical bandwidth to set up a monitoring tool like Noibu. That's why we offer services that fully offload your team's work to ours. 

We offer complete setup and maintenance of your store’s Noibu integration, configuring the tool without disrupting operations. Next, we monitor the platform and regularly audit your store to ensure everything runs smoothly, so you don’t have to. Finally, when Noibu alerts us to issues that need fixing, we help prioritize and resolve the bugs so you get the most out of the platform in combination with our ecommerce development services. 

Conclusion

Your ecommerce store can't afford the hidden costs of undetected website issues. RUM is your frontline defence, proactively identifying and resolving user experience problems before they hurt your sales. With Noibu, ecommerce businesses gain a specialized solution tailored to their unique challenges, ensuring critical issues get prioritized and solved efficiently. 

Partnering with Blue Badger will simplify Noibu implementation, maintenance, and issue resolution, letting you focus on what you do best: growing your business. Get in touch today to learn more about real user monitoring with Noibu and Blue Badger.