The importance of benchmarking in digital experience monitoring
Making sure that users have a smooth, pleasurable experience with your digital platform—whether it be a website, mobile application, or any other online service—is essential for business success. Benchmarking is a crucial technique that can increase the usefulness of digital experience monitoring. By offering a point of comparison, benchmarking enables organizations to validate the user experience of their platforms in a significant manner.
Why is benchmarking indispensable in DEM
Comparing the performance of your digital platform to a set of predetermined benchmarks or to that of your industry competitors is known as benchmarking.
Benchmarking in the context of digital experience monitoring (DEM) is assessing your digital touchpoints' key performance indicators (KPIs) and contrasting them with best practices, industry norms, or your own historical data.Organizations may discover opportunities for improvement and obtain a thorough grasp of how their digital experiences compare to those of their competitors by utilising benchmarking.
Benefits of benchmarking website performance
- Identify performance gaps
Benchmarking helps to understand whether your digital platform is performing well or if there are areas for improvement. Businesses can track performance metrics such as page load times, uptime, and transaction speeds, and compare them with industry standards or competitors’ performance. - Establishing clear performance targets (SLOs and KPIs)
Benchmarking provides the crucial context for defining realistic and achievable service level objectives (SLOs) and key performance indicators (KPIs). Businesses can set precise goals for their own performance by examining industry averages for measures such as page load times, error rates, bounce rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction scores. Through this process, intangible ideas of "good" and "excellent" are transformed into concrete, quantifiable objectives. - Gaining a competitive advantage
Benchmarking allows businesses to gain valuable insights into how their competitors are performing and what users are experiencing on their platforms.
For instance, if competitors have faster page load times or more intuitive user interfaces, benchmarking can help you recognize these differences, providing the information needed to fine-tune your own platform. - Elevating user satisfaction and loyalty
A subpar digital experience can result in a significant drop in user satisfaction and loyalty. Identifying areas of underperformance and addressing them through targeted improvements can boost user engagement and foster positive customer relationships. - Making decisions based on data to maximise resources : A comprehensive dataset from benchmarking supports important decision-making. The knowledge gained from these comparisons makes it possible to use resources optimally and make focused enhancements that have the biggest effects. Any strategy including digital transformation must include an understanding of where to concentrate efforts and which resources work best.
- Assure ongoing progress
As technology advances and consumer expectations shift, digital experiences are always changing. By using benchmarking, businesses can make the required changes to stay current and make sure they are continuously monitoring their digital performance.
How to implement benchmarking in digital experience monitoring
To successfully incorporate benchmarking into your digital experience monitoring strategy, follow these steps:
- Define key metrics and KPIs
Before benchmarking, clearly define the key metrics and KPIs that are most relevant, like page load times, uptime, user satisfaction, bounce rates, and conversion rates. - Collect benchmarking data
Once you have defined the relevant metrics, gather benchmarking data from various sources, like industry reports, competitor analysis, or publicly available performance data. - Analyze the data
Analyze the data to identify gaps, trends, and opportunities for improvement. Identify areas where your platform excels, as well as areas that need improvement. - Establish objectives and create a plan of action
Using the information gleaned from your benchmarking research, establish quantifiable, precise improvement objectives. Create a strategy that details the actions required to close performance gaps. - Monitor and adjust regularly
Continuously monitor your digital platform’s performance and adjust your strategies as needed. Regularly update your benchmarking data and adjust your goals.
Utilizing DEM tools for effective benchmarking
Comprehensive capabilities for data collecting, analysis, and visualization are offered by digital experience monitoring tools such as Site24x7 , and these are essential elements of benchmarking.
- Application performance monitoring (APM) : Provides granular insights into backend application performance, identifying bottlenecks, and issues that impact the overall front-end experience. Helps to track application load times, slow SQL queries, issues in connectivity, and overall performance of an application.
- Real user monitoring (RUM) : Enables analysis of how real users interact with the website, providing a realistic view of the user journey highlighting the transactions where users encounter issues. Real-time analysis of front-end performance during real user sessions from multiple locations and ISPs, granular details of user sessions, Apdex score, throughput, and much more.
- Synthetic monitoring : Simulates user interactions, identifying potential problems in a controlled environment before impacting real users. This allows for proactive mitigation and improvement before issues escalate. Conduct application testing in pre-production stages, record and playback user journeys from various global locations, and drill deep into the performance of critical transactions.
- Comprehensive reporting and dashboards: Deliver clear, actionable insights into performance trends, allowing quick identification of issues and patterns for effective problem-solving.
- Root cause analysis (RCA): Facilitates a deep dive into the underlying causes of performance problems, providing a structured process for identifying and resolving issues. This crucial step enables more targeted and efficient improvement strategies.
Zylker's transformation
Zylker, a digital company, noticed its bounce rate was significantly higher than industry benchmarks. This indicated a less-than-ideal user experience, leading to lost potential sales. By leveraging Site24x7, they identified critical areas for improvement; APM analysis pinpointed database query delays as a primary culprit, RUM revealed slow response times on specific product pages, and synthetic transaction monitoring data highlighted difficulties in finding products, necessitating a review of site navigation.
Zylker significantly decreased its bounce rate, improved user front-end,
and got better sales opportunities by reworking its product navigation, optimizing database queries, and enhancing front-end performance. This case demonstrates how benchmarking can result in observable, advantageous business effects.