User Journey Monitoring

What is the user journey?

Essentially, the user journey consists of a sequence of interactions with your website that leads to an expected outcome for either the business or the customer. For example, a user journey for an online web shop would start with users searching for their products, adding them to shopping carts and going through the check-out process.

Other examples of user interactions are account logins, email signups, clicks onto landing pages and so forth. These steps along the user journey are often mapped out to view the types of online activities users engage in and the experiences they most often expect.

What is user journey monitoring?

The goal of user journey monitoring is to monitor critical clickpaths that users take on your website to ensure that all the steps along the user journey run smoothly and without errors.

For DevOps teams, website designers and other IT stakeholders, user journey monitoring provides a repeatable framework that can be used by small and large organizations as part of their digital marketing strategies.

What is the benefit of user journey monitoring?

User journey monitoring offers real-time information about any downtime, errors, or performance bottlenecks your users are currently experiencing. This information is vital to organizations so the right teams are notified of errors and other issues before they affect the end user experience and impact the bottom line.

When your website or service doesn’t operate properly, your users will likely switch to your competitors. Not only will they switch to a competitor, but many of them will never come back. Whereas certain monitors provide information as to basic availability of digital assets, user journey monitoring offers support for elevated levels of performance as users interact with applications.

Does Synthetic Monitoring play a role in user journey monitoring?

The short answer is yes. Synthetic Monitoring takes a proactive approach that goes beyond uptime and performance monitoring with a focus on finding issues, notifying IT stakeholders, and analyzing website performance to provide insight for improving user journeys that are critical to your business success.

By recreating the steps your users are taking via scripts, you can monitor these user interactions around the clock from our worldwide checkpoints. With features including waterfall charts and error screenshots to see exactly what’s going on. Synthetic Monitoring provides alerts and flags errors along the user journey.

Are scripts an important part of user journey monitoring?

Yes, with Uptrends' Web Application Monitoring you can ensure core website functions are operating as they should. By recreating the steps your users are taking via scripts, you can monitor their interactions around the clock from hundreds of worldwide checkpoints. With features including waterfall charts and error screenshots, you’ll see exactly what’s going on.

Transaction monitors provide a way to track the steps users take in the browser using a Transaction Recorder, which records the steps of everything you do in the Chrome browser, just like your users would. When the recording is complete, the Transaction Recorder will generate a script for you. Once activated and uploaded to your account, you can further edit the script (or let one of our Support heroes do it).

The interactions along the user journey can be run over and over to check if everything still works as expected from Uptrends’ network of 233 checkpoints or even behind your own firewall using a Private Checkpoint.

If you own an e-commerce business or manage network systems for one, the ability to record and modify scripts that go through the entire checkout flow — from adding shopping cart items, filling in shipping details, and processing payment transactions — will matter greatly.

Conclusion

Because ecommerce, travel, and SaaS businesses tend to rely heavily on financial transactions and other user-critical process flows to provide revenue, it stands to reason that synthetic monitoring be at the forefront of your efforts to ensure correct functioning along user journey monitoring pathways on your website before they impact your customers.

If you own an e-commerce business or manage network systems for one, the ability to record and modify scripts that go through the entire checkout flow — adding shopping cart items, filling in shipping details, and processing payment transactions — will matter greatly as you monitor pathways along the user journey.