Uptime.com Blog

Data-Driven Decision Making: Leveraging Website Monitoring Metrics for Business Growth

Even if you’ve only been a digital business owner for a short time, you likely already understand the importance of metrics like click-through rates, engagement, and follower demographics.

What you may not be aware of, however, is how much of an impact proactive website monitoring can have on catalyzing your business growth.

Just as your marketing metrics should inform your next campaign, you should rely on website monitoring metrics to prioritize strategic improvements. The end goal is to provide a silky-smooth user experience that maximizes conversion rates and turns first-time buyers into long-term brand fans.

The question is, then, what website monitoring metrics should you focus on first?

Metrics to Watch

While backend website monitoring was once a service largely reserved for those who could afford to work with an agency, tools like Uptime.com have put the power into the hands of every business owner to make metric-based, data-driven decisions.

Uptime

If you think that 99% uptime is good enough, consider this: Over the course of a year, 99% uptime equates to about 88 hours of downtime. If an online retailer averaged $1,000 in sales per hour, that would mean losing approximately $88,000 in revenue annually. The last thing you want when you’re trying to grow a business is losing money over blank screens and page errors.

Not only that, but frequent website downtime erodes customer trust and satisfaction, resulting in additional lost sales when your customers seek out a competitor who can provide the operational reliability they expect from an e-commerce professional.

With the Uptime.com platform, we can help you achieve 99.9% uptime by checking site availability as often as every 30 seconds. If our platform detects a website outage or performance issue, you’ll receive a notification detailing the root cause and advanced details directly to your Uptime.com Website Monitoring app—available on iOS and Android—and get your site back in good working order.

Site Speed

With the ubiquity of on-demand services and instant gratification, the human race has very little patience when it comes to accessing websites. Thus, no matter how incredible your product is, speed is the silent killer that can send your potential sales packing for a faster competitor.

B2C site speed has a direct effect on how likely a business is to get a sale in several different ways:

• Conversion Rates: Sites that load in 1 second have a conversion rate 2.5x higher than a site that takes 5 seconds to load. When you’re trying to grow your business, every second counts—literally.
• Bounce Rates: When load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the likelihood of a user leaving your site increases by 32%. Beyond just losing a sale at the moment, it also affects the overall traffic that you could nurture over time.
• SEO: Google prefers fast pages because users prefer fast pages. We see that reflected in the fact that results on the search engine’s first page have an average load time of 1.65 seconds compared to the overall average site speed of 3.21 seconds. Vis-a-vis, faster site speed leads to better search rankings, which drives more organic traffic to your website.

Server Response Times

There’s another dimension to the site speed equation that goes beyond how well you’ve optimized your site themes and images: server response times.

This website monitoring metric measures how quickly the server hosting your site responds to a user request, which naturally impacts your website’s overall speed. Google recommends a server response time below 200 ms, with the average time being between 100 ms and 200 ms.

When your server response time is optimized, users don’t have to wait as long for pages to start loading, which makes moving down the customer path more fluid by reducing frustration and keeping your users engaged.

If you have a global user base, Uptime.com’s server response time metrics are particularly helpful for monitoring site access by users who live far from your primary servers. Once you’ve tracked this data over time, you’ll know whether or not to invest in fixes like a content delivery network (CDN) to achieve uniform speeds so that all customers can enjoy an effortless experience regardless of their location.

User Path and Abandonment Rates

Who better to learn about what users want from your website than the users themselves? With Uptime.com’s Synthetic Monitoring and Real User Monitoring, you can take a two-pronged approach to hurdles along the road to conversion.

With Synthetic Monitoring (SM), you can proactively identify and resolve potential user path issues before they actually impact a user’s experience. With the Uptime.com platform, you don’t even need coding knowledge to program customized tests and monitor how users will complete actions, like completing a purchase or signing up for a newsletter on a mid-scroll pop-up.

Then, if the SM detects errors or delays along the user path, you’ll receive a report explaining where something went wrong, allowing you to fix the issue before it turns into an actual case of cart abandonment.

Real User Monitoring (RUM), on the other hand, is useful for gathering real-time data on customer behaviors and leveraging it to further optimize your site according to needs that a bot may not necessarily get tripped up on. By tracking where customers actually decide to bounce or run into a problem in real-time, you can glean information about specific issues like device compatibility or aesthetic problems that a bot may not pick up on.

For example, RUM might reveal that visitors abandon product pages because the images take too long to load or because the text on the homepage is too small on mobile devices, making it difficult to read. Even these kinds of aesthetic issues can impact how potential customers feel about how professional and reliable your business is, so RUM makes it possible to garner insights into the seemingly small details that make a big impact.

Before taking your business to the next level, make sure you have the tools you need to be responsive to what will keep your customers clicking “Checkout Now.” The Uptime.com platform offers eight monitoring tools and more than 20 checks, so you can stress less about your website and focus on growth.

We encourage you to give us a try with our 14-day Free Trial offer! You get free access to our Premium Plan with no credit card required, so you can test out all the features before you invest in Uptime’s award-winning resources.

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