Uptime.com Blog
What Is Real User Monitoring (RUM)?
Even if your website is perfectly designed on paper, users don’t always follow the script. They often behave in ways you might never predict.
Real user monitoring (RUM), also known as end-user experience monitoring or digital experience monitoring, closes that gap by providing a moment-to-moment view of user interactions. It allows you to spot where visitors encounter friction, confusion, or slowdowns that could impact conversions.
These insights benefit your entire team: DevOps can fine-tune on-page performance according to production environment data, and marketing can see which site elements draw the most engagement or get completely ignored.
Are you still wondering why real user monitoring data should matter to you?
We’ve rounded up everything you need to know about how RUM works, how it compares to other monitoring tools, and which industries should prioritize it.
How Does Real User Monitoring Work?
One of the biggest differences between real user monitoring vs. synthetic monitoring is how it gathers data.
Whereas synthetic monitoring can work completely independently of actual traffic, RUM’s data source — user interactions — requires your DevOps team to embed a small script into your website’s code to get started.
It operates passively, collecting data on every user interaction, similar to how Facebook or Google pixels work. In the background, it registers every click, scroll, feature load time, etc., for users across different devices and regions.
With Uptime.com, the RUM setup process only takes a few minutes. We’ll give you a quick overview below, but you can also check out our RUM | Setup and Basics guide for video tutorials and other resources.
How To Set Up Real User Monitoring
- Sign up for a 14-day free trial of Uptime.com to get unlimited access to our Premium Plan, which includes Real User Monitoring capabilities
- Click Monitoring > Checks > Add New, and select Real User Monitoring from the Check Type dropdown
- Provide the domain name — subdomains are tracked by default
- Choose an Aggregation option or leave it as the median
- Set the Apdex to your desired threshold, or leave it at the default 4000ms
- Click Save, and Uptime.com will provide the RUM code snippet
- Place the RUM code snippets in the <head> attributes before all scripts you want tracked
- Sit back and wait for all the RUM data to come pouring in
What Are the Benefits of Real User Monitoring?
With RUM, you don’t have to guess how your audience feels about your site’s UX. Instead, you get a high-visibility solution that you can leverage to fine-tune your digital assets and keep users coming back time and again.
Continuously Improve Site Performance
Your user base isn’t static, so your site shouldn’t be either. Businesses need dynamic data that tracks performance day by day, week by week, so you can watch patterns emerge over time. It’s the best way for your DevOps and SRE teams to spot small, recurring inefficiencies that might not be as obvious when they’re exclusively working from a big-picture perspective.
As the data flows in, your RUM platform will analyze and organize it into performance metrics your team can easily interpret. Examples of these metrics can include:
- Page load: How long it takes for pages to load completely
- Core web vitals: Google’s metrics for evaluating user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction To Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
- JavaScript errors: Any issues with code execution that are causing functionality disruptions
- Network requests: The number of requests the browser makes and how long they take to complete
- Active users: Indicates how many people are using your site at a given time. It is particularly useful for finding correlations between traffic rates and errors
Provide an Excellent User Experience
Happier users mean fewer bounces and more conversions, and that’s precisely what RUM is all about. The data lets you home in on website roadblocks — be it a confusing checkout process, hard-to-find buttons, or broken JavaScript — that let you make the user journey silky smooth from start to finish.
Beyond technical performance, RUM also offers rich insights into how users interact with your site, helping your marketing and UX teams refine customer journeys and improve engagement.
Behavioral RUM Data:
- User navigation paths: Watch the real-time flow of user navigation paths to see how customers actually interact with your site and note any points of friction where users bounce or abandon tasks.
- Click tracking: Track click-through rates for key elements, like calls to action or checkout buttons, to identify what’s grabbing attention and what’s being ignored.
- Cart abandonment rates: Pinpoints the exact stage within the checkout process where customers abandon carts.
- Session durations: Monitor session durations to see how long users engage with your content and at what points they leave.
- Error occurrences: Detects each time users encounter functionality issues like broken links and dead-end pages.
Catch Problems Before They Snowball
RUM may primarily focus on real-time user interactions, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until there’s a huge issue to start addressing it. When your team notices a sudden increase in cart abandonment, for example, RUM provides the data they need to step in before the issue impacts more users instead of waiting around for a help desk ticket to come through.
Make Your Marketing Campaigns More Successful
RUM isn’t just for your technical team; your marketing department will love it, too. When they run a campaign, they can dig into live feedback data about how users respond to landing pages, calls to action, and various A/B test iterations without hoping that someone submits a “How Was Your Visit?” survey popup. Then, they can adjust campaigns on the fly and improve their chances of targeting the right audience with the right message.
Build Stronger Cross-Department Collaboration
One of the most powerful aspects of RUM is that it brings different teams together over the same set of insights. Developers, designers, and marketers pursue their work with a shared understanding of user behavior and site performance, making it easier to collaborate around technical fixes and strategic improvements that result in a net positive experience for your users.
Why Real User Monitoring Is Different From Other Types of Web Monitoring
Before reviewing the differences between various monitoring services, it’s important to understand that no single monitoring method can give you complete visibility. Uptime checks, synthetic monitoring, website performance monitoring, and API monitoring all serve distinct purposes, and relying on just one leaves gaps in your data. Instead of considering each as an “option,” consider them a “complementary set.”
Real User Monitoring vs. Uptime Monitoring
| Real User Monitoring | Uptime Monitoring | |
| Purpose | Analyzing actual interactions for a comprehensive picture of the complete user journey | Verifies that your site/service/platform is available |
| Scope | Tracks user experience across all interactions | Focuses solely on determining whether a site is up or down |
| Frequency | Continuous | Continuous |
| Metrics/Insights | Load times, user behavior, device types, navigation paths | Binary; is the site up or down? |
| Test Environment | Production environment | Production environment |
| Timing | Reactive | Reactive |
Real User Monitoring vs. Synthetic Monitoring
| Real User Monitoring | Synthetic Monitoring | |
| Purpose | Analyzes real user sessions to capture genuine user experiences and behavior | Simulates user interactions to proactively test functionality |
| Scope | Real-world usage patterns | Specific, predefined user paths and interactions |
| Frequency | Continuous | Scheduled intervals |
| Metrics/Insights | Load times, user behavior, device types, navigation paths | Response times, transaction success rates |
| Test Environment | Unpredictable production environment | Controlled “lab” environment |
| Timing | Reactive | Proactive |
Real User Monitoring vs. API Monitoring
| Real User Monitoring | API Monitoring | |
| Purpose | Monitors how APIs affect the overall user experience within the site journey | Focuses specifically on the performance and availability of APIs |
| Scope | Analyzes the entire user journey, including how API calls interact with other site elements | Tracks API functionality exclusively |
| Frequency | Continuous | Continuous or scheduled intervals |
| Metrics/Insights | Load times, user behavior, device types, navigation paths | API response times, availability |
| Test Environment | Production environment | Production or staging environment |
| Timing | Reactive | Proactive |
Real User Monitoring vs. Performance Monitoring Tools
| Real User Monitoring | Performance Monitoring Tools | |
| Purpose | Tracks the user’s experience in real time to assess overall user engagement and satisfaction | Monitors system health and server performance to maintain optimal backend operation |
| Scope | Front-end user interactions | Backend systems like networks and servers |
| Frequency | Continuous | Continuous |
| Metrics/Insights | Load times, user behavior, device types, navigation paths | Resource usage, network latency, response times |
| Test Environment | Production environment | Production environment |
| Timing | Reactive | Reactive |
What Businesses Should Use Real User Monitoring?
While any business with an online presence can benefit from RUM, a poor user experience can have more serious repercussions on a brand’s reputation in a few industries.
E-Commerce and Retailers
The stakes in e-commerce are sky-high. Every second a page takes to load or a delayed checkout process can result in a lost sale, so delivering a flawless experience is paramount.
Further complicating things is that, as of the second quarter of 2024, mobile shopping dominates 77% of global retail site traffic and approximately 66% of orders. Couple that with heightened user expectations for fast, frictionless service, and even minor issues can erode customer trust and send potential buyers clicking away to competitors. No business can afford to be complacent.
Why RUM for E-Commerce & Retailers?
- RUM highlights exactly where customers abandon their carts due to slow load times or confusing steps in the checkout process so your team can address these friction points immediately.
- Track performance variations across devices and regions, then optimize the experience to cater to mobile users.
- Instead of waiting for reports of cart abandonment, RUM alerts you when large numbers of users drop off so you can prevent a negative impact on your bottom line.
SaaS Platforms
When customers rely on your platform for their day-to-day operations, any downtime or performance issue can lead to lost productivity, frustration, and, in worst-case scenarios, customer churn.
As SaaS platforms grow, managing the balance between feature development and maintaining operational stability becomes a serious challenge. If a new feature rollout slows down performance or causes bugs, the ripple effect can disrupt the entire user base. The challenge lies in presenting a service that boasts all the necessary features without losing responsiveness.
Why RUM for SaaS Platforms?
- If a new feature rollout causes slowdowns only during peak traffic hours, RUM provides granular data to isolate these issues based on user patterns.
- RUM indicates where users get stuck during onboarding. Your team can then smooth out these early interactions and improve overall adoption rates.
Media & Entertainment Platforms
The people must be entertained, and if you’re bearing the weight of that responsibility, be prepared to deliver seamless streaming free of interruptions or feel the wrath of angry users. Downtime during a major sporting event or popular series release is a surefire way to attract immediate customer churn, and the same goes if your platform struggles to perform on smart TVs.
Why RUM for Media & Entertainment Platforms?
- RUM keeps streaming quality high across geographical borders with CDN tracking.
- RUM lets you know how content renders across devices so your team can optimize playback functionality based on usage rates.
- Media platforms that operate internationally are held to regional compliance standards, and real user monitoring tools keep you in line by tracking the effectiveness of your geolocation and content restriction features.
Travel & Hospitality
With as many booking platforms as there are online, you’re up against serious competition. One of the benefits of real user monitoring is that you can catch even the most subtle hiccup in the on-page sales funnel and then directly address whatever interaction is causing users to abandon their booking.
Why RUM for Travel & Hospitality?
- With such high-value transactions on the line, RUM monitoring alerts let you know if any delays or breaches could be detrimental to user trust.
- Scaling your infrastructure according to where your international traffic is at its highest ensures that your users can handle all their travel needs anywhere in the world.
- According to Google, “48% of U.S. mobile users are comfortable researching, planning, and booking an entire trip to a new travel destination using only their smartphone.” You’re missing out on a massive demographic if you’re not using RUM metrics to keep mobile-specific features responsive.
What To Look for in Real User Monitoring Solutions
You know how real user monitoring works, but do you know the necessary features to follow the rules of real user monitoring best practices?
Before you invest in a RUM platform, ask yourself the following questions to evaluate whether you’re getting excellent value for the cost.
Comprehensive Data Collection Across Devices and Platforms
Users today access websites and applications from a wide range of devices — desktops, mobile phones, tablets, game consoles, smart TVs … even refrigerators! Your RUM solution must keep pace with the devices your users rely on, or you’re missing out on valuable traffic.
- Can the RUM platform capture data from many different devices and browsers?
- Does it monitor both desktop and mobile applications?
- How accurately does it track interactions on complex single-page applications (SPAs) and progressive web apps (PWAs)?
Real-Time Data With Instant Alerts
Issues that affect user experience can escalate very quickly, and you need to be able to resolve them ASAP. Before you accept poor alerting protocols as one of the limitations of real user monitoring, know that there are solutions out there that won’t force you to compromise on features.
- Is there real-time monitoring with minimal latency?
- How customizable are the alerts for specific metrics?
- How easily does the RUM solution integrate with your existing systems, such as performance monitoring tools, ticketing platforms (like Jira), or communication tools (like Slack)?
Granular Behavior Tracking
The data’s in the details, so you’ll need a robust RUM solution that covers the full spectrum of user behavior — navigation paths, clicks, scroll depth, time on page, session duration, and more.
- Can it help you differentiate between new and returning users or segment data by device type, location, or user group?
- How does it relay information about exactly where users encounter friction?
Flexible Scalability
If you expect your traffic to grow, your real user monitoring software should evolve with you. Look for options that let you scale up to handle more users and increasingly complex performance requirements without missing a beat.
- Can the RUM solution handle significant increases in traffic during peak usage times without performance degradation?
- Is it flexible enough to customize according to your business needs, such as tracking user journeys or supporting API monitoring alongside RUM?
- How easily can you scale the solution to support additional applications, regions, or devices as your business expands?
Actionable Reporting
RUM data is only as valuable as the strategies you can develop from it, so the right platform will make identifying issues a breeze. Hold out for a tool that provides customizable, intuitive dashboards from which any stakeholder — tech-savvy or otherwise — can glean insights.
- Are there customizable dashboards for at-a-glance insights?
- Are the reports designed to be accessible to technical and non-technical stakeholders?
- Can you export or integrate reports with other monitoring tools for deeper analysis?
Security and Compliance Guarantees
Given that RUM metrics rely on user data, you need to know that your chosen solution prioritizes data protection regulations as stringently as you do. Don’t let a third party compromise your users’ trust in your brand.
- What security features keep user data anonymized?
- Does it comply with global and industry-specific data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA?
If you answered no to any of the above, you haven’t looked into Uptime.com’s Real User Monitoring service. You’ll have access to a complete monitoring suite and 14 days to evaluate whether our platform meets your needs; no credit card is required. Sign up for your free trial today!
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