User Journey monitoring provides a measure of website performance from the user's perspective - whether making use of features, performing multi-page transactions or simply visiting single static pages.

The performance graphs and error analysis provided by User Journey monitoring will enable you to pinpoint the key problem areas more effectively and to sort out those bottlenecks as they occur. Moreover, the data is something that all departments can understand and share. And as mentioned, left, the call centre will be far more knowledgeable when dealing with customer enquiries.

In summary, once the business/ marketing team decide on the core User Journeys through the site, the process brings a new clarity to discussions - providing hard facts about performance.

So what's the best way to approach a User Journey monitor programme?
SciVisum recommend that you measure the agreed journeys 24/7, and have the real-time and summary graphs available to all interested parties. Here are the first six steps you might take in User Journey monitoring.

1. Define key journeys

Document the multi-page User Journeys that visitors to the site follow. You don't need every possible journey; choose say the five that you feel are most important. For example a menswear Add-to-Basket journey might start with Menswear/ Trousers/Jeans/Select size and colour. (View an example of a dynanic user journey)

2. Define quality of service

For each journey, try to put some measure on quality. How long is the maximum acceptable time? What is the maximum page-delivery failure rate that you will accept?

3. Service level agreements (SLAs)

Once the User Journey has been defined, it can form the basis of an agreement with third parties on the service levels they might deliver. Forget any previous measures such as homepage delivery time or server uptime. An SLA might be phrased in the form of:

"99% of the time the User Journey should complete in less than 15 seconds, and there should be less than 0.5% errors.

In addition, the SLA can also specify worst-case performance, e.g:
“For the worst 1%, the journey should complete in less than 30 seconds and have an error rate of less than 3%, for ¾ of the time."

4. Monitoring programme

Set up a web site monitoring programme. Rather than tying up in-house resources, consider using an independent third-party. Also, that way the Marketing and IT teams won't be able to quibble over the numbers.

After the first month, review together any web performance issues that the monitoring has highlighted and aim for the technical team to reduce any bottlenecks early on.  After your web site monitoring supplier has data over some months of your site, confidence in well your team can respond and improve issues as they arise will quickly arise.

Don't try to improve everything. Aim for the best return on investment from quick improvements.

5. Real-world metrics

Both before and after the next marketing campaign use the monitoring metrics to decide if the performance is within the agreed service levels. If not, then estimate what effect this might have on visitor drop-outs and overall campaign effectiveness.

Ideally, the metrics after each campaign will show that the web performance is within acceptable bounds. If there's any disappointment in conversion rates from a campaign, then the root causes must be sought elsewhere than in the web technology systems.

6. Set peak visitor throughputs

If you’re considering web load testing you will also need to consider how many visitors the site should be able to support at the same time? You might decide it's ten checkout journeys per second, 30 add-to-basket journeys, five registrations and two check-my-order status journeys per second.

A clearer understanding

Earlier this year we reported the results of a survey that suggested that Marketing and IT teams need to talk more. While 73% of Marketing Executives had had website failures, 26% of them never involve the IT Department in new campaigns. 47% had no idea how many visitors abandoned their sites mid-transaction and half were unable to discover the cause from their IT Departments believing that it was too complicated or that any explanation might be inconclusive. Nearly two thirds did not know how many user transactions their website could support. User Journey Monitoring can provide a clearer understanding for all concerned.

Further: User Journey Monitoring