Meet Emily, a seasoned Digital Product Manager at a thriving e-commerce company known for its stylish furniture. Emily has been diligently working on a new product launch for weeks. As she logged into her computer the morning after her launch, her inbox was flooded with emails from customers raving about the new products. Conversion rates had increased, and orders were pouring in. It seemed like a resounding success.

However, a few days later, revenue began plummeting at an alarming rate despite the spike in orders. After exhaustive data analysis and correspondences with IT, a communication with the marketing team revealed a costly typo: a promo code intended to offer a 10% discount had mistakenly been set at 100%, leading to substantial daily financial losses.

They immediately corrected the promo code, honored discounts, and soon recovered. 

Why wasn’t Emily able to monitor her part of the digital experience, just like IT and engineering monitor the application? Digital monitoring, she realized, was not just IT’s job; it was a responsibility that extended to every facet of the business, including her role as a Digital Product Manager.

It’s not enough to know when the lights go out.

Companies are inundated with an array of sophisticated monitoring tools that promise to keep an eye on the health of their digital ecosystem. These tools are adept at signaling when a website or app goes down or if there’s a major disruption, ensuring the lights stay on.

But the real challenge lies beyond the glaring red alerts and flashing indicators. It’s not about merely identifying when the site is down; it’s about uncovering those elusive, business-critical needles in the haystack that often evade detection.

As in the case of Emily’s undetected promo code error, the real culprits to revenue leakage are often the subtle yet insidious elements that can stealthily erode a business’s performance and profitability. These imperceptible frictions can go unnoticed for days or weeks, and can silently chip away at customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and ultimately, the bottom line. 

They’re like grains of sand within the intricate machinery of a digital enterprise, causing real revenue loss. It’s not enough to know when the lights go out; businesses must relentlessly seek out these hidden obstacles and diagnose what’s causing them.

Traditionally siloed monitoring tools.

Digital monitoring tools have been around for ages, but they’ve traditionally operated in organizational silos, leading business and product teams like Emily’s to be underserved. Here are a few examples of various teams throughout the org, and how they often use digital monitoring in silos:

Gaps in the traditional monitoring mindset.

The siloed team mindset has enabled every function to have a tool that meets their specific needs. But so many of these tools are reactive, noisy, and lack contextual awareness about customers and business impact. Static custom thresholding is flawed and fails to keep up with seasonal changes. Common negative impacts include:

• Alert overload
• False alarms
• Delayed responses
• Irrelevant alerts / No actionability

The above impacts are the result of 3 common gaps of digital analytics monitoring:

1. Customer context: Many monitoring tools alert on technical performance broadly, but fail to understand in a targeted manner which outcomes matter to your customers. To monitor efficiently, you need experience alerts that intelligently monitor page performance, outages, API failures, and more, across any segment—all tied to business impact (like CSAT, NPS, conversion or revenue)—so you can prioritize with confidence.
2. Historical benchmarking: Many tools rely solely on threshold-based alerting, generating a high volume of alerts, including false positives and red herrings, leading to alert fatigue. You need a tool that doesn’t just report on the number, but the number in comparison to the norm, while adjusting to seasonal changes.
3. Autocapture 100% of sessions: Many tools rely on manual data capture, which introduces delays in the detection of issues or anomalies, since you would have to know in advance what data to capture before you could know if there’s a problem. Leverage autocapture with real-time anomaly detection and alerting to ensure a more proactive monitoring and alerting strategy.

Monitoring: A cross-team necessity.

Beyond the technical capabilities, today’s digital experience monitoring solutions need to look through both a business and customer lens to ensure it’s an issue worth prioritizing your limited resources for. This includes monitoring key behavioral signals (such as frustration or rage clicks), business signals (such as drops in conversion funnel), and technical/performance signals (such as slow loading pages or repeated login attempts).

Today’s digital experience monitoring solutions need 3 key capabilities:

1. Automatically capture, visualize, and report on digital metrics: Autocapture 100% of sessions without manual tagging, and make data accessible in pre-built dashboards with limitless depth—build any dimension on any metric in real-time. With a one time JS tag or SDK deployment, capture every swipe, click, scroll, API response, page view, and more—release after release, without needing to involve engineering.
2. Baseline and detect anomalies: Machine learning automatically and dynamically baselines and detects deviations from normal behavioral, business, or technical patterns, while also handling seasonal changes. Across web and native apps, you can benchmark network timings, resources, and API performance at a page or page group level.
3. Alert on anomalies in real-time: Leverage intelligent, proactive alerting to avoid lag or false positives. Then easily diagnose the root cause with detailed resource capture, session replay, debugging tools, segment analysis, opportunity analysis. 

Furthermore, these tools should extend beyond monitoring to provide intelligent diagnostic capabilities, assisting teams in identifying issues, and aiding in the prioritization of their digital backlogs.

3 ways digital experience monitoring ensures awareness across teams:

1. Stay ahead of the curve on experience roadblocks.

   Quickly pinpoint and tackle product, campaign, and design issues on micro-journeys like landing pages, checkout funnel or payment flows, so you can prioritize high impact issues that potentially affect their bottom line. This proactive approach can lead to faster problem resolution, improved customer satisfaction, and ultimately, better business outcomes.

   • Teams benefitting: Exec, Product, Marketing, UX, Tech

2. Be the first to know about the business impacts of product releases.

   Know not just when but understand why conversion rates, revenue and other KPIs change after product and feature releases or during re-platforming initiatives. KPI changes can be influenced by a variety of factors, such as page speed/performance, API errors or changes in click behavior. This helps ensure awareness across business and technical teams so they can diagnose issues faster.

   • Teams benefitting: Exec, Product, Marketing, UX, Tech

3. Anticipate security and fraud risks.

   Proactively safeguard your business against threats and fraud, such as non-human traffic like bots attempting to copy-and-paste login and passwords. Continuous monitoring helps reduce potential damage and loss and maintains business continuity by identifying and resolving issues before they escalate into major disruptions.

   • Teams benefitting: Tech, Product

Unleash the potential of digital experience monitoring.

It’s easy to spot the glaring issues – those P1 “hair on fire” moments – when your site or app goes down. Resource availability, site outages and page speed analysis are now table stakes.

What truly impacts your business are those subtle, seemingly insignificant hiccups that collectively shape the digital experience. Think of them as the “death by a thousand cuts” for your customers – those little irritations that gradually cause them to abandon. It’s like watching your hard-earned revenue slowly drain away.

Now, picture a different scenario: you introduce a new feature — and without the need for engineering assistance – you instantly set up an event to monitor your most important customer journey in real-time. You begin dynamically capturing things like cart values in real time. 

When an anomaly is automatically detected, you can see every behavior, from customers who visit a product description page (PDP), to those who click through and abandon. And you can see how many others experienced it and quantify the business impact. 

Suddenly, you can see what’s at stake for the business if you choose to ignore this friction for a week, a month, or a year. You feel empowered. You have a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and full control.

You come to the realization that the monitoring you once considered optional is now business critical.

Want to learn more about how to monitor at a level above the competition? Explore our demo center.