While most web and content providers have a good handle on using web analytics technology to improve their customer's experience, very few have taken the next step into end-user monitoring technologies. As websites increase in complexity, more consumers report experiencing difficulties or even complete failures of web applications. End-user monitoring gives you an important window into these problems.

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How is end-user monitoring different than web analytics?

The purpose of web analytics is to help you organize your website in a way that most pleasing to its intended users. It analyzes the server logs to give you information that can answer business questions about how relevant the website is, how good you are at selling products and services, and how accurately the website matches the customers you are targeting. This type of analysis assumes that the website is working and that the applications are functioning as designed.

By contrast, end-user experience monitoring shows you the inner workings of the infrastructure on which your website runs. It passively monitors all users of the website in order to assess whether the website is operating properly in real time. This is a more user-centric approach, which will show even minor performance degradation and errors affecting your customers - the type of data which never appears in your logs. With this type of solution, you can answer questions about whether the user was able to do what they were attempting, how long it took, and how wiell your infrastructure performed while completing the transaction.

What problem does end-user monitoring address?

Businesses thrive on their ability to observe their customers and take action based on how they react. This is even more critical with web applications where you are never face to face with your customer. Whether or not a customer can reach your website is not always is relevant as whether or not they can get there and then access the backend systems that support their transactions all the way through the process.

When TeaLeaf, a provider of online customer experience management solutions, commissioned Harris Interactive to survey consumers, the results were worse than anyone could have anticipated: nearly 90% of users experienced some type of failure in conducting a web-based transaction.

Web analytics and end-user monitoring work together to help website designers and marketers analyze both sides of the equation. By combining the user's behavior on the website with the technical reasons for the way the Web responds, it becomes possible to align the website design to the typical user's profile, improving the chances of conversion.

For example, if your web analystics shows a trend of customers failing to complete their transations, end-user monitoring may be able to tell you more about why that is occurring.

How can businesses effectively use end-user monitoring?

Knowing that you need to monitor your end-user's experiences is only half the battle. It's also important for business to understand what specific metrics are the most appropriate to focus on. While there's no universal list of the correct metrics, information about your customers true experiences can empower you to make application and service changes that will dramatically impact customer satisfaction.

For many applications the best indication of how it's performing for the end-user is response times. You may need to measure response times for the network, the server or the application components. It may also be important to look at total transaction time, server processing time or time spent on the client device. For other instances, transaction times may not always be the main focus. It's important to monitor the metrics that will indicate user success.

From a customer's perspective, the performance of the website is made up of far more than just the speed and accessibility. In the same Harris Interactive survey referred to earlier, they discovered that users were concerned most with security, the ability to complete a transaction, and receiving confirmations upon transaction completion. Page download speed was important to only 3% of the people surveyed.

Moving critical business functions to the Web has many advantages but has also created some significant disadvantages. While owning customer relationships might be unfamiliar territory for IT, they need to understand a new reality - with web applications, they are now the business area closest to the end-user experience. Gaining insight in the end-user experience enables IT to effectively partner with the business to achieve superior service delivery and higher end-user satisfaction.