Does your business website run on mobile devices? If it does, and if you want to maintain or grow your customer base, it’s a good idea to learn about RUM, or Real User Monitoring for your business. Many entrepreneurs are already familiar with the two, RUM and synthetic, and know the key differences between them. That’s a good start, but if you really want to pinpoint issues with customer-facing site features and correct them asap, then it pays to acquire a reliable RUM application for your Android mobile device.
The Two Approaches
Monitoring based on real user experiences boast unique advantages, still, it’s wise to understand the primary ways it differs from its main alternative, synthetic monitoring, sometimes called synthetic testing. To grasp the pertinent differences in approach, philosophy, and style of these two popular forms of website evaluation, just look at their names. Real implies actual users, customers who are or have been on the pages of your company’s website. A political comparison would be exit polling, which are after the fact results reported by those who just exited a voting booth. This kind of data is much more reliable that pre-election predictions about who might vote one way, which is closer to synthetic testing.
When it comes to Real User Monitoring vs Synthetic Monitoring is very similar to the difference between exit polling, as noted above, and pre-election guesses based on surveys, focus groups, and random samples. Synthetic testing uses a program that simulates what your mobile site looks like to a user. It has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, but in general is far inferior from a business owner’s perspective.
Advantages of RUM
What are the distinct advantages of real user testing? For starters, it uses actual behavior of human beings who visit your company pages and collects reliable, valuable, actionable data about them. Want to know how long your loyal customers stayed online viewing your products or services? Or, perhaps you are interested in which pages load quickly and which ones load slowly. Some managers and marketing personnel are most concerned with how much money each customer spends and whether a slow loading time affects whether they buy or not. All those questions, and plenty more, are at your disposal when you measure and observe the behavior of people who visit your site. The key benefits of RUM that can be tracked on a mobile app include the following:
- The ability to pinpoint problems that users encounter
- Gathering relevant data about load time, visitor behavior, spending, shopping cart functionality, and more
- It’s an inexpensive way to collect highly valuable data
- The results are easy to understand and lead to direct solutions
- You can reach out to customers who had serious problems with a given page or function, to ensure the correct display on different devices
It’s important to understand the difference between RUM and APM overall. You might say there is just a relationship, because real user testing is a form of application performance management. APM refers to any kind of measurement and monitoring system that helps IT developers discover problems with their websites.