Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM): What is it and why do you need it

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) helps track, understand and optimize your end-user experience, helping uncover everything that could derail a good experience. Insights derived from DEM effectively improve site performance, speed up error resolution, and enhance the overall digital customer journey by identifying areas of frustration and struggle.

We sat down with Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare, to learn more about DEM, why it’s important for businesses and what makes Contentsquare’s CS Find & Fix different from other experience monitoring solutions.

A bit about Andrew

As VP of Product Success, Andrew is responsible for CS Find & Fix, a digital experience monitoring solution that enables business and technical teams to spot issues and slowdowns impacting their customer experience.

He’s been at Contentsquare for over five years, first heading up pre-sales for Northern Europe before moving over to product success.

What is digital experience monitoring?

Digital experience monitoring (DEM) combines behavioral and technical data to provide real-time insights into your visitor experience.

“Digital experience monitoring is all about mixing two data sets (behavioral data and technical data) to see how they correlate,” says Andrew. “For example, you could monitor a correlation between high bounce rate on a landing page and a technical metric like Google’s Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) value.”

Learn more about what LCP is and other Web Core Vitals in our blog.

Why is combining behavioral data with technical data important?

DEM is crucial for understanding your visitors and creating an experience that delights them. It helps you understand what’s impacting their experience negatively and why you are losing potential customers.

Andrew shares an example of how it can be used for making creative changes to a landing page. “If you’re only monitoring behavioral data like bounce rate and it goes up after a creative change, you might immediately believe the new creative doesn’t work and needs to be changed.”

However, technical data like website performance or errors might reveal the creative changes impacted the performance of that page. “The actual root cause of high bounce rates could be a high LCP score due to a heavy or oversized image which is slowing down the loading of the page. That’s why you need to have both data sets to fully understand what’s causing customer friction, ” explains Andrew.

What are the key benefits of digital experience monitoring?

According to Andrew, the main benefits of DEM are time and cost savings. By monitoring both the technical and behavioral aspects of the customer experience, you can allocate resources more efficiently and make the right decisions quickly.

“Without the supporting technical data, you’re missing a 360 view of what’s actually happening, making it impossible to understand why visitors are bouncing,” says Andrew. “You might start redesigning new assets, spending time and money on changes even though the high bounce rate was actually due to your site’s performance—not the creative.”

Who is digital experience monitoring for?

Digital experience monitoring helps unite different teams, which is key to democratizing data across organizations. “Anybody can use DEM. It provides a single data source that aligns business functions, creative and technical teams with the same insights and understanding,” says Andrew.

Andrew believes this alignment enables organizations to make more data-driven decisions while reducing internal disagreements. “There’s a human impact to DEM; having a more holistic view enables teams to align and reduces conflict.” says Andrew.

How does digital experience monitoring go beyond RUM?

Real user monitoring (RUM) tracks performance data on real site visitors. It’s a part of digital experience monitoring and conveys metrics, like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), for every visitor experience. “RUM allows us to look at averages based on what users experience on a site,” shares Andrew.

On the other hand, digital experience monitoring is the synthesis of both technical data and behavioral. “With DEM you might look at bounce rate versus page performance or repeated clicks and the correlation with JavaScript errors,” explains Andrew. “It’s the combination of those two data sets that adds value.”

“We’re the leaders in the digital experience analytics space—we’ve got extremely rich, granular behavioral data that we’re combining with technical data sets, like performance metrics and page errors.” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

How is Contentsquare’s digital experience monitoring capability different?

Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution incorporates behavioral and technical data straight out of the box with no upfront configuration required.

Users can seamlessly correlate behavioral metrics with Core Web Vital metrics that impact Google search performance, website errors and API failures on a page. “You could view performance metrics alongside your conversion rate and bounce rate metrics, for example,” says Andrew. “Our solution also allows you to set up automated alerts highlighting when an error is linked to an abnormal click, speeding up your time to resolution.”

Contentsquare’s solution conveys data in a visual, easy-to-understand way. “You can look at your performance metrics and Customer Journey Analysis to compare how people with good and bad performance behave,” explains Andrew.

“We’ve taken technical data that’s often a very complex subject, and combined that with visual data from Zone-Based Heatmaps and Customer Journey Analysis making it easy to digest. That’s what makes Find & Fix so unique” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

In addition to real user monitoring, Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution also uses synthetic monitoring. “Synthetic monitoring isn’t based on real user data but produces its own Lab data—it’s a bot,” explains Andrew. “It allows for better control of parameters such as specific device and network connection speed, which gives a solid baseline.”  As a result, it enables testing new experiences before even launching them to avoid performance blunders once they’re in production.

The challenge with only using real user data is user variability. “If a visitor on your page is starting to head down to the tube, their connection is going to get shaky, having a sudden negative impact on your performance metrics,” shares Andrew.

“RUM gives you a true picture of what’s happening in the field, but using synthetic monitoring gives you a solid baseline to check whether your changes have made an improvement or a degradation.” — Andrew Taylor, VP of Product Success at Contentsquare

Find & Fix Product Demo

Watch our 6-minute product demo to learn how Contentsquare’s Find & Fix offer can help your business.

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What’s next for Contentsquare’s Find & Fix solution?

“Up next for us is to expand our capabilities for mobile app monitoring,” shares Andrew. “Our App Find & Fix solution combines behavioral data and technical data, like crash reporting with API errors and Impact Quantification.”