What RUM actually shows you
RUM captures what's happening on your customer's screen, which ties directly to whether they buy something or leave.
- Page load times: How quickly does your site feel to a user? RUM measures things like how fast the first visuals appear (First Contentful Paint) and how soon a customer can actually click or scroll (Time to Interactive).
- Dynamic action speed: How fast are the interactive parts? This includes things like updating the shopping cart, checking if an item is in stock, or validating a promo code.
- JavaScript errors: See the errors that break forms or prevent a customer from adding an item to their cart.
- Third-party slowdowns: Is your payment gateway, ad script, or analytics tool slowing everything down? RUM will tell you.
- User frustration: RUM can even spot signals like "rage clicks" (clicking repeatedly on something that's not working), helping you connect poor performance to abandoned carts.
Key things to track for your online store
Don't get lost in data. Focus on the metrics that directly impact sales.
- Time to Interactive (TTI): How long until a customer can actually use the page? This is critical for product and checkout pages.
- Checkout speed and errors: Track the performance of each step in your checkout process—shipping, payment, and confirmation. This is where the money is made or lost.
- Dynamic content speed: Measure how quickly your cart and inventory updates happen for most of your users, not just the average.
- Third-party performance: Keep an eye on the load times and failure rates of external tools like payment processors.
- Conversion rates by location & device: Find out if performance issues in specific cities or on certain phones are costing you sales.
RUM metrics help determine which requests bypass cache and contribute to delays, highlighting opportunities to optimize TTLs or purge strategies without impacting freshness.
How to get started with RUM
A practical approach works best.
- Start with what matters most. Begin by monitoring your most important user journeys: viewing a product, adding to the cart, and completing the checkout.
- See what your users see. Capture metrics that measure perceived speed, like how long it takes for the main product image to appear (Largest Contentful Paint).
- Watch your critical actions. Track the speed of behind-the-scenes calls, like when a customer's cart is updated.
- Use smart sampling. You don't need to record every single action. Capture all checkout sessions, but take a smaller sample of general browsing to keep things manageable.
- Protect customer data. Always make sure you're not capturing sensitive information.
Smart ways to use RUM data
Examples of what teams can do with RUM insights:
- Fix a broken checkout. When sales dip, RUM can help you quickly figure out if the problem is a bug on your site, a slow payment provider, or a server issue.
- Check if new designs are actually better. Use RUM to measure if that slick new layout is helping or hurting your load times and user engagement.
- Manage third-party scripts. Identify external tools that are bogging down your site and decide whether to optimize how they load or find a faster alternative.
- Get ready for big sales. Use RUM to set a performance baseline before events like Black Friday. This helps you spot new bottlenecks when traffic surges.
RUM works best as part of a team
RUM tells you what real users are experiencing. For a complete picture, it's best to use it alongside other tools:
Synthetic monitoring:
These are automated tests that act like a user to proactively check if your site is available and fast from different locations, even when you have no traffic.
When you connect RUM data to your backend traces, you can follow a slow "Place Order" click all the way from the customer's browser to the exact database query that's causing the delay. This makes fixing problems much faster.
User experience risks to mitigate
- Single-page apps and virtual navigations: Ensure instrumentation handles route changes, lazy-loaded resources, and dynamic content.
- Alert fatigue: Set thresholds based on actual user impact, not raw server metrics.
- Ignoring mobile and slow networks: Average metrics hide worst-case experiences; RUM exposes pain points for subsets of users.
- Assuming CDN is enough: RUM often shows edge misconfigurations or origin fetch spikes, even with global distribution.
A quick 7-step plan for a better store
Use this checklist to prioritise improvements that directly affect sales:
- Put RUM on your checkout pages and measure how long each step takes.
- Set up alerts for when performance drops below a certain point (for example, checkout takes longer than 3 seconds for 10% of users).
- Break down performance by country and device to find struggling user groups.
- Find your slowest third-party scripts and figure out a better way to load them.
- Link your frontend API calls to your backend traces for end-to-end visibility.
- A/B test lighter, faster versions of your most important pages.
- Create a plan for handling traffic spikes during sales events.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Only looking at averages: The average experience can look fine while hiding the fact that 5% of your users are having a terrible time. Look at the outliers.
- Collecting sensitive data: Be extremely careful to remove any personal or payment information from the data you collect.
- Drinking from a firehose: Collect enough data to be useful, but use smart sampling to keep costs and noise down.
- Ignoring location: A fast experience in New York might be painfully slow in Sydney. Look at regional performance to understand your global customers.
See the full picture with ManageEngine Applications Manager
Insights are only useful if you can act on them. ManageEngine Applications Manager brings RUM together with backend, synthetic, and infrastructure monitoring so your teams can focus on what users actually experience.
- Connect the dots between a slow frontend experience and the backend issue causing it.
- Segment your data to find out which devices, browsers, or regions are having trouble.
- Spot performance issues caused by third-party tools like payment gateways or ad scripts.
- Get smarter alerts that only trigger when real users are affected.
- Analyze trends to build a faster, more reliable global shopping experience.
By seeing the whole picture, your teams can reduce cart abandonment, improve customer loyalty, and deliver a great shopping experience every time.
Ready to see how it works? Download a free 30-day trial of ManageEngine Applications Manager now!
