In today's world, your web applications must work properly to capture your audience's attention and keep them on your website for longer than a few seconds. It's a battle to keep potential customers engaged, and you'll lose out on valuable leads if your website isn't performing optimally.

Before synthetic transaction monitoring (STM), developers used consumer data to examine their website or app's performance closely. Now, they can replicate behavior using synthetic scripts and models.

If you want to understand better STM and how it works in practice, look no further. To help you get started, we're covering what STM is and how it works. As a professional, you're likely always looking to improve the user experience, so we're also discussing how STM can help you in your efforts.

What is Synthetic Transaction Monitoring?

STM is an advanced approach that web deployment teams use to understand better how a website works in practice. While once IT professionals had to rely on the real activities of their users, they can now use STM to make synthetic transactions that simulate their actions. With this treasure trove of information, they can improve the performance of their systems.

Need to know how STM works on a deeper level?

Well, STM uses automated tools like scripts, which work by copying the behavior of your real users. Let's say you want to examine how a user interacts with your website. You could use STM to log in and browse products. You might want to see how easy it is to add a product to a basket and complete a purchase. STM lets you follow the steps of a real user to get better insights into your website.

Mimicking the behavior and patterns of users can allow you to test your website or app thoroughly under different scenarios. Depending on your goals, you can employ many types of transaction monitoring.

The advantage of STM lies in its ability to identify and resolve potential performance issues or glitches before they impact real users, ultimately leading to a higher UX ROI. Replicating user behavior also provides insights into how users experience your site across different locations and situations.

Typically, STM operates 24/7 to monitor your website's performance diligently, even when there's less actual user activity.

Now, let's take a closer look at how employing STM can help you to improve your user experience.

How Can Synthetic Transaction Monitoring Improve the User Experience?

Employing STM plays a pivotal role in ensuring your users have a good experience on your website from start to finish. By proactively addressing any issues that arise, STM allows you to quickly prevent your users from having a poor experience.

Here's a closer look at how STM ensures your web visitors have a great experience every time.

1. Detecting Issues Early

By consistently running simulated transactions at regular intervals, STM acts as a watchful guardian, actively monitoring the performance of your web applications. This proactive approach lets you detect and address potential performance or functionality issues before they affect your real users.

The monitoring system will trigger alerts, which allows your IT team to respond swiftly to any errors encountered during these synthetic transactions. They can quickly investigate and solve any problems to minimize the impact on your genuine users. By identifying and resolving issues early on, STM contributes to user satisfaction by preventing any disruptions in your web performance or glitches in its functionality.

STM not only helps you detect issues in your web pages. It can also help you detect issues across your IT infrastructure, like your networks and servers.

STM is crucial in preventing downtime or service interruptions since organizations can take preventive measures or schedule maintenance during non-peak hours. This strengthens the reliability of your web and remote applications, contributing to a better user experience.

2. Continuous Monitoring

STM constantly monitors web applications around the clock, without any breaks. It diligently checks their performance, making sure they function smoothly and efficiently. Regular monitoring promptly identifies potential issues such as slow performance, images failing to load, or glitches.

This continuous surveillance ensures that any problems are detected early on before they can disrupt the experience of actual users. As a result, web applications operate reliably and seamlessly, offering users a stable and hassle-free experience.

3. Get a Global Perspective

STM allows IT professionals to simulate the experience of real users and interactions from across the globe. For instance, you could check the performance of your website in different countries around the world. Businesses with a global customer base can ensure that all customers get a consistent experience no matter where they are in the world.

As a business, you could even adapt your digital services to meet the requirements of people in different parts of the globe. For instance, you can adjust your website to appeal to a global audience, considering the variations in network conditions depending on the country.

If you're a business that needs to meet SOX software compliance, STM can help you to ensure that you align with your obligation to uphold accurate financial reporting by ensuring that your website performs consistently for worldwide users.

4. Tested based on Scenarios

STM helps you understand how your apps and web pages react in different user scenarios. Let's say you own an e-commerce platform. You could analyze what a user experiences when buying something. Or, maybe you own a blog. STM could help you see how easy it is for a user to sign up for your newsletter.

Understanding every part of the user experience can help you see how well your website is working and what you need to improve on, and performing tests based on set-out scenarios can help you achieve this.

5. Optimize Your Web Performance

You may use STM as part of your toolkit to improve the efficiency of your apps and websites. You can get first-hand experience of an app's performance without putting real users through a bad experience. That way, you can avoid potential bottlenecks and ensure all users get a great experience every time.

STM is already improving the online services of many businesses, playing a vital role in enhancing website functionality and ensuring a seamless user experience at all times.

In the realm of e-commerce, STM helps IT professionals test the purchasing process. This ensures customers can effortlessly select products and add them to their shopping cart. This enables payment processing without glitches, preventing abandoned shopping carts.

Moreover, STM also plays a crucial role in enhancing cybersecurity, detecting and preventing potential security threats, and ensuring the safety of online transactions.

When it comes to the banking industry, where safeguarding user information is paramount, STM proves invaluable in identifying and resolving issues with banking services. STM allows users to enjoy a seamless experience while accessing their accounts and making secure transactions.

The healthcare sector also finds value in STM. For organizations offering portals and telehealth services, STM helps simulate user actions within these systems to address any issues users may encounter when scheduling appointments or accessing medical records.

Ensuring that booking systems constantly work in the travel and hospitality domains is crucial. STM helps guarantee that their systems can handle volumes of bookings without users facing any difficulties during peak times.

While STM is particularly beneficial in the banking, healthcare, and hospitality industries, it can also be used in broader businesses that deal with customers online.

Ensure Your Website Runs Smoothly With Synthetic Transaction Monitoring

STM can help your business maintain a high-performing website or app. No matter what industry you're in, using STM helps your users enjoy a seamless experience every time. Proactively identifying and quickly addressing performance issues, this method ensures that you face no disruptions when it comes to your website or app.

Enhancing your website performance and keeping your users happy is far easier with a web transaction monitoring system that helps to replicate the real user experience on your website or app. It detects connectivity problems and slow performance issues, so your users won't experience as many issues. Don't let your website's performance let your business down.

We've outlined the advantages of synthetic transaction monitoring, and you're now ready to use this tool as part of your own process. Empower your business and deliver an excellent user experience every time by using STM.