Providing the best possible user experience is a key challenge for companies today. It's the key to winning and retaining customers, and increasing sales. So it's essential to make the user journey as smooth as possible, and eliminate all obstacles, while improving site performance.
Among the available solutions is digital experience monitoring (DEM).
Providing real-time information, DEM helps you understand the behavior of a website's users. In this article, we explain its objectives, how it works, and its advantages.
DEM, APM, RUM: what are the differences?
Digital Experience Monitoring is often confused with other monitoring approaches. Here are the key differences you need to know in order to choose the right solution:
| Criterion |
DEM
|
APM
|
RUM
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Meaning | Digital Experience Monitoring |
Application Performance Monitoring |
Real User Monitoring |
| Point of view | 👤 End user | ⚙️ Infrastructure & code | 👥 Real users |
| Type of monitoring | ✦ Proactive & concise | Responsive (technical alerts) | Passive (traffic analysis) |
| Detects before an incident occurs? | ✅ Yes — 24 hours a day | ❌ No — non-reactive | ❌ No — after the fact |
| Full course? | ✅ From start to finish | ❌ Technical layer | ⚠️ Partial |
| Visible business impact? | ✅ Conversion, MTTR, NPS | ❌ IT metrics alone | ⚠️ Partial |
| Ideal for | Key accounts, e-commerce, banking and insurance |
Dev teams / DevOps | UX & behavior analysis |
| Examples of tools | 2Be-FFICIENT | Datadog Dynatrace New Relic | Contentsquare Hotjar |
DEM complements APM tools: while Datadog or Dynatrace monitor infrastructure, DEM monitors what your users actually experience. These are two complementary approaches, not competing ones.
What is DEM (Digital Experience Monitoring)?
Digital experience monitoring is a global approach to site or application supervision that analyzes user behavior and measures site performance. Thanks to the data collected, DEM enables :
- obtain precise information about the experience of visiting a site, and thus understand the user journey;
- identify and correct errors and anomalies that are detrimental to a good user experience (UX).
In other words, it provides a detailed and consistent view of the user journey by combining technical and behavioral data. It is a proactive monitoring system that operates in real time and analyzes the root causes of a problem, poor performance, or malfunction.
Digital experience monitoring is therefore essential in complex environments, particularly for e-commerce sites and cloud-based services.
Digital experience monitoring generally combines several techniques: synthetic monitoring, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and sometimes Application Performance Monitoring (APM). What are the objectives of digital experience monitoring?
Digital experience monitoring serves several purposes. It provides
usable information on :
- the performance of SaaS, private or cloud applications that use HTTP protocols, for example, and run on users' devices, and can adversely affect their experience in the event of problems, slowness ;
- network latency ;
- user behavior.
DEM also makes it possible to monitor, analyze and measure users' digital experiences. The ultimate goal is to improve :
- site performance ;
- user experience;
- commitment and customer satisfaction;
- productivity.
How does digital experience monitoring (DEM) work?
Digital experience monitoring uses advanced techniques to analyze and optimize users' interactions with digital services. Several tools are used to collect this data:
- Real User Monitoring (RUM), which tracks the data of real visitors to a site and enables the analysis of various metrics (page reactivity, average loading time, for example). This data can be used to identify opportunities for site optimization.
- Synthetic monitoring (STM), which simulates user interactions using automata (bots) to test the performance of specific pages. This tool is very useful for testing new functionalities before they are launched.
- Application monitoring (APM) identifies and analyzes the key parameters of software applications. It enables the detection of technical performance problems in these applications, which are detrimental to a good user experience. This is the case, for example, with bottlenecks. To find out more, discover how ourAPI monitoring solution measures the reliability of exchanges between systems.
- End-point monitoring ensures optimum performance of PCs and cell phones by monitoring various parameters, including performance and connection quality. This ensures productivity, and proactively identifies and resolves anomalies that could disrupt the end-user journey and experience. This approach complements our mobile application monitoring solution.
- DevOps monitoring, which focuses on the performance of development workflows in order to identify and resolve performance problems.
- Network performance monitoring (NPM), which assesses the reliability and performance of the underlying network infrastructure (e.g. speed, latency) to ensure seamless connectivity across environments.
Interacting in real time, these tools enable :
- establish links between the various data obtained, which are brought together in a dashboard
- identify errors or problems that could have a negative impact on the user experience
- detect a drop in application performance and its cause (e.g. increased traffic slowing down the loading of site pages)
- solve the problems identified.
Digital Experience Monitoring monitors and analyzes the performance and smooth running of a site from two points of view: technical and user. It's a comprehensive solution.
Why is this type of monitoring strategic for companies?
DEM saves time and reduces costs, thus improving user satisfaction and the productivity of the monitoring organization. These are undeniable advantages for any company, as they help to boost sales.
Offer a better user experience
Digital experience monitoring is a good tool for guaranteeing the quality of the user experience by better understanding user behavior and expectations. It can help a company to stand out from its competitors, and identify problems and errors that can have an impact on the UX and a site's conversion rate.
Proactive error detection
With digital experience monitoring, alerts are sent out in real time when problems are detected. This makes it possible to resolve them quickly, before they damage the UX, the company's business or affect customers, for example by preventing them from finalizing their online purchases.
Identify the causes of anomalies or problems
Digital experience monitoring doesn't just spot problems. It goes a step further, identifying the causes of problems thanks to the various data it collects, which is essential if we are to prevent them from recurring. For example, with digital experience monitoring, it's possible to understand why a site's bounce rate is rising. It offers a global view of web-user behavior.
Facilitating collaboration between teams
As we mentioned earlier, DEM also benefits the user company's teams by facilitating internal workflows. It gives teams greater visibility of the entire infrastructure, enabling them to work on improving the UX and resolving problems more quickly.
Guiding strategic decisions
Using usable data from user behavior and site performance measurements, a company can define priority areas for improvement and the corrective measures to be applied to the site. Once again, the aim is to optimize the user experience in order to build customer loyalty and increase the site's conversion rate.
DEM also enables a company to stand out from the competition by placing UX at the heart of its priorities and providing web users with a reliable, high-quality experience. In a competitive sector, this is a real asset.
Finally, as a digital experience monitoring solution is scalable, it really does adapt to the needs of the company and its business.
What are the advantages of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)?
These two solutions may seem similar. It's true that they are linked and complementary, but their objectives are not identical.
In fact, monitoring mainly tracks user activity and identifies technical anomalies on a server or network.
DEM, on the other hand, goes beyond this by ensuring a site's availability and performance while focusing on the end user's actual experience:
- it provides precise information on how users interact with a site's services and is based on key site performance indicators (loading time, latency, etc.)
- it helps detect problems before users spot them and complain, whereas conventional monitoring is a passive surveillance method
- it takes into account a global context and analyzes performance regardless of the user's environment (geographical location, device, browser, etc.)
- it helps quantify the impact of a performance problem on a company's sales and productivity, which is not the case with conventional monitoring, which does not link these data.
- It is suited to modern architectures (cloud, SaaS, hybrid), whereas traditional monitoring struggles to keep up with developments outside the IT perimeter.
The real impact of digital failures
Incidents are not just technical problems—they have a direct and measurable impact on revenue and customer loyalty.
| Sector | Key figure | Impact on your business |
|---|---|---|
|
Mobile
|
38% of users have uninstalled an app due to poor performance Statista, 2023 |
Direct loss of loyal customers after a single unresolved incident
|
|
Global web
|
39.6% of online sessions affected by frustrations (JavaScript errors, loading times) Contentsquare, 2023 |
Direct decrease in conversion rate on each affected page
|
|
Bank
|
7% conversion loss per second of additional delay in a transactional journey Akamai |
Subscription cancellation, transfer, or login — before any IT alert
|
|
E-commerce
|
70% average shopping cart abandonment rate — slowness and errors are a major cause Baymard Institute |
Loss of direct revenue for each transaction that is not completed
|
|
IVR / Voice
|
A few minutes is all it takes for an undetected faulty IVR to generate hundreds of overflow calls. Field observations |
Immediate overload of call centers and visible customer dissatisfaction
|
Who can benefit from digital experience monitoring?
By collecting and analyzing technical and behavioral data, digital experience monitoring (DEM) enables anomalies and errors to be detected and then corrected. This proactive monitoring therefore meets the needs of companies in various sectors, regardless of their size, including:
- e-commerce
- telecommunications
- education
- health.
Similarly, the data collected is not only useful for IT and technical teams. It is also valuable for sales and creative teams, as it helps them identify areas for improvement on a website and collaborate more effectively with each other.
In fact, any company with a website or application can opt for digital experience monitoring in order to:
- increase your conversion rate ;
- offer a better user experience;
- improve site performance;
- obtain information on user behavior to better understand them and meet their expectations.
Today, this concerns many structures, especially as most DEM solutions can be integrated into existing systems. This eliminates the need to make major changes to an infrastructure, and the additional costs involved.
DEM in practice: use cases by sector
Monitoring the digital experience addresses very specific challenges depending on your industry. Here are the most critical use cases:
Banking & Insurance
Banking processes are among the most critical: an anomaly in a transfer, subscription, or secure connection can have immediate regulatory and financial consequences.
• Continuous monitoring of connection processes (strong authentication, MFA)
• Real-time monitoring of transfers and payments
• Detection of anomalies in customer areas before user notification
• Verification of online claims and subscriptions
• Example: a bank detects in less than 2 minutes that a transfer process is blocked at the validation stage—before a single customer is affected.
🛒 E-commerce & Retail
Every second of friction in a purchase funnel translates directly into abandoned carts and lost revenue.
• Monitoring of the entire purchase funnel: add to cart → payment → confirmation
• Monitoring of promotions and flash pages (Black Friday, sales)
• Verification of payment integrations (credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay)
• Monitoring of click & collect and mobile applications
• Example: a retailer automatically detects that a payment page returns an error only on iOS mobile devices—invisible on desktop and traditional APM tools.
Energy & Utilities
Customer portals and contract management applications are essential touchpoints for customer satisfaction.
• Monitoring customer areas (viewing invoices, contracts, consumption)
• Monitoring incident and breakdown reporting portals
• Checking real-time consumption tracking applications
• Example: an energy supplier is immediately alerted that an update has broken the form for changing bank details—before any customer reports are received.
Distribution & Logistics
The digitization of logistics routes creates new points of failure that are invisible to conventional technical tools.
• Monitoring mobile delivery apps and package tracking
• Monitoring B2B interfaces (orders, EDI, partner APIs)
• Verifying return routes and refunds
• Example: A retailer detects that an order tracking API responds with an 8-second latency only on weekends—correlated with an increase in customer service contacts.
Why choose 2Be-FFICIENT for your monitoring solution?
2Be-FFICIENT, a specialist in user experience monitoring, offers you an innovative solution for digital experience monitoring that will :
- allows you to analyze and measure each user's experience, regardless of the device used (desktop, laptop, mobile or tablet);
- alerts you in real time when anomalies or errors are detected so that you can act immediately to resolve or correct them;
- provides preliminary diagnostics to identify the source of a problem as quickly as possible, and intervene quickly and effectively.
This monitoring is carried out via automated systems, which are independent of your IT structure. Similarly, when incidents are detected, they are recorded (video and screenshots) to help identify them.
Our solution also incorporates AI to simplify the analysis of errors and problems. Designed to adapt to complex infrastructures, it can be quickly deployed by our teams. As for alerts, you can customize them, just like the statistics integrated into your dashboard.
To find out more and discover the benefits of digital experience monitoring by 2Be-FFICIENT, request your online demo!
FAQ — Frequently asked questions about Digital Experience Monitoring
What is the difference between DEM and conventional monitoring?
Traditional monitoring tracks the availability of servers and IT infrastructure.
DEM (Digital Experience Monitoring) goes further: it replicates the journeys of real users to detect anomalies that impact the customer experience but do not appear on technical dashboards.
A server may appear "green" on your IT dashboard while a payment process is blocked for your customers.
Does DEM replace APM tools such as Datadog or Dynatrace?
No, DEM and APMs are complementary. APMs (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic) monitor infrastructure and code.
DEM monitors the actual experience of end users. The two approaches work together: APM to detect technical causes, DEM to measure the actual user impact.
Many companies use both in parallel.
What is synthetic monitoring?
Synthetic monitoring is a technique that involves automatically simulating user journeys at regular intervals, from outside your infrastructure, 24/7.
Robots replicate the actions of a real user (logging in, adding items to the cart, paying, subscribing, etc.) and detect anomalies before your real customers encounter them.
This is the main technique used in Digital Experience Monitoring.
What is the difference between synthetic monitoring and RUM?
Synthetic monitoring continuously simulates traffic from outside, even without real traffic, ideal for proactive detection.
RUM (Real User Monitoring) analyzes the behavior of real users in real time, but only works when there is traffic and reactively.
The DEM ideally combines both approaches for comprehensive coverage.
Is DEM useful for mobile applications?
Yes, that's one of its strengths. DEM can monitor journeys on real mobile devices (real Android and iOS smartphones, not emulators), on all browsers and operating systems. It detects mobile-specific anomalies that go unnoticed in desktop testing: SMS authentication, push notifications, performance on 4G/5G networks, etc.
Do you need to install anything on your infrastructure for the DEM?
No. That's one of the key advantages of synthetic monitoring: the agents are located outside your infrastructure. No changes to your information systems are necessary, no agents need to be installed, and there is no impact on production. Deployment is quick and non-intrusive.
Which sectors need Digital Experience Monitoring the most?
The most critical sectors are banking and insurance (regulated processes, financial transactions), e-commerce (purchase funnel and conversion rates directly impacted), energy and utilities (customer portals and online declarations), and distribution (mobile applications and click & collect). In practice, any company whose revenue depends on critical digital processes can benefit from DEM.
How do we measure the ROI of Digital Experience Monitoring?
ROI is calculated based on several factors: reduction in MTTR (mean time to resolution), decrease in customer service contacts related to digital malfunctions, increase in conversion rates on monitored paths, and reduction in revenue losses related to undetected incidents. Teams using DEM generally move from reactive incident management (reported by customers) to proactive management (detected before customer impact).
