Companies spend an inordinate amount of money setting up complex IT systems to manage and optimize service offerings to customers.  Often these management systems only look at a single metric, like conversions or performance. What if both could be correlated?

Imagine you are a high-traffic on-line ticket vendor for major events nationwide.  As the head of IT operations, you want to maximize conversions by ensuring that you can handle the traffic volumes generated by a major concert event or marketing push and that the response times for customer queries remain optimal. In spite of your best efforts, however, the latest concert promotion brought your site to its knees and some of your systems went down for a short period of time.  The impact of that outage on your users might be unacceptably slow response times or actual system errors in their browser.  In either case, if they risk losing out on good seats for the concert while waiting for your systems to recover, they will abandon your site in favor of a competitor that is more responsive and you will have lost that revenue. On the assumption that you could have sold 1000 tickets at $100 apiece during that outage, you could lose up to $100k of revenue, depending on the number of users affected.  That’s a lot of crumpets, as they say.

Poor response times and unreachable sites are bad for revenue. But there is also a third reason why your site traffic could be impacted that is not caused by the performance issues described above.  It may be that your site content is unappealing to the average eye or that your offerings are priced out of reach for the average consumer.  This is the typical explanation that marketing gives to conversion dips, but it is clearly not the only root cause.

This is where Coradiant Analytics In A Box can help.  Our passive capture technology combined with the included Google Urchin software collects performance and availability metrics about your site while it is tracking user behavior. This allows you to look at conversions (e.g. ticket purchases) in the context of performance and availability, thus allowing you to categorize conversion dips into those that are infrastructure related and those that are marketing and content related.  For example, your analytics data tells you that the 22% of your users bought tickets between 12-2 PM on Monday afternoon. You also see that this is about 35% less than the norm for a corresponding period.  Coradiant allows you to correlate this event with an increase in page load time or availability problems.

End-user monitoring coupled with analytics provides a powerful solution that helps to maximize customer visits and conversions.  It places those responsible for business results and for performance in the driver’s seat by providing them with the data they need to understand the real business impact of system outages, thus enabling them to provide the best possible service to their Line-of-Business managers.