Features used: Dashboards, Real User Monitoring (Core Web Vitals) and Synthetic speed testing and monitoring.
Time: 20 min.
Common use cases for analysing Web performance
Improve the landing experience
Optimizing the web performance of your landing pages is essential for a positive user experience, higher conversion rates, and improved SEO. Faster-loading pages reduce bounce rates, enhance brand reputation, and provide cost-efficiency.
Set up
1. Define the “Entry Pages”:
- Create a general mapping that includes your main landing pages (e.g., Category page, Homepage, Product page). If you are analyzing a landing page during a specific campaign, be sure to separate these landing pages as well (e.g., Black Friday page, Sales page, etc.)
- f you don't have integration with an analytics tool to directly import acquisition segments, create a traffic acquisition mapping that includes the acquisition sources driving traffic to your landing pages.. Read ‘How to make an acquisition mapping’
2. Define your segments:
- Chose a Web Vital metric you want to monitor (e.g., TTFB, LCP, CLS, FID, INP) and, by using the “Same Pageview” condition, filter sessions with an LCP condition on the Landing page (also known as Entry page). Try to define both low and high bounds to avoid outlier values..
- Duplicate your initial segment to create segments that represent 'Good', 'Needs Improvement' and 'Poor' experiences of the chosen metric (e.g., LCP) on the Entry Page.
Note! Don’t expect this to represent 100% of your traffic: LCP is only collected from browsers that expose it: Safari, Firefox and iOS (all browser) are not supported.
3. Create a dedicated Dashboards. Use the 'New Dashboards' helper to set up a dashboard based on your 'Poor,' 'Needs Improvements,' and 'Good' segments.
- Typical performance-associated KPIs include 'Percentage of sessions,' 'Bounce Rate,' 'Session Time,' and 'Conversion Rate,' which are associated with your usual goals.
Learn more about how to monitor your technical performance of your site here
Analysis
1. Analyze the impact of the different segments on your key KPIs:
- Does having a better LCP impact the time spent on the site, the 'Add to cart' rate, and overall conversion?
Example of a dedicated to LCP performance Dashboards
A dashboard displaying improved LCP on the entry page consistently correlates with a better experience, reflected in increased session duration, a higher 'Add to cart' rate (with a 10% increase when LCP on the entry page is good), and higher conversion rates.
2. Detect the LCP element with Speed Analysis. To do this, open the Speed Analysis Lab, go to the 'Analyze' tab, and select the URL of the page you want to analyze, along with the desired device and location. This will take you to the Reports page, where you can identify the main areas for improvement on the selected page.
3. Assess your page's performance against key web performance metrics.
- Understand the loading performance by examining the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Total Blocking Time (TBT), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
4. Click on the LCP image to open the video replay and rendering times.
- Visualize the LCP element directly in the video replay and access additional details about the LCP element, such as its size, weight, path, and HTML code.
Learn more about using the Speed Analysis Report.
5. Identify the cause of delayed image display and prioritize resources by clicking the 'Waterfall' CTA in your report. The waterfall displays all network requests, including HTTP, necessary for page loading, encompassing assets such as images, JavaScript, and web service calls.
- Find the resource linked to LCP and ensure its prompt retrieval and display by refining resource prioritization and introducing lazy-loading for non-essential images.
Prioritize improvement of problematic areas
Identifying and prioritizing efforts to address web performance issues in specific site areas allows you to tackle the most critical issues first and make the most significant impact on your website's overall performance.
1. In the Speed Analysis Lab, go to your Standard Dashboards and look for noticeable trends in the graphs. Adjust your indicators to evaluate performance based on various metrics.
Example of a Time To First Byte analysis a site across Desktop, Mobile and App devices.
On mobile 3G from Paris, the TTFB analysis consistently reveals poor performance over time.
2. Understand the impact on page groups using Dashboards. Create a Dashboards to aggregate the average values of the chosen Core Web Vitals for your main pages.
- Determine which pages require optimization, considering their relevance from a real user's perspective and assessing their impact.
Example of a Dashboards for average values of TTFB for real users on the Homepage, Category Page, Product Page and Cart, on Mobile & Desktop.
3. Assess the business impact of of an above-average TTFB on the problematic page by using the Impact Quantification module. Compare the following:
- the experience of the people that have visited the page you want to analyse (e.g., Product Page) and never experienced a TTFB of more than the average value and less than 100/500 ms (to eliminate excessively low values that could distort our analysis)
VS
- the experience of the people that have visited the page you want to analyse and never experienced a TTFB of less than the average value and more than 5 s (to eliminate excessively high values that could distort our analysis)
Example of an Impact Quantification analysis comparing mobile users who have not experienced slow TTFB on a Product page versus those who have.
The analysis shows a yearly revenue opportunity of €400,000 if only 10% of the above-average TTFB experiences were improved to the values that are currently below average
Measure the impact of a resource/service
By understanding which resources or services affect your website's performance, you can focus on the most crucial areas, enhance user satisfaction, and make informed decisions to achieve a faster, more efficient, and competitive online presence.
Here's a step-by-step guide on how to measure the impact of a resource or service.