Novem­ber is here, and this marks the begin­ning of a chal­leng­ing time of year for online retail­ers. Black Fri­day, Cyber Mon­day, and the rest of the Hol­i­day sea­son will soon be upon us. For unpre­pared online retail­ers, what should be the most reward­ing and prof­itable time of the year can spin bad­ly out of con­trol. Retail­ers pre­pared for the dig­i­tal onslaught can and will ben­e­fit by delight­ing cus­tomers at every dig­i­tal touch­point and every moment of the cus­tomer jour­ney.

It’s not uncom­mon for dig­i­tal busi­ness own­ers to go through most of the year under the impres­sion that their site is per­fect­ly fine, and thus not be over­ly con­cerned at their prospects for suc­cess from Thanks­giv­ing through the New Year. How­ev­er, the asso­ci­at­ed traf­fic spike puts a whole dif­fer­ent kind of pres­sure on web­sites and mobile apps, and can reveal issues that only orga­ni­za­tions with a cul­ture focused on dig­i­tal per­for­mance man­age­ment would be on top of. The hol­i­day sea­son often sheds an unfriend­ly light on some spe­cif­ic issues. In the spir­it of giv­ing, we’re hap­py to demys­ti­fy these for you. Opti­miz­ing dig­i­tal per­for­mance to deliv­er high qual­i­ty cus­tomer expe­ri­ences at every turn is chal­leng­ing, but you can pre­pare for every hol­i­day mar­ket­ing moment. Here are five steps online retail­ers must take now.

1. Test, Test, Test!

“Be pre­pared” sounds like a broad piece of advice that, while obvi­ous­ly a good idea, isn’t actu­al­ly all that help­ful. So the mes­sage here for busi­ness and mar­ket­ing teams: test well in advance of peak events like the hol­i­day sea­son. Test from an end-user per­spec­tive to make sure you get an idea of what they will expe­ri­ence. Make sure your tests actu­al­ly reflect the cir­cum­stances of peak load time. Too many dig­i­tal busi­ness own­ers wait for some­thing to go wrong before they wor­ry about mak­ing improve­ments and opti­miz­ing per­for­mance. But the goal here is not to spend all of Black Fri­day and Cyber Mon­day just try­ing to sur­vive the fire­fight. If you can get out from under­neath this kind of tech­ni­cal debt and focus on inno­va­tion, you can dras­ti­cal­ly improve how your cus­tomers inter­act with your brand. Don’t wait for some­thing to go wrong before tak­ing action.

2. Forget Sampling

Noth­ing is more dis­con­cert­ing than know­ing you don’t know some­thing. From a per­for­mance man­age­ment per­spec­tive, look­ing at aggre­gate traf­fic ana­lyt­ics of your dai­ly, week­ly, and month­ly vis­its isn’t enough. Count­ing on a sam­pling of what users expe­ri­ence only gives you a vague idea of what your users are going through, and thus makes it dif­fi­cult to gain any real insight. It is impor­tant to load test in advance of peak shop­ping events like the upcom­ing hol­i­days, but it is no sub­sti­tute for real user mon­i­tor­ing. You need a com­pre­hen­sive strat­e­gy that includes load test­ing, syn­thet­ic mon­i­tor­ing and real user mon­i­tor­ing to ensure you’re pre­pared for every vis­i­tor. Rely­ing on sam­pling not only lim­its your under­stand­ing of what’s hap­pen­ing across the app deliv­ery chain, it leads to the next major chal­lenge…

3. Monitor Every Transaction

In today’s dig­i­tal world, your apps are your brand. Quite pos­si­bly the worst hol­i­day “gift” is wak­ing up to an angry call from your boss ask­ing what is wrong with your web and mobile sites or your mobile app: “Our con­ver­sions have fall­en through the floor, the call cen­ter is get­ting slammed with ques­tions from cus­tomers who can’t check out online, and we’re trend­ing on Twit­ter – fix it!” Dis­cov­er­ing cus­tomer expe­ri­ence degra­da­tion after the fact is a sce­nario that keeps dig­i­tal busi­ness own­ers up at night, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Stay­ing ahead of the per­for­mance game means hav­ing a dig­i­tal per­for­mance strat­e­gy that deliv­ers real user mon­i­tor­ing on every sin­gle trans­ac­tion. This will ensure you will see any and all issues as they devel­op, before cus­tomers do. With­out this abil­i­ty your cus­tomers become your “ear­ly warn­ing sys­tem,” which means that by the time you learn about an issue they are already frus­trat­ed and aban­don­ing trans­ac­tions. At that point it’s like­ly only a mat­ter of min­utes before they vent on social media. This is not only dam­ag­ing to your bot­tom line, but it can also have a neg­a­tive effect on your brand equi­ty and rep­u­ta­tion going for­ward. Play­ing catch-up after users are aban­don­ing your sites and apps means you will lose rev­enue and cus­tomers to the com­pe­ti­tion, and the trust of your cus­tomers, which takes a long time to earn back. This can be avoid­ed. Stay on top of your cus­tomers’ dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences at all times. Proac­tive­ly address issues as they hap­pen, before your cus­tomers are impact­ed.

4. Uncover Actionable Insights

Get­ting alert­ed to prob­lems is all well and good. After all, know­ing you have a prob­lem is the first step toward solv­ing it. How­ev­er, a dig­i­tal per­for­mance solu­tion that alerts you to issues but doesn’t tell you exact­ly what to do about it has lim­it­ed val­ue. Igno­rance is bliss, but not when you are aware of an issue, but blind to the root cause. The more time spent between iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and res­o­lu­tion, the more con­ver­sions you lose, and the more mon­ey gets flushed away. So a dig­i­tal per­for­mance man­age­ment solu­tion that doesn’t include root cause ana­lyt­ics, makes the whole idea of address­ing an issue before your users are affect­ed dif­fi­cult to exe­cute. Dig­i­tal busi­ness own­ers don’t just need more raw data; they need answers. They need insight into the exact dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence they are pro­vid­ing in order to iden­ti­fy con­ver­sion road­blocks. The good news is that today syn­thet­ic mon­i­tor­ing allows busi­ness­es to not only detect, but clas­si­fy, iden­ti­fy and gath­er infor­ma­tion on root caus­es of per­for­mance issues and pro­vides instant triage, prob­lem rank­ing and cause iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. “Smart ana­lyt­ics” reduces hours of man­u­al trou­bleshoot­ing to a mat­ter of sec­onds. With today’s mod­ern dig­i­tal per­for­mance solu­tions, busi­ness teams don’t need to be IT experts. Dash­boards show busi­ness stake­hold­ers how cus­tomers are expe­ri­enc­ing their ser­vices, in real-time, across dig­i­tal chan­nels. This enables stake­hold­ers to make clean and sim­ple hand­offs from tech­ni­cal coun­ter­parts to address poten­tial issues imme­di­ate­ly.

5. Be Alert For Third-Party Performance Issues

In a per­fect world, third-par­ty ser­vices can improve end-user expe­ri­ences and deliv­er func­tion­al­i­ty faster than stand­alone appli­ca­tions. How­ev­er, there is a poten­tial down­side. Mod­ern appli­ca­tions often call on a vari­ety of third-par­ty ser­vices (Face­book wid­gets, pop-up chats, etc.) that are out­side the view of tra­di­tion­al mon­i­tor­ing sys­tems. Known unknowns like this should be enough to scare the socks off of any dig­i­tal busi­ness own­er. Hing­ing your site or app’s per­for­mance on a ser­vice that you don’t have any insight into is a fright­en­ing propo­si­tion. But it gets worse. Even though you often don’t have insight into thir d‑parties, when they expe­ri­ence issues it can still have a dra­mat­ic affect on your site. The issue is not your fault, but when Face­book crash­es, that “like” or login but­ton can still hang up your entire site. Your users don’t know it’s Facebook’s prob­lem and not yours. All they know is your site isn’t meet­ing their expec­ta­tions – sud­den­ly Facebook’s prob­lem is your prob­lem. Dig­i­tal busi­ness own­ers can solve this by mak­ing sure they can see these ser­vices from the get-go, map any per­for­mance issues to them, and act with­in min­utes to negate the prob­lem.