Every time a shopper accesses your site, they leave a trail of breadcrumbs detailing their path through your store and their user experience along the way. These breadcrumbs are incredibly rich in the information they provide both to you, the business owner, and the team responsible for monitoring the health and security of your store. They provide detailed insights into every aspect of your business from your sales funnel to your site operations.
The first question, then, is how do you collect all of these breadcrumbs? Webscale’s Traffic Viewer has the ability to access your site’s activity nearly as it occurs. Webscale allows you to view the complete suite of traffic logs that your store’s CDN and application generate as well as pageview logs for insight into your user experience and Content Security Policy (CSP) reports for site security.
The second question is how do you sift through the trove of logs to know when action is needed? Webscale makes it easy to configure log monitoring that covers a wide range of conditions. You can define criteria that combine any aspect and collection of your CDN, application, and pageview logs as well as CSP reports to focus on what you deem critical. More importantly, Webscale log monitoring will automatically alert your team when thresholds you design are met. To jog your imagination, the following list of monitors has been curated for keeping a pulse on your business’ sales success and your store’s performance and security.
Sales funnel: email registering and checkout failures
Marketing directors know the importance of capturing a window shopper’s email before they navigate away from the store. It gives you an opportunity to keep the conversation going by reminding them their cart is full or that a new sale has begun. But what if a recent code change introduced a sporadic bug that prevents the shopper from registering? Worse, what if a similar bug sporadically prevents a shopper from checking out? These failures may not necessarily be caught by your existing store monitoring solutions due to their sporadic nature.
Here is a Webscale log monitor that can monitor these important endpoints, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If it sees more than 5 shopper requests in an hour that result in an error, it will automatically notify a list of email recipients with a custom message.
Performance: Core Web Vitals
As mentioned in this Webscale blog post, Google’s Core Web Vitals determine your search ranking and, as a result, have a direct correlation with your subsequent conversions and revenue. These metrics capture how fast and responsive your site is for your shoppers, meaning any code changes that affect the load time of your pages will affect your business’ sales.
To protect against ‘silent failures’ that slow down load times, here’s an easy-to-configure real-time monitor:
This simple monitor has the power to provide you peace of mind that code changes are not having an adverse effect on your shopper’s experience of the store. Additionally, Webscale’s real-user monitoring (RUM) capability allows you to measure this experience in richer terms than just simple page load times using metrics directly reported by the shopper’s browser. For more information about these metrics, see my previous post.
Security: Content Security Policy reports
If your team is not already aware of magecart attacks, they should be. According to Webscale’s 2021 Global Ecommerce Security Report, these types of attacks are implemented with data skimming scripts injected into your store pages without your knowledge, collecting personal user information like credit card numbers. Using content security policies can help prevent these scripts from loading while also providing you the details of the attack.
To keep your team alerted on any magecart attacks your shop sees in real-time, use this monitor:
This is the simplest monitor of the three but unarguably the most important to your shop’s security: if any of your team’s configured content security policies are violated, they will be notified. For even more control, this monitor can be enhanced to perform anomaly detection on these violations. For more information, contact us at info@webscale.com.
Real-time monitoring of your sales funnel and site operations is painless with Webscale log monitoring. Configuring a monitor is easy for business owners and operation teams alike and will grant you the peace of mind your sales pipeline is operating as expected, your shoppers are enjoying their experience in your store, and the site is protected against threats.
