Business Insights extends support for optimizing Core Web Vitals

Organizations face challenges around scale, focus, and communication when starting their Core Web Vitals optimization journey. The Dynatrace Business Insights team has developed analytical views and an approach to help you get started.

In February 2021, Dynatrace announced full support for Google’s Core Web Vitals metrics, which will help site owners as they start optimizing Core Web Vitals performance for SEO.

This is good news if you’ve been tasked with leading a Core Web Vitals SEO project. But you may be wondering, “how do I get started?”

Not everyone has expertise in performance optimization and how it can impact SEO. The Business Insights team at Dynatrace has been working with our largest Digital Experience Monitoring customers to help them turn the Core Web Vitals data they’re collecting with Dynatrace into actionable insights they can use to optimize pages ahead of this June 2021 change in Google’s search ranking algorithm.

Through these discussions we realized there are three main challenges customers face when starting their Core Web Vitals optimization journey. On the Dynatrace Business Insights team, we have developed analytical views and an approach to help you get started.

What challenges will organizations face to optimize Core Web Vitals?

These challenges center around scale, focus, and communication.

How do you apply the Core Web Vitals methodology at scale?

One application with 10 top key pages is easy and fits nicely on a single dashboard. But capturing metrics and displaying them in a way that’s easy to digest across dozens of global sites and hundreds of landing pages for all the Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics – the 75^th percentile, 28-day lookback, pass and fail criteria, mobile and desktop segregation – can get hard to manage. To do this effectively, you need a big data processing approach.

How do you know where to focus first with failing pages?

Not all pages are equally important, and development resources are top priority. Once you address the scale challenge, you can focus on surfacing the hot spots. A page with low traffic and failing CWV compliance does not hold the same weight as a failing page with high traffic. You need to focus optimization efforts on the pages that matter most.

How do you clearly communicate this data to your marketing and business stakeholders?

Organizations will need to communicate CWV performance for key pages to key stakeholders outside of Dynatrace in a way that’s easy to understand, and actions to be taken are clear.

How Dynatrace Business Insights can help

The three challenges to optimizing Core Web Vitals is exactly why the Dynatrace Business Insights team have built the Insights Analytics Engine. This service offering which allows us to create views for specialized use cases like Core Web Vitals assessment and compliance.

We are happy to introduce new Core Web Vitals views exclusively for Business Insights customers.

The Business Insights new Core Web Vitals views offer 100% precision metrics for:

• Core Web Vitals performance for top pages across all applications
• 28-day lookbacks
• Segregation of data by mobile and desktop
• 75^th percentile
• Pass / fail assessment
• Bounce rate for additional context

Turning CWV insights into action

Once you know which pages to focus on based on the Business Insights views for the CWV pass/fail score, the next step is determining exactly what you can do to optimize your Core Web Vitals score.

To start organizations in the right direction, Google provides some basic guidelines for how to optimize for each CWV score.

For example:

• Largest Contentful Paint can be improved by faster server response times, deferring render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, reducing resource load times, and optimizing any client-side rendering
• First Input Delay can be improved by reducing the impact of third-party code, redoing JavaScript execution time, minimizing main thread work, and keeping requests counts low and transfer sizes small
• Cumulative Layout Shift can be improved by including dimensions on images, reducing ad shift, and reserving sufficient space for dynamic content

While these guidelines provide clues as to what types of changes organizations may need to make to get that ‘passing’ score, this alone is not enough information to pass to developers when it comes time to implement a solution. You need specific, targeted, recommendations for exactly what you need to implement to achieve your desired outcome.

CWV views can help provide competitive insights

In addition to optimizing Core Web Vitals results for your applications, the Business Insights team can also help you understand how your results compare to competitors. For example, some questions the Business Insights team and the Core Web Vitals views can help answer include:

• How do desktop and mobile home pages compare to competitors in terms of CWV results and page construction?
• Are competitors meeting CWV compliance for comparable pages? – if so, what are they doing differently?
• What can you do to improve – and how can you track and report on these changes over time?

These are the exact scenarios Business Insights specializes in. Specific, actionable recommendations you can give directly to your developers to help improve your Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift timings – and ensuring you meet those ‘Good’ thresholds month over month.

What’s next for Business Insights and Core Web Vitals?

• Trending Core Web Vitals over time – see how your score and timings improve month over month
• Automated Core Web Vitals dashboards in Dynatrace for Business Insights customers
• Core Web Vitals metrics introduced in additional standard Business Insights views to enhance our reporting and analysis