customer story

Dotdash

Improving Digital Experience for Millions of Monthly Users

Reduction in MTTR using RUM

Digital publisher Dotdash helps approximately 100 million users each month find answers, solve problems, and get inspired. Dotdash is among the largest and fastest growing publishers online, and its collection of 14 media brands in health, finance, and lifestyle have won more than 80 awards in the last year alone. Dotdash brands include Verywell, Investopedia, The Spruce, Byrdie, and Simply Recipes, among others. Dotdash is an operating business of IAC.

Dotdash wanted to make performance enhancements to their sites. Rather than build a solution themselves, they looked to Catchpoint to provide the observability capabilities they needed. They use a combination of active observability and Real User Measurement (RUM) to:

Quickly discover and solve issues.
Vastly reduce MTTR.
Provide performance metrics.
Refine data collected and transform it into useful insights for improving user experience.

Employees:

200-1,000 employees

Revenue:

$214.3 Million

Headquarters:

New York, NY

Industry:

Media and Entertainment

Our mean time to resolution has dropped considerably since we've deployed all of Catchpoint's products. Particularly, we've found that our mean time to resolution dropped after we deployed Real User Monitoring. RUM has given us the ability to find root cause almost immediately.

VP Front End Technology

Problem

As one of the biggest digital publishers on the Internet, Dotdash specializes in the kind of intent-driven pages that tend to easily pop up in a search. Online readers have a short attention span, so issues such a slow-loading websites can make the difference between a reader who sticks around and one who heads elsewhere. That makes web performance a top priority at the company.

Dotdash looked to Catchpoint's digital experience observability solution to enable them to improve the situation.

Solution

Dotdash uses Catchpoint’s Enterprise, active observability, and RUM to monitor digital experience.

“We were some of the first adopters of the [RUM] beta program, and we're really excited to see how it's grown since it first came out,” says Ben Cochran, vice president of front-end technology at Dotdash. "The combination not only gives the company complete observability, but it also saves the team from the headache of building a custom tool.

“We realized that RUM was going to be one of the most important things to provide us with the visibility we needed to make the performance enhancements that we wanted to make,” says Matthew Landolf, director of operations at Dotdash.

“After talking to Catchpoint and going through their RUM solution, we saw that the user interface was pretty much exactly what it is that we had hoped to build ourselves.”

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Results

Catchpoint technology has been instrumental in very quickly finding the root cause of problems.

“Our meantime to resolution (MTTR) has dropped considerably since we've deployed all of the Catchpoint products,” Landolf says. “We’ve found that our mean time to resolution dropped after we deployed Real User Monitoring. RUM has given us the ability to find root cause almost immediately."

The level of detail helps the company quickly identify anomalies that previously had taken hours of parsing through logs to define root cause, notes Landolf. “Now, it's just a few button clicks away in the RUM console.”

Even better, the data is easily ported to other internal systems. “One of the biggest things that attracted us to the RUM solution is the ability to make a lot of these stats available for internal ingestion by putting it into our internal dashboards,” Cochran says.

Cochran also points to the detailed information they pull from Catchpoint’s active observability tool as a big plus in determining root cause.

“Things show up through synthetic/active observability very, very quickly,” he says. “The waterfalls and the specificity that are inside the synthetic traffic let us dive very, very deep and find out exactly what was happening, when, and what did it last from. And to be able to cut it by all the same metrics across both tools is incredibly helpful.”

Finally, the two leaders point to Catchpoint’s deep expertise and ability to create industry-specific performance metrics as another value add.

“It’s had a positive cascading effect on user engagement user experience that we're incredibly proud of,” Landolf says. “It's true that collecting the data is the easy part. Refining it and consuming it, that's the part that requires a lot of thought, and that's worth every penny that we get from Catchpoint.”