How we measure Core Web Vitals ourselves with Real User Metrics (field data)

A lot of the guidance I’ve seen online about measuring Core Web Vitals with Real User Metrics yourself is .. DON’T! Often this guidance comes from companies trying to sell you their lab data solution.

And I understand that to a degree. It’s a quite a lot of effort. BUT I think the payoff has been well worth the investment of time we’ve put on.

There isn’t a ton of guides online about how to do this so I’m going to detail how we measure Core Web Vitals.

We’ll start with highest level detail that I think is useful.

High level flow for how we measure CWV

In the browser we use JS to send to the dataLayer LCP, CLS and FID events.

GTM (Google Tag Manager) picks these up and sends them to Google Analytics.

In Google Sheets we pull reports from Google Analytics.

In Google DataStudio we create pretty charts to show how we’re doing.

I’ll dive into each of these layers in greater detail in future posts.