Digital experience blind spots hinder growth goals

Ibnsina Pharma is the largest pharmaceutical distribution company in Egypt. The organization distributes a competitive portfolio of pharmaceutical products from over 350 Egyptian and multinational pharmaceutical companies to more than 60,000 customers including pharmacies, hospitals, retail outlets, and wholesalers using a fleet of approximately 1,000 vehicles.

As the pharmaceutical industry increasingly shifts toward digital channels, Ibnsina Pharma is focused on modernizing its digital commerce operations with an emphasis on customer experience, data-driven decision-making, and platform scalability. Ibnsina Pharma wants to improve the digital ordering experience to drive revenue, reduce friction and crash rates in its mobile app (the company’s primary digital sales channel to pharmacies), use data to inform migration and modernization efforts, and build better stakeholder engagement and monetization models.

As Ibnsina Pharma advanced its digital growth goals, its digital leadership team recognized the need to evolve from primarily backend-focused monitoring toward a more holistic view of the user journey. Although Datadog had already been in use for infrastructure and AWS monitoring, expanding into frontend and behavioral analytics would enable Ibnsina Pharma to achieve real, measurable success.

While Ibnsina Pharma maintained several monitoring platforms, its fragmented landscape limited the ability to correlate user experience with technical performance. The company sought to implement authentic, actionable measures of customer engagement. Ibnsina Pharma’s management needed real-time insights to guarantee the app’s components worked cohesively and reliably.

In early 2024, Ibnsina Pharma’s digital leadership team began re-evaluating how to measure and optimize user experience, turning a conversation with their Datadog account executive into a transformation of how Ibnsina Pharma measures, prioritizes, and modernizes the business.

Comprehensive digital experience monitoring replaces fragmented tooling

After testing various standalone frontend monitoring tools, Ibnsina Pharma chose to expand its existing Datadog implementation to address its digital experience challenges. “Datadog was the most convenient product for us in terms of the usability for our needs, and it specifically addressed the issues we had,” says Muhammad Abdulhamied, business intelligence leader at Ibnsina Pharma.

The team liked the fact that they’d have an opportunity to create a one-stop shop for all their monitoring needs. Datadog’s responsive account management team also played a role in the decision. “The account management team put in a great deal of effort to facilitate all of our issues and to address all of our questions promptly,” says Abdulhamied. “This is why we chose Datadog.”

“The account management team put in a great deal of effort to facilitate all of our issues and to address all of our questions promptly. This is why we chose Datadog.”

Ibnsina Pharma implemented Datadog RUM and Product Analytics for comprehensive frontend performance monitoring. The initial proof of concept immediately delivered insights into the organization’s online ordering cycle. Teams could see how many clicks customers needed to complete purchases from home screen to checkout, along with average duration metrics. “Datadog has helped Ibnsina Pharma turn customer data into truly insightful insights, empowering us to understand needs more clearly and improve the customer experience,” says Mahmoud Abdel Gawad, Co-CEO, Ibnsina Pharma.

Today, Ibnsina Pharma uses Datadog for performance monitoring to track things like crash diagnostics and backend latency, as well as for behavioral analytics to understand things like session flows, feature adoption, and add-to-cart behavior patterns. This visibility enables journey optimization by identifying where drop-offs occur. For example, when the team recently heard from customers that they were having issues with one aspect of the app, they had the data they needed to identify the issue. Behavioral funnels revealed a major drop-off between browsing and add-to-cart, leading to a UX redesign that improved conversion.

Datadog also assisted Ibnsina Pharma with its migration planning by helping prioritize modules for migration based on actual usage data. “Datadog gave us an edge in our migration because we were able to plan based on real input,” says Abdel Gawad. “Now, we’re focused on putting only what is needed in the app.”

“Datadog gave us an edge in our migration because we were able to plan based on real input, now, we're focused on putting only what is needed in the app.”

A unified platform for insight, action, and impact

Today, Ibnsina Pharma has unified, end-to-end visibility across frontend, backend, and behavioral analytics in one platform—enabling both technical and business teams to act on data with confidence. This visibility fuels faster iterations, smarter feature prioritization, and measurable improvements in app performance and digital sales.

Different teams are using the platform in different ways. Developers monitor mobile app performance, crash rates, and availability to ensure reliability at scale. Product managers analyze user paths, event funnels, and behavioral cohorts to identify friction, measure adoption, and guide roadmap priorities. Meanwhile, the business intelligence team tracks purchasing behavior, including basket size, order value, and engagement patterns, to inform growth and monetization strategies. “Datadog allows us to correlate performance issues with usage metrics in a single platform,” says Abdulhamied. “One platform lets us monitor everything from crash diagnostics to feature adoption and business outcomes.”

“Datadog allows us to correlate performance issues with usage metrics in a single platform. One platform lets us monitor everything from crash diagnostics to feature adoption and business outcomes.”

The results have been significant. By segmenting champion users from those who drop off, the team launched targeted onboarding and engagement campaigns. Product and mobile teams redesigned the onboarding experience and simplified checkout flows based on funnel abandonment patterns, leading to a drop in crash frequency. Add-to-cart rates improved after they identified and resolved key friction points in the user journey. Today, behavioral data directly informs their service decomposition strategy, helping accelerate their migration roadmap with confidence.

Looking ahead, Ibnsina Pharma aims to provide its suppliers with data-driven insights into how their promotions are performing—helping quantify impact and understand customer responses in real time. “Datadog is helping us unlock potential through insightful data to extend value to customers and suppliers,” adds Abdel Gawad.

“Datadog is helping us unlock potential through insightful data to extend value to customers and suppliers.”