Are you taking advantage of holiday opportunities?

Mobile websites are important for all retailers because they’re far more discoverable than apps, which require a download from an app store.

During the holidays, you may be tempted to collect buyer information. Although this is a common practice in social retail, companies should weigh what’s gained in collecting junk data against the potential loss of real prospects by introducing multiple barriers to consideration of your merchandise.

Be sure to utilize an integrated and branded campaign across multiple platforms to reach as many potential customers as possible during the holiday season. In addition, mobile coupons are on the rise and can be a perfect addition to your mobile strategy this holiday season.

In a recent infographic, Microsoft Tag reported that 20% of smartphone users currently acquire and redeem mobile coupons on a regular basis, with that number expected to grow to 30% by 2013.


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3. Can your customer rely on your mobile site?

Can your customer rely on your mobile site?

We often talk about speed and optimization, but site reliability is just as important to get your customers to repeatedly visit to your mobile site and build brand loyalty. According to the Keynote Mobility Survey, 48% of smartphone users experienced a problem with loading errors and the inability to open the page.

This can be a frustrating experience for mobile users and a good reason to either not come back or visit your competitors mobile site. 

There are a few standard practices to combat the pitfalls of bad performance, and continuous monitoring & testing is the best way to find out when and where your mobile site is failing. Finding issues before your customers do and fixing them quickly is the key to scoring well in terms of website reliability. 

Who does reliability right?

Keynote keeps running measurements of mobile websites from several industries on our KeynoteMobile Performance Indices. On any given week we can see different companies at the top of the list for reliability. But if you follow the weekly indices long enough you'll see that the companies that rank best tend to be the same, suggesting a greater attention to mobile website availability. For the week ending September 9th, here's who were on top

Learn more about:

1. Why Web Load Testing?

2. How to monitoring site

3. Free website monitoring 

10 Tips to Improve User Experience of your site

Hi. My name is Ben, and I plan to visit your website a lot! I’m a casual user that likes to browse the Internet, and like everyone else I know, I hate to wait. Although your website is really cool, and I love your products and services, the Internet is full of interesting places and I’m easily distracted. Oh, and did I mention that I love using my Android smartphone and iPad to play, connect, shop, bank and book travel when I’m not at work? All I want for the holidays is a speedy web and mobile site.
Here are top 10 wishes of a user for you and your site in 2012:

1. Please test your code/site on IE and not just Firefox before you launch it. I am one of the 50% that will continue using IE, even after they start auto-upgrades!
2. Understand the difference between browser execution and network/back-end performance. Most pages have both and you need to know which is which to optimize the page/site. One way is to monitor using a real browser.
3. Understand how your page renders. Focus on reducing upfront (pre-render) delay. It’s the one me and your other users feel the most!
4. Please make sure your third party tags (analytics and others) are below your visual content. (Did I mention rendering delays and blocks are aggravating?)
5. Please combine your external JS and CSS files. I’ve been saying this for years, but very few sites seem to follow this recommendation. Do it, and I’ll see a major improvement in the speed of your site.
6. Understand the quality your Content Delivery Network is providing. Every website is unique, and not all CDN providers are created equal.
7. Don’t worry so much about overall page size but instead focus on individual file/resource sizes. Keep them under 100K and you will limit the impact of slower connections. (Did I mention I love my smartphone?)
8. Don’t just push your desktop website to mobile. You will fail.
9. Test your mobile web site… please!
10. Read Keynote’s Page Construction Guidelines. They’re chocked full of goodies to help you optimize the performance your Web pages and keep visitors like me happily clicking through them, instead of away to your competitor’s site.

What’s on your wish list for better web and mobile performance in 2012? Let us know in comments!


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Measuring site performance over an actual cellular network

As fundamental as it may seem, many site owners don’t alter their approach at all when tackling a mobile site project. Call it “desktop thinking,” or terrestrial, landline, wireline thinking — by any name, it ignores the fundamental reality of the cellular network, which as described above, is inherently slower and riddled with opportunities for performance degradation.

One common desktop tactic that causes issues in mobile is the URL redirect, which instructs the browser to follow a different URL than the one originally requested. There are a number of legitimate reasons to employ this technique — to direct users to your third-party site host; to offer nicknames that provide multiple paths to the main site; or to send users to a site designed specifically for the detected browser.

This is generally a fine practice in the desktop browser world, where redirects usually happen in the blink of an eye and are virtually undetectable to the user. Use the same technique on a mobile site, though, where the big “L” — latency — colors the entire experience, and you end up with users staring and staring at a screen where nothing’s happening.

Surprisingly, even some of the biggest retailers have mobile sites bogged down with URL redirects. The problems become apparent when measuring site performance over an actual cellular network (as opposed to a WiFi connection).

At what point does the user come to the conclusion that the site’s not working, or that it’s not worth the wait? If they’ve just navigated from a well-built mobile site that loaded quickly, there’s a good chance they’re not going to wait eight seconds. How likely is it that they’ll come back again? How likely they’ll tell their friends about the experience? Forget what that means in terms of a lost sale. What does it mean for retailer X’s brand image?

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App, Website, Or Both?

There’s no silver bullet for getting content successfully onto three screens, no switch that can be thrown to make content fast and usable. On smartphones and now tablets, site owners are juggling some combination of Mobile site optimization, Web app and native app; except for those who are doing nothing at all, and effectively writing off what is soon to be online’s biggest audience.

Whatever the approach, any serious mobile strategy requires effort and investment. Native apps need to be developed separately for multiple platforms, at minimum iOS and Android, for both smartphone and tablet — that’s virtually four apps, for starters.

HTML5 Web apps theoretically simplify the development task, in as much as one app should function acceptably on multiple phones. But a big tweak is required for tablets, to take advantage of the format and deliver a native-like experience.

Still another approach is to build separate, mobile-optimized sites for smartphones and tablets, streamlined for fast loading and usability, but not offering the capability of offline viewing.

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Mobile Web: Load Testing and Ongoing Performance Monitoring

Many retailers are making efforts to enable genuine mobile commerce, as opposed to trying to drive traffic from mobile to other channels to complete the transaction. And many are bringing their mobile development efforts in-house, after testing the waters with a third-party solution. Both of these scenarios involve significant risk, making it all the more imperative to perform robust load testing and ongoing performance monitoring.

The big challenge that mobile sites face that’s different than the desktop Web — in addition to the inherent slowness of over-the-air (OTA) signals — is the plethora of devices, operating systems, and carriers. A mobilesite or app has to be vetted in all the major configurations that ultimately control what is displayed in the user’s hands.

Any outage or excessive slowness during peak holiday periods can inflict serious pain on a retailer’s bottom line, whether the retailer is big or small, online-only or hybrid. The only way to make sure a website can handle an extraordinary rush of traffic is to thoroughly test it well in advance and every time changes are made. The most solid test regimens subject a site to traffic that’s multiples of the highest demand projected by the sales and marketing department.

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Retail and an Intro to Mobile Strategy

Mobile Performance management starts with how the pages are built, which often presents a dilemma for retailers. With more and more products approaching commodity status and available at multiple online outlets, site experience becomes a key differentiator.  Retailers want to create a rich experience for visitors with interactivity, dramatic product presentation, perhaps Flash, personalization or other features to set themselves off from the competition.  But a heavy load of features and functionality can drag site performance down, often because of third-party content, and, instead of making visitors sticky, can drive them to leaner, faster competitive sites.

The successful retailers this year will have built mobile into their strategy right from the start—not just as an afterthought to the “main” site, but side-by-side with it.  Shoppers carrying smart phones are using them to check prices, locate products, find deals, look at reviews and, more and more, to make purchases. 

Many retailers were surprised at the amount of mobile traffic they got during the 2009 holiday season.  And there will be millions more smart phones in the hands of shoppers this year.

With regards to mobile website availability, the inherent slowness of cellular networks and devices, mobile sites need to be even leaner and meaner than wired Web sites.  It takes some hard decision-making and analysis of what is essential for users when they are browsing on the go and what it takes to satisfy them, including their need for speed.  Search results can be confined to return four or five results, for example, instead of the 40 or 50 that might be delivered on the wired Web.  And perhaps tracking pixels are needed only on the landing page and cart page, instead of every page on the site.

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Emulation Technologies and Mobile Device Monitoring

Many Websites and services require only a browser to render the page and do not depend on the operating system of the device (for example, SMS). To accurately monitor such services on a broad range of possible combinations in the mobile ecosystem, the mobile monitoring solution needs to be able to emulate the vast array of devices available. A diagnostic capability helps to quickly pinpoint the root causes of failures when something goes wrong. Emulation technologies must contain, along with a wide range of device profiles, an awareness of the multiple factors comprising the end-user experience.

Emulated mobile device monitoring can be performed by content owners in two separate modes:

● Over the air mobile monitoring for true end-user experience

This requires a measurement solution that truly emulates the entire technology behind mobile downloads—including the actions of the operator network that sits between the Web server and the end user’s device.

● Direct over the Internet monitoring to measure only the availability of content without the impact of operator networks

By using this method, you can quickly identify the root cause of failures experienced by end users.

Read More on Mobile Monitoring

Root Cause Analysis with Mobile Monitoring Solutions

The quality of the subscribers’ mobile experience can be ensured by monitoring, benchmarking performance and availability of services. Now, this needs to get down to every step of a transaction.

Mobile monitoring solutions provide real-time information for transactions involving root cause analysis, competitor benchmarking and alerts in case of service downtimes.

Let’s get into a few details regarding ‘Root cause analysis’.  In case you there is a service downtime or a degrading performance issue how do you determine the cause for the problem?   It could be the handset, the carrier network or your content portal.

Mobile monitoring solutions can quickly take you through an intuitive portal if the problem is resulting from a specific transaction; or if your service in every location is down; if the problem is local to one city. You can also drill down further into the components that make up that transaction to find out what exactly caused the issue.

Competitive monitoring and analysis with precise and accurate data

Mobile network quality is often cited as the top reason in selecting a mobile carrier. Consequently vast resources are allocated to monitoring internal operations. But if that’s all that’s being done, you’re only getting half the picture.

Carriers and infrastructure providers looking to get a comprehensive view of the performance and end-user experience take the additional step of benchmarking against their competitors. It requires time, resources, and expertise to analyze data and make actionable decisions. This testing helps you understand industry standards and take the actions needed to stay ahead of the curve. After all, maintaining the highest standard in service performance is of paramount importance when it comes to retaining customer loyalty. An important step is improving the user experience for mobile content, services, and applications begins with mobile monitoring and collecting the right mix of performance data. 

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A Comprehensive Mobile Monitoring Solution

The demand for enhanced mobile applications, content and services is growing. Keynote Systems’ Mobile Application Perspective gives you a powerful test & measurement solution to keep up. As a real-time on-demand solution, the mobile application  testing and monitoring solution allows you to ensure quality before you push out dynamic content and mobile Web services to live environments.

The first step in mobile testing or monitoring content and mobile Web based services is to pick a desired handset model from over 1,600 available in the library. Mobile Application Perspective will then simulate transactions from the handset you choose across a live network. You can use the worldwide carrier profile to direct transactions across your mobile network of choice. Within minutes you can report on transaction details for any transaction, using any handset model, around the world. You can test mobile content by quickly switching handset models, or carrier networks. This way you can cover more devices and networks all from your desktop.

Read more on Mobile Monitoring & Analysis.

Interactively Test and Verify Mobile Content

Mobile is the fastest growing mode of access for online content. The biggest challenge associated with the success of mobile content is assuring your users can quickly access it no matter what device they are using.

When it comes to a mobile device simulator, MITE - a desktop tool by Keynote Systems lets you interactively test and verify mobile content by emulating more than 1,800 devices and 11,000 device profiles.

MITE device profile is a unique combination of device manufacturer, device model, user agent and device orientation. The same device model can have different user agents that represent different operating system/firmware versions.

Unlike other mobile device simulators, MITE device profiles also contain device characteristics such as image types supported, screen size, headers supported, hardware features, and more.

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