Can the right mobile optimization trick be a treat for customers?

After a night of trick or treating on Halloween, all children will agree; there's always that one piece of candy in their bag that nobody wants. The treat may have been given with good intention but really ends up being sour grapes in a wrapper instead.

Online retailers have their own sets of tricks of the trade to better acquire and retain mobile customers. But sometimes, those treats can be sour grapes in a wrapper for the end user.

With increasing statistics showing the impatience of mobile customers (65 percent of mobile users prefer a sub-4 second download speed), previous holiday season was a critical test on mobile user patience and retail performance.

Implementing key best practices can help you prepare for the next holidays.


Related Links

1. App, Website, Or Both? 2. Mobile Device Testing

Measuring & Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications

The Internet and the Web continue to evolve to deliver new customer
experiences and increased application utility. The label “Web 2.0,” while
imprecise, signifies the newest and best examples of this evolutionary
process.

Web 2.0

Many organizations are now adopting these Web 2.0 technologies and design
methods to enable the creation of richer and more responsive interactions.

But to be effective, the resulting applications must also be significantly more
complex than traditional Web sites, complicating performance management and
imposing new requirements on performance measurement tools.


Related Links

1. App, Website, Or Both? 2. Web performance with streaming media 3.Web Performance Monitoring – From Traditional to a Richer Media

The Audience is Watching: Website Availability

A large entertainment media site needed to measure availability, performance and quality of their multimedia streams to ensure their customers were receiving a satisfactory experience.

Streaming is pervasive on news, media and entertainment Web sites. To ensure the quality, reliability and availability of streaming media, Keynote offers the industry’s leading monitoring solution.

Keynote Streaming Perspective™  provides the true picture of your audio and video stream delivery from connect time to rebuffer events. It provides the most effective early warning system to help you resolve media stream performance and availability issues in real-time. 

Keynote Application Perspective™  provides cost-effective website availability monitoring, as well as root cause analysis and diagnostics. Both services use Keynote’s global test and measurement network to represent end-user experience from locations around the world. Together, Streaming Perspective and Application Perspective allow you ensure your systems and content are performing at their very best.

Related Links

1. Can your customer rely on your mobile site? 2. Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience 3. Web site monitoring services

Website Monitoring 101 - Part III

Features of a Good Website Monitoring Service 

This is the final part in the 'Website Monitoring 101' series in which we are going to talk about ‘website monitoring features’ to start looking at how you utilize this.

Advanced Website monitoring services are capable of carrying out multistep Website transactions. They also offer several capabilities through a Website monitoring dashboard to set up tasks in Website monitoring accounts. Website monitoring features include,

• Complete monitoring and reporting for uptime and performance using user defined Web transactions
• Real browser-based Website monitoring for the most accurate read on performance
• Robust alerting mechanisms to deliver trouble notifications to multiple points
• Complete monitoring to ensure that there are no faults within pages, including examination of referenced objects, SSL certificates, and page content
• User-friendly transactional monitoring, with the ability to capture each business process
• Geographically dispersed monitoring locations so that Websites and Web applications using different Internet backbones can be accessed
• Root-cause analysis of problems when they occur

For maximum control over your site, Website monitoring must be transparent and the measurements it provides must be accurate. Keynote's efficient Website monitoring tools provide total visibility into the performance and functionality of your Website from an end user's perspective.


Related Links
1. Web site performance
2. Web page monitoring
3. Website monitoring software

Filtering Out Web Performance Monitoring Traffic From Google Analytics

If you're a webmaster, site owner, or digital business manager, picture this scenario. You open your Google Analytics dashboard and you see a big spike in traffic. At first, you're really excited - wow, look at all those site visitors! You run off to tell your boss that she can give you that bonus she promised if you got that online marketing campaign to work. And then... you learn that someone in the Site Ops team added web performance monitors, and so it's all so-called robots - synthetic traffic generated for the purpose of keeping tabs on your site's response time and availability.

You think, no problem, I could filter that out from Google Analytics, and then you learn you can't. It's always going to be there, like, forever. You go crazy, emailing the GA team, posting on forums, and then slowly resign yourself to forever dealing with that spike. It will disappear from your default view, maybe after a month, but that's a long month to wait. And heaven forbid if your execs ask you for a site traffic report for the past year, try explaining why you can't filter out that spike - what, you weren't thinking ahead? What kind of guy did we hire to run our online business, anyway?

Don't let this happen to your career. Plan ahead and learn how to use Google Analytics to filter out all web performance monitors from your site analytics reports. Here's the link: http://blogs.keynote.com/the_watch/2012/08/filtering-out-web-performance-monitoring-traffic-from-google-analytics.html

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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Real tests use real devices

It's not that testing with real devices is the gold standard, though that's one way to look at it. The fact is, there is simply no way to emulate the behavior of a mobile app in the field unless the device is literally in the field. System overhead, memory usage, CPU speed — a host of variables impact app functionality in ways that just can't be reproduced in a lab. To get real test results, you have to deploy real devices.

But creating an internal test program using real devices is a challenge. The devices have to be bought, carrier contracts have to be established, test scripts created, users trained, results compiled and analyzed — for each geographic market. And then the devices and contracts have to be dealt with after the testing is done, or maintained for ongoing monitoring.

This complexity is why so many enterprises use an outside test partner that offers an established infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of devices deployed over a broad geography. The test provider works with the client company to develop the necessary scripts, and then leases time to them on its network to run the tests. This is testing in the "public cloud," which means that many clients utilize the same devices and infrastructure to conduct their tests. It's an ideal solution for most companies — there's no upfront capital expenditure and tests can be quickly executed on demand, on a budget-friendly pay-per-use basis.

Source: http://keynote.com/benchmark/mobile_wireless/article_mobile_app_performance.shtml

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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