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

Monitoring the 340 Trillion Trillion Trillion: Keynote and IPv6

The Keynote Systems’ Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge now facing anyone with a web presence. It shows a website's weekly average load time and download success rate (availability) on desktops, smartphones, and tablets. Let's take a look at mobile gaming, but the lessons here apply to any web sites optimizing – or not optimizing – for three screens.

The growth of mobile games is inevitable with the growth of mobile devices that enable them including feature phones, smartphones, tablets and even e-Readers. Adverse to many websites, mobile is a main focus for mobile gaming companies like Rovio.

While their desktop load speed leaves something to be desired, Rovio is the fastest social gaming site on the iPad and second fastest on the iPhone (with a speed of seven seconds). Rovio improved their site by redirecting iPad and iPhone users to a lighter, mobile optimized site. 

Papaya Mobile is another mobile gaming site, loading at a blazing 2.58 seconds on the iPhone, leveraging best practices and simply requiring a login screen as the first step to access the site. The login screen loads very quickly because of its simplicity, a great way to get your gamers on the site efficiently with minimal wait.

While most mobile gaming sites focus on their mobile speed and reliability to retain their loyal customers. Crowdsart has managed to integrate the best of mobile and desktop performance and reliability.

Crowdstar has arguably the best overall performance in the July Startup Shootout for mobile games, with a better than average desktop load speeds and 6.97 seconds to load on the smartphone. What is remarkable about the smartphone loading time is that Crowdstar brings the entire site to iPhone users, rather than offering bits of content to speed mobile interaction. If they optimized their site even further for mobile, they have the ability to achieve even faster speeds. The response time for iPad users is better than average and may end up being tolerable when connected over Wi-Fi instead of the 3G network.

Although Rovio and Papaya charge forward for quick mobile speeds to target their main demographics, leveraging best practices and monitoring slight changes in website development can give many developers the ability to optimize a better overall experience over all three screens.


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A Three-Screen Perspective From The World’s Largest Retailer

Magazines on smartphones: convenient but not quick

What can you do to make sure your site is mobile ready?

Mobile technology is increasingly becoming the avenue for disseminating news and information during emergencies. According to a recent Pew study, 95% of Millennials own a cell phone, but only 57% own a desktop computer. How do you think they stayed connected? Companies whose businesses are impacted by disasters should keep this in mind when developing their sites to ensure that they are also mobile ready.


So what can you do to make sure your site is mobile ready?

• Monitor your site regularly to determine fluctuations in performance. With regular monitoring you can identify key areas where your mobile site isn't holding up in terms of speed and reliability.  You don't know when a natural disaster will strike. If it happens and users aren't sitting at their desk, chances are that they'll be reaching for their smartphone. Under normal conditions it's not uncommon to see increases in mobile traffic outside of traditional working hours.  During an emergency or big news story, that percentage can grow quite a bit.

• Load test your site to make sure it can handle certain amounts of traffic, especially for uncertain conditions. Let's say that your website is well-built, like a brick house (as opposed to straw or sticks), at some level of visitor traffic it will come down. It's important that you know that breaking point so that you can be prepared for all but the unlikeliest of scenarios.  When a Category 5 storm hits, resulting in a flood of hits to your mobile website, don't leave your visitors in the dark because your server can't handle the load.

 These are basic recommendations for any company with a mobile website.  But for a company providing news and information to an increasingly mobile population, they should be standard practice.

Related Articles:

1. Monitoring User Experience of the Cloud
2. Enhance Web Performance with Best practices
3. Website Performance: More Than Just Speed
4. The impact of web load testing on performance

What do AdSense, Friend Connect, and Tribal Fusion have in common?

AdSense, Friend Connect, and Tribal Fusion, all three of these services were demonstrated by Google researchers to impact Website performance by double-digit percentages.

They are not alone, of course, but representative of the kinds of things that can create bloat on a Website and degrade user experience.

Of course 1 person's bloat is another person's manna so the best thing to do is;
1) find out what 3rd party content is featured on your site and,
2) keep watch on how these 3rd party services are performing.


As Web operations teams well know, knowing is half the battle and in no case do you want to be caught flat-footed, without knowledge of what's happening on the Website you are responsible for.


Keynote(The Mobile and Internet Performance Authority) has made the job easy of tracking performance for 3rd party content easier for your Website. It's called Virtual Pages and it works just like the other Web performance monitoring services you've come to rely on from us.


Related Articles: 

• Web Performance and Third Party Content
• Fast, Fun & Touch-Friendly: The New Rules For Tablet Websites
• Ensuring Mobile App Performance

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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• Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience
• fast fun touch friendly new rules
• A need for speed on mobile websites

Test Your Site on IE 9 and Measure User Experience

Few months back, Keynote announced that the Keynote Global Network was being updated with Internet Explorer 9. As a result, our real browser monitoring service, Transaction Perspective™, is now measuring the performance of Web applications and sites using Microsoft’s latest Web browser. This makes Keynote the first on-demand monitoring service built on IE 9, which is pretty cool. But what’s even cooler is the ability that IE 9 gives us to measure a new class of performance metrics we call user experience metrics.
IE is still the big kid on the block when it comes to browser usage. With the demise of IE 6 in the United States, and the rise of Firefox and Chrome, it’s clear that users are quickly leaving “old” browsers for “modern” ones like IE 9. With high performance and broad support for open Web standards, browsers like IE 9 make it easier for companies to create a rich and snappy experience for consumers. In response, 34% of the top Internet sites now use HTML 5, and the use of JavaScript continues to rise. Transaction Perspective built on IE 9 allows customers to get a more precise view of their site performance, especially those leveraging new Web standards.
Our new Live Beta preview of MyKeynote 11 with Transaction Perspective lets you see performance in very important ways Learn More

Speed and Tenacity: the Apple iPad Outage

We’ve heard a lot recently about the importance of speed and performance when it comes to online retail. The New York Times highlighted research from Microsoft claiming that 250 milliseconds—a mere eye blink—could make the difference between a repeat visitor and a lost customer. And a popular infographic touts that Amazon would stand to lose $1.6 billion in sales per year from a 1 second web page delay. Our friends at Walmart.com have also shared some awesome research linking web performance to conversion.

These statistics are welcome news for the web performance community. But sometimes they don’t apply. With Apple, a lot of rules don’t apply.

To Apple’s credit, the Apple store normally runs very quickly—averaging well less than 2 seconds for total User Experience Time and less a second for Time to First Paint. (The Apple Store is a member of the Keynote Retail Performance Index, measured with Keynote Transaction Perspective.)

Your product/service is unique. And your customers are also unique. Keynote web load testing consultants dig into web analytics to model user behavior. They consider familiarity, tenacity, interaction speed and connection speed when developing virtual user profiles. It may be unrealistic for you to understand how different levels of performance impact your various customer types across all these variables. But if you can begin to understand them, you’ll be in a better position for setting ongoing performance goals and SLAs—especially around tolerances for outliers from your averages.

Source: Keynote Systems