Learn more about website cross browser testing or test your website yourself with the Gomez Cross Device Compatibility Test.

It’s a 2-minute video: The Gomez Platform: Web Performance Management to Ensure Positive User Experience.

Learn more about Web Performance as a business issue on our Website.

Benchmarking is valuable tool in today’s competitive online marketplace because companies cannot efficiently improve web or mobile application performance without first having an understanding of previous performance levels or performance in comparison to key competitors and industry leaders. Benchmarks help companies fully understand the connection between web and mobile application performance, business results and improved process discipline. There are two types of benchmarks:

Internal Benchmarks provide visibility into performance impacts (positive or negative) of Web or mobile application or website changes, and allows businesses to better understand the risks of change on the ROI of technology related investments.

External Benchmarks (or Competitive Benchmarking) allows businesses to compare their performance against top competitors.

This week, we introduced new Gomez benchmarks including the “rank of ranks”- a single, overall rank across many dimensions. The web site and mobile site performance indices provide companies with the most comprehensive view of their website or mobile performance as it compares to top competitors and industry leaders.

We also launched the first Mobile performance benchmark that measures performance from multiple browsers (Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox) and mobile-specific websites by four different carrier and device combinations (AT&T/iPhone, Sprint/HTC Hero, T-Mobile/HTC Dream and Verizon/Droid).

Do you know how your website performs in comparison to your competitors, across browsers, or on mobile applications? Take one of our Instant Tests  today to find out.

He offers that instead of hardware, what is needed is an application performance management strategy. Not simply buying a tool, but an overall approach to application performance which includes understanding the mission critical applications and their needs, measuring those applications appropriately, understanding business impact of poor performance, being proactive in terms of managing acceptable performance over time, as well as being ready to find and fix issues rapidly should they arise.

Read Bryce’s full post here: Performance Matters

But how did some of leading sports books sites perform under increased visitor levels during the 2010 World Cup?

During the course of the 2010 World Cup, Gomez tracked the online performance of a selection of the leading sports books to see how well their sites performed. Performance and availability were measured from Gomez’s Last-Mile and Backbone peer networks within the UK. Gomez also used its cross browser compatibility tool to check the compatibility of the home page from major browsers and mobile devices.

Read David Flower’s blog post on eGaming Review.

Today, companies with the strongest mobile Web performance are shaping user expectations across all the websites they encounter.  As retailers forge ahead in setting new performance standards, airlines, banks and search companies may find themselves facing more demanding end-users.

The key is to understand performance from the true user perspective; proactively identify those users experiencing a performance issue like a slow-down; and then isolate and resolve the performance-impacting “culprits” in the respective mobile Web application delivery chain, including ISPs, carriers and devices.

To read the full article, go to: Mobile Web is key to in-store shopping experience

Senior editor at Mobile Marketer, Giselle Tsirulnik,  provides her final take in a video recording. You can watch the video here: Web is key to the in-store shopping experience

Read Mobile Commerce Daily’s article, “Mobile Web is key to in-store shopping experience” which also features this video.

This got me thinking about how web application delivery has changed over the past few years, and the management challenges that have been created.  Web applications today are composite with services and  content coming from diverse sources and assembled at the end-user’s browser. Websites are becoming become more complex and business critical— featuring richer applications and reaching audiences across more devices and browser types (think Smartphones, iPads, and Google Chrome).  All of these trends make it more and more challenging to ensure the delivery of quality Web experiences.

As evidenced by the presentations at Velocity, these challenges are likely to expand. Key considerations for today’s web performance include: 

• Performance insight across multiple browsers: today no one browser dominates the market so you  must optimize performance for the browsers that generate the most revenue for your business.
• Global reach: you need real insight into user experience to see your site as visitors do, from every point around the world where your customers are.
• Mobile devices: More and more consumers are accessing websites via “smart phones” and other mobile devices. While a mobile device is very different than a computer, customer expectations remain the same.
• Richer apps and features: websites are a complex mixture of tools, features and composite applications that must execute perfectly to ensure a satisfactory end-user experience. You must have visibility to the site as users see it in order to monitor the application’s performance.
• Third party content and providers: Many of the features visitors expect are run by third-party providers. You need to monitor and measure the performance impact of these third parties on your Website.

Although one thing remains constant – your site’s performance is too impor­tant to ignore.

Data consumption is rising. The revenues associated with smartphone sales and the growth of mobile advertising investments is staggering. While in the early days marketers have approached the mobile opportunity as experimental at best, many now view it as a new customer engagement channel associated with direct revenue targets. 

Mobile commerce represents a significant opportunity for marketers to engage their audience in an optimized fashion, leveraging contextual indicators like real-time location and time available through mobile applications, resulting in better chances of converting an end user to a buyer. Yet, to ensure proliferation of mobile commerce transactions, you need to address the following constituents:

• End users care about ease of use, trust & privacy: It is important to create an easy, reliable and trusted solution for end users.  For example, iTunes APIs for in-app checkout drive proliferation of commerce transactions because end users already have accounts with iTunes, so no need for upfront signup transactions. They trust the Apple brand as the payment processor and the process is easy and reliable
• Marketers need a unified payment processing solution: Fragmentation is bad news for marketers. It means more engineering efforts, more support burden etc. The unification of reliable, easy payment processing solutions will reduce risks and effort on behalf of the marketers and encourage them to promote mobile commerce solutions to their audience through their existing marketing channels
• OEMs, Carriers, Payment Processors and Services providers need to agree on the CRM strategy and the resulting revenue share: This is perhaps the most difficult part and the most critical one. As long as there is no consensus between the technology vendors around the “end user ownership” and the revenue share, it will be hard to form a unified payment processing solution that is reasonable for all parties. That drives fragmentation of services, distrust by the users and eventually low adoption of commerce solutions by marketers

Low trust levels is the primary reason why the number of mobile Web users who actually make purchases online remains relatively low in comparison to the overall number of people accessing the mobile Web.  This comfort factor is driven, to a large extent, by superior experiences that are fast, consistent and reliable, and simple enough for use by the average mobile user.

Like iTunes, there are several success stories where mobile commerce is successful. Mobile wallets are widely used throughout Asia for daily commerce transactions. Careful analysis of those cases shows that it is driven by successful cooperation between all the technology providers to create a reliable, trusted, easy and unified solution.

To ensure proliferation of mobile payment services, carriers, OEMs, payment processors and organizations need to create a platform solution for mobile payment processing. This will simplify the experience for end users and drive trust and adoption.

Secure, convenient and easy-to-use mobile payment solutions are vital to the success of mobile commerce and the key to a significant number of organizations taking the plunge into mobile commerce.

Then: Before the Internet Company’s Didn’t Know Their Customers as Well

Direct marketers are data people. They analyze any piece of data they can get and use it to improve the layouts of their catalogs, the products that they sell, and the sales programs they put together. They mail catalogs to “interested” parties and hope … no expect…those parties will order.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, they were able to analyze who bought from the print catalog and what they bought, but they weren’t able to understand the buying process…how many times did a customer look at the catalog or a product in the catalog before making a purchase? Did she dog-ear pages? Was he buying for himself or for someone else? With the Internet and Web analytics, direct marketers were able to not just understand who bought what, but they started to get insight into how one made purchases.

With this wealth of data and information, one would have thought that the direct marketers would have created a corporate strategy to use the Internet to influence the print and online catalogs. That wasn’t what happened though. In most cases in 1998, 1999, 2000, and even as late as 2008-9, corporations had VPs of online and different VPs of offline. They didn’t work closely, they had different, and often competing goals. The print, brick and mortar, and online channels were completely siloed and, in many cases, seen as competitive.

I remember recommending to one VP of eBusiness that he simply print the URL for the Web site on every page of the print catalog to drive customers to a lower sales channel — the Website. He said there was no way that the VP of the print catalog business would ever allow that for fear that the web channel would cannibalize the print business.

Now: Truly Understanding Customers Benefits Today’s Businesses

Thankfully, times have changed. Retailers are building mobile web apps that drive users to the store or provide more information to facilitate in-store purchases, in addition to enabling purchases from an iPhone. Customers can make a purchase online and pick it up in the store, or one can go old school: Visit the fixed-web, buy from the fixed-web, and receive their product in the mail 5 days later.

Strategic companies who truly understand the value of the web to their business have a fully integrated business model. This makes for good business, but it also increases the complexity and priority associated with Web performance. If a Web site performed poorly in 2006, the primary effect was a decline in online sales (yeah, I know, call center volumes can go up in parallel). But in 2010, a poor Web performance and experience can directly affect the results for the offline business channels, too.

At Gomez, we say, “It’s all one web.” I say, “It’s all one business! Better get it right.”