Delivering complex functionality in a manner that satisfies high user expectations requires a tremendous infrastructure, which in itself exponentially multiplies the opportunity for slow performance or outright failures. To deliver a customized “my” page on a site such as Yahoo! or Google or one of the news portals, for example, may require hundreds of servers. And running a search-and-transaction site such as eBay takes a huge amount of processing horsepower.

Whether the objective is to reduce abandonment rates, to increase self service and reduce call center loads (and costs), to increase average sales or repeat purchases, performance monitoring is critical to acquiring the data needed to formulate sound Web strategies and tactics. Web performance is the common denominator underneath every Web site metric and is fundamental to achieving any Web site goal.

Things can and do go wrong at any step of the way — in the site’s own internal network, over the Internet backbone, across the last mile of the local ISP, or on the user’s desktop. Site operators employ a number of strategies to monitor this complex path and pinpoint the many problems that inevitably come up.

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It’s all those things because, so far, the Internet has been a level playing field. All content is treated equally, whether it comes from two guys in their garage or the world’s largest corporation. It all gets to users through the wires and fiber at the same speed, subject to the same bandwidth limitations or availability. It all has an equal chance to arrive on a user’s screen. So the upstarts in the garage have the same opportunity to reach an audience as the big corporation. So far.

Net neutrality defined

This idea of the Internet as level playing field – that all data is treated the same regardless of source, destination or content – is called net neutrality. Content can’t be blocked, slowed down, sped up, or interfered with in any way. It’s all equal. For many netizens and content providers large and small, net neutrality is a sacred principle, often called the First Amendment of the Internet. For the owners of the pipes, though – the cable companies and telco Internet Service Providers – and some of the largest content and tech companies, there’s money to be made, advantage to be had, and new value and choices to be delivered to consumers if the Net were not quite so neutral.

Businesses can’t afford to put their heads in the sand and hope net neutrality works out in their favor. Even if net neutrality becomes a formal regulation, you’ll still be a more competitive business if you optimize your site for speed and performance.

A sound strategy for optimizing performance today and in the future includes following best practices in page construction – minding script and object placement, reducing external calls, keeping assets small – and following a robust and consistent performance monitoring program in the field at the end-user level, so performance issues and hiccups can be quickly identified and corrected. This strategy is doubly important on the mobile side, where networks are less consistent and speeds inherently slower.

Source: http://keynote.com/benchmark/SaaS/article_net_neutrality.shtml

With websites, apps, basically anything in the online world, things can and will go wrong. There could be overload issues (because your app is so popular!), server issues somewhere in your network, unexpected usage patterns. Any number of things can dull the sparkle of your shiny new app today, tomorrow or six months from now. Constant vigilance is the key to happy users and a successful app.

That solution is monitoring. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the same best practices for testing also apply to monitoring performance and availability, most notably, using real devices in real-life scenarios. How and what you monitor, though, is somewhat different from what you tested in the development phase.

Monitoring offers a similar public/private cloud choice as described above for testing. Keynote, for example, has a well-established infrastructure with a broad array of devices on different carriers in multiple locations around the world. An app owner can use this network for ongoing scheduled monitoring. Or, if security is a concern or if volume justifies it, Keynote will build a private cloud network with the devices and in the markets that matter most to the app owner. And with a private cloud, you have the luxury of doing more troubleshooting than you could do in a shared public environment, because you own all of the time on the devices. You can pause the application and monitoring script and interact with the app to see exactly what the end user sees and find out exactly what’s causing a problem.

Public or private, the key to an effective monitoring program is to find out quickly about problems before they become crises.

Read More @ http://keynote.com/benchmark/mobile_wireless/article_mobile_app_performance.shtml

Scores of companies are in the online data business. Some collect data from individuals’ Web browsers and offline sources like auto registration and real estate records. Others aggregate and analyze the data – sometimes down to semantic analysis of what a user writes in comments or social media updates. Still others package it and offer it for auction on online exchanges to still other companies that place online ads, or to websites themselves, who use it to tailor content, offers, and even pricing based on the profile of the person sitting on the other side of the browser.

The moment a consumer puts an item in a shopping cart, makes a bid on an auction site, or takes any number of innocuous actions, that information is put up for sale – virtually instantly – often for just fractions of a penny. (It adds up, quickly, though; targeted advertising commands a 100+ percent premium over non-targeted ads.

Read More at http://keynote.com/benchmark/SaaS/article_browser_privacy.shtml

The place to start is with benchmarks to establish online performance goals for all your online sites that can then be monitored, measured and improved over time. The needs of broadband and mobile users are quite different, so you should be benchmarking both types. Broadband sites include far more graphics and audio-hungry features, because there is speed to spare to deliver them. Mobile sites are usually pared down to get out just the basic information to customers, while cutting out the flashy extras due to mobile bandwidth and screen size limitations.

In addition, your monitoring should emulate the kinds of devices and Internet access services your customers are using so you can get real-time data on the performance they are experiencing first-hand. For example, if iPhones and Android devices via the AT&T and Verizon Wireless are the mobile devices and services of choice for your customers, those are the key things you should be monitoring to be sure your sites are serving them well.

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A 2010 study by Keynote for Adobe Systems of 1,200 U.S. consumers found roughly equal satisfaction with app and browser experiences, and that users spend about an equal amount of time with each. Two-thirds expressed a preference for browsers when accessing media and entertainment and consumer products/shopping, though again, satisfaction in these categories was neck-and-neck for both websites and apps. Categories where users in the study showed a clear preference for apps were games, social media, maps and music.

Unfortunately, if you are looking to consumers to help solve the app-or-website dilemma, they’re not going to be much help. Some demographic trends are fairly clear, but overall, consumer preference is not overwhelmingly in one camp or the other. Use cases drive many preferences. The same goes for developers and marketers.

Read about Mobile monitoring and  Mobile device application testing with Keynote.

A 2010 study by Keynote for Adobe Systems of 1,200 U.S. consumers found roughly equal satisfaction with app and browser experiences, and that users spend about an equal amount of time with each. Two-thirds expressed a preference for browsers when accessing media and entertainment and consumer products/shopping, though again, satisfaction in these categories was neck-and-neck for both websites and apps. Categories where users in the study showed a clear preference for apps were games, social media, maps and music.

Read More at The Mobile Dilemma

All three parties then — site owner, ad network and advertiser — have a stake in understanding where the performance issues lie. With accurate performance data in hand, site owners can demand that ad networks perform to their minimum standards, or they can switch their sites to competitive networks (after making sure, that is, that their own page construction is optimized for best performance). Ad networks, in turn, can use the data to improve their delivery or to demonstrate to clients that they are delivering as promised. And advertisers can know if their message is getting out, and if it isn’t, they can explore alternate channels for their advertising.

Source: http://keynote.com/benchmark/SaaS/index.shtml

This new “Everywhere Web” is a place where customer expectations are high, and if you want to prosper, you certainly want to ensure that your web and mobile quality always deliver for all of your customers, with no excuses. Don’t disappoint them with an online experience that is slow or that doesn’t serve them. If your sites don’t sell to them when they want to buy from you, those customers may not come back.

To win them over and drive sales, your company needs to stay on top of all the new devices that your customers are using to find you online. That means ensuring that your site performance is ready to meet the needs of all of that device diversity. Making it even more complex are new electronic devices such as tablet PCs and iPads that blur the lines between traditional desktop computing and the mobile world.

It may seem like a lot to worry about, but by following a performance monitoring strategy that keeps up with new devices and Web services accessed by these devices, you can turn this challenge into a competitive strength for your business.

The place to start is with benchmarks to establish online performance goals for all your online sites that can then be monitored, measured and improved over time. The needs of broadband and mobile users are quite different, so you should be benchmarking both types. Broadband sites include far more graphics and audio-hungry features, because there is speed to spare to deliver them. Mobile sites are usually pared down to get out just the basic information to customers, while cutting out the flashy extras due to mobile bandwidth and screen size limitations.

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

But that all seems like such a long time ago. While the U.S., at 60 percent broadband penetration, ranks 20th (!) globally (far behind South Korea’s 95 percent), a solid majority of U.S. users now have fast connections.^x They’re paying for speed, and they expect sites to be fast. Add in rich functionality, video, Flash, etc., and you’re looking at an experience made or broken by site performance — performance that can no longer be effectively measured from the inside out.

Believe it or not, some major U.S. retailers still do not have an organized regimen for external testing of their sites, or for determining if they can handle a heavy surge in holiday traffic.

In the broadest sense, testing falls into two categories: ongoing evaluation and tweaking to optimize daily performance, and peak load testing to determine overall site capacity and potential breakpoints.

In either case, the only way to quantify user experience is to measure what users are actually experiencing. Unless you’re the local bike shop serving only your immediate area, the testing needs to be done across a wide geography and multiple backbones. And it needs to use an actual Web browser, and go through the same type of page view sequences and transactions as a typical user would. There’s simply no other way to get a true perspective on what users are really experiencing.

Source: http://keynote.com/benchmark/online_retail/christmas_article.shtml

The ultimate purpose of website performance monitoring is to monitor and keep up the robustness of the entire site infrastructure – performance and availability.

Many of these issues are browser-agnostic – if the server has an outage, it’s out for all browsers – but some do involve specific browsers. Microsoft recommends developers use a strategy of detecting for specific features rather than for different browsers. Whichever strategy is used, the most critical step in the multiple-browser development process is detailed, comprehensive pre-release quality assurance testing.  A very thorough solution includes end-user monitoring using live installations of the two leading browsers, IE and Firefox. Regular scheduled testing with an alternate browser needs to be supplemented with continuous monitoring with one of the major browsers.