subject: Performance Pays Or Not [print this page] Slow web page loads make for a very bad user experience that can cause visitors to abandon sites. Recent studies suggest that visitors expect a page to load in just two seconds. So ad delivery that slows page performance down, or videos that take forever to stream, have a real financial impact. The site owner potentially loses revenue because they are delivering less traffic to the advertiser. The ad networks take a hit because it lowers the number of eyeballs they are delivering as well. And the advertisers themselves are not getting the exposure they are counting on to market their products or services.
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 isnt, they can explore alternate channels for their advertising.
Best Practices for Web Page Component Testing
The only accurate way to gauge page performance for end users is with live testing, in the field, using real browsers located across all the geography being served. Keynotes testing network includes some 3,000 typical computers running Internet Explorer in 80 countries around the world. Tests can be constructed to simply measure home page load times, or to measure a specified task sequence. And with virtual page testing, individual page components ad feeds or Flash movies, for example can be individually benchmarked.
With the data from this kind of testing, White says, IT and site managers can find out, where are my slowdowns? Are my slowdowns regional? Is it East Coast versus West Coast? Is it third-party feeds that are hanging my pages up? Or is it the ISP in a particular region?
At the end of the day, you have to test in Johannesburg to know how your website is performing in Johannesburg. Theres nothing that beats the real thing. And thats what our testing products do. We go to great lengths to make it as real-life as possible.
