subject: Mobile Web The New Mainstream? Performance Pays [print this page] Love it or hate it, the iPhone has dramatically changed the way masses of consumers use the Web. For media companies and online portals like AOL and Google, an online presence is not complete without a robust mobile site and/or application. Delivering an exceptional user experience on a mobile device is fraught with the same challenges as computer-delivered content, with the added complexity of hundreds and hundreds of device profiles, and the bandwidth challenges of cellular signals. And again, the challenge is not only with the site owners hosted content, but with third-party feeds including ads and videos.
Mobile websites and applications face the same performance challenges as computer-delivered sites, and then some. In addition to ad network and video feeds, the vagaries of devices and cellular networks complicate the performance monitoring challenge.
How do you measure what the end-user is actually experiencing?
Can you emulate that experience or do you need to do it from a real iPhone, White asks. With Keynotes Mobile Device Perspective, we have a network of real, actual iPhones around the world. We have real iPhones, connected to computers so we can take a recorded transaction or scenario. We can set up a script that says load the CNN app and click on the first headline, and how long does that take?
We also have a service where we can emulate a phone or 1,600 different phones and do similar types of things. The advantage of our emulated service is that we get more details about the network signal strength, what cell tower is the signal coming through.
Performance Pays Or Not
Slow page loads make for a 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 site 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.
