1001, 1002, 1003, 1004….
That didn’t take much time, what could have happened? Actually when it comes to mobile websites, those few seconds can have a major impact on your revenue. Look what happens to mobile users when a minimal delay in response time is introduced. How many users will leave a mobile site with a 200 ms delayed response time? Not many. However, when the delay reaches 500 ms the effect is noticeable. Increase the delay to 1000 ms and the direct correlation is obvious. The higher the delay, the greater the number of users who are going to abandon ship. Does this affect your bottom line? You bet. Even worse, some of those users are never coming back.
Let’s look at Joshua Bixby’s results presented at Velocity Europe this November. Although it makes sense that users are going to desert poorly performing mobile sites and apps, most of his clients were not aware of the true impact on their KPIs. To quantify his hypothesis, he added various delays to HTML page response time to monitor the effect. With 500 ms of delay, page views and conversion rates are negatively impacted. At 1000 ms of delay, cart size is also affected.
Bounce rate, negligible at 200 ms, rises over 8% at 1000 ms. Those users may never return; Bixby pointed out that even after a few months, visitors who experienced long delays returned at lower rates. For iPad users, the correlation is even more obvious – their bounce rate increases significantly when performance degrades. He also examined the effect of delay during various steps in a mobile scenario. Bounce rate almost doubles when delay is about 2 seconds during any of the stages in the scenario.
How directly does this affect your key business metrics? There’s no question that more and more money is now spent using mobile devices. For a typical retailer just a year ago, for every $100 spent online only 50 cents was spent on a mobile. Today $7 out of every $100 spent online comes from a mobile source. With 14 times growth in just one year, the trend is obvious. Anyone selling or providing a service online no longer has a choice about whether to offer mobile access. But while a great app can improve your income, a poorly performing site can negatively impact not just your mobile, but also other online sales and even your company’s image. As users tweet and post comments about pathetic response time, the effects can quickly become viral. Will users say that the website is great but that the mobile app is terrible? No. They may just comment how the site took so long to respond that they checked out the competitor.
Mobile access is also changing. While most users are still accessing the full site, partially because many search engines point to these sites, an increasing number of users are going to the mobile site and mobile app. However, no matter how they access your information, when performance is poor users are not tolerant.
So what can you do to determine if your mobile performance is unsatisfactory? To obtain a true picture of the performance, Bixby recommends correlating performance and business metrics. The performance data includes real end-user monitoring, including data from site traffic analytics, latency and bandwidth checks. The business component includes data such as who is buying, what and how much they are purchasing, etc.
These decisions need to be taken at a policy level to have meaningful, long-term impacts to your business. Once you commit to a company policy on performance, the next question is typically, “how do I know how my customers experience my site and how do I optimize that experience?” That’s where Shunra comes in. To improve customer experience on the mobile, Shunra’s Application Performance Engineering products deliver insights into application performance that include fast root cause analysis, location based SLA validation, and actionable information for improving and ensuring optimal end user experience. Ideally, you should set these targets early in the development process so that performance objectives are integrated throughout product development.
Shunra’s NetworkCatcher has an extensive library of network profiles based on millions of samples from across the globe that can be used to emulate various network conditions. For customers with atypical networks, NetworkCatcher can measure the performance of your actual network environment. Shunra’s PerformanceSuite is able to emulate almost any network and then provides rich reports and drill-down transaction analysis to help isolate and resolve the root causes of transaction problems in minutes. PerformanceSuite also helps determine whether any modifications to the application, network or infrastructure are required. Here’s an example of some of Shunra’s recommendations for optimization for a specific mobile site:
According to Bixby, even a 1 second delay can result in 16% decrease in customer satisfaction. The data he presented validates the assertion that mobile performance directly correlates to revenue. Shunra products help determine whether any modifications to the application, network or infrastructure are required. By testing early, adjustments can be made to performance well before your app goes live, saving time, effort and poor feedback. Testing and improving mobile performance both encourages customer satisfaction and helps to maintain a healthy bottom line.
Leave a Reply