3PHealth Blog

You Know what they Say about Assumption?!

Tuesday, May 24th, 2011

I’m a marketer and understand all the good reasons for tracking online behavior.  At 5o9, we’re all about the 3Ps – Performance, Privacy and Personalization.  Ahh… personalization, the holy grail of mobile marketing – but, marketers, beware.  Your good intentions may have unintended consequences, as you’ll learn about in this great TedTalk video from Eli Pariser – “What the Internet knows about you.”

Do your visitors, customers and yourselves a favor.  ASK before you track. ASK about interests and preferences.  If your content is valuable to me, I’ll share personal information in exchange for relevant ads and offers.  ASK before you apply filters to search or social interactions.  Don’t assume that your filters are the filters that your visitors want.  Before you interconnect your content with a large search or content provider, understand how they will process and filter your data and your customer requests.

Personalization is good.  When done right, you send less data and it’s more relevant.  Filtering without my permission is just a nice name for business-sponsored propaganda. Eli talks about Filter Bubbles in his TedTalk and new book.  Improper filtering can reinforce existing behaviors, decrease our exposure to new ideas and openness to change.  From a marketing perspective, it can backfire and limit prospective customers’ access to your new products, content or services.  Filtering can also be good – their is a lot of content to sort through on the Web.  Just be upfront about your filters and make them easy to turn on or off, or to change the settings.

The Web has given us the opportunity to have a two-way, real-time conversation with our customers.  Quit trying to shove everything down from the server and use this amazing technology platform, we call the Web, to start talking with your customers.


They say 1/2 a second improvement in page load speed is worth a billion dollars a year…want to go for 2?

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

Bing vs. Google on Sprint’s network in Denver

billion


Google’s Page Speed vs. 3PMobile

Thursday, May 19th, 2011

For today’s test I thought I’d use Google’s new Page Speed service (which supports Mobile) and compare the results to our own 3PMobile Performance Measurement service. To make the test “even” I had Page Speed run a test on http://m.cnn.com (CNN’s mobile site) I then ran the same test on our service using my AT&T phone. Here’s how it baked out.

 

Page Speed score 57 out of 100 (where’s the detail?)

ps

 

3PMobile metrics. Items to note:

  • Cell strength icon, real time GPS and disk cache empty
  • Time for the actual test – it’s slow on AT&T
  • Device and carrier information

3p

 

Now lets take a look at how the browser actually performed. Now it gets much more interesting. You can actually see the elements of the page that are causing the big slow down.

  • The home page and the style sheet account for a huge chunk of time (there’s actually a redirect taking place which is strange because the URL was already set to go to the mobile site
  • There’s a red button which spins the clock
  • And finally what looks like a cookie that takes forever to download (it shouldn’t)
  • Overall these 4 elements account for virtually the entire delay of 30 seconds to load the page

bp


What a difference, Real time Mobile Performance testing vs. something else

Friday, May 13th, 2011

For today’s test I picked the following web site: http://mpulp.mobi/ It’s actually designed for Mobile so it should produce some good results. And it didn’t disappoint!

First here’s the results using our 3Pmobile.com performance web service. Several really important things to note here…

  1. Underneath the URL (first red arrow) you can see some icons. These are as follows:
    1. Cell strength (99 asu) Wi-Fi was disabled, GPS location was found and the cache was empty (that one’s really important otherwise the performance results are skewed)
  2. Secondly (the other red arrow) you can see the exact type of phone I used, the Carrier (Sprint) and even the OS rev (we’ve learned that it does make a difference when it comes to performance)

mpulp

 

To compare our results I went to Blaze.io’s web site and plugged in the same URL and picked an Android phone to test it. Sadly I have no idea what carrier, what the Wi-Fi signal strength is, the OS rev or even where the device is located. However plowing on with the test reveals these results.

blaze

It’s really tough to see but the numbers are as follows:

  • 25 requests
  • 404.6kb
  • 12.05 seconds

So let’s compare the two. Sprint downloads 495k in 9.4 seconds. Blaze’s Android downloads 404k in 12.05 seconds (probably had something in the cache, but then it should have got the page loaded even faster. Interesting.)

Summary…

On my Sprint phone (real device) in Denver Colorado http://mpulp.mobi loads 22% faster than the same test on the same “type” of phone. So whose right? Well even though I’m biased I’m going with the real device on the real carrier network with a known position and a cleared cache. If Blaze can show me why they’re results are more accurate then I’m happy to listen. Until then – they’ve got some catching up to do – literally (it’s faster on the actual device!)


The Mobile Web – What Really Matters

Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Earlier today I listened to a great panel discussion followed by audience Q&A from the folks over at the Mobilism Conference.  Then I started reading an insightful blog posting about what to look for from a Web monitoring service (this one comes from one of our beta testers over at Sereti Consulting).   All this got me thinking about what is really important to to Web developers, performance engineers, product managers and marketers when they are optimizing their sites for mobile.

My conclusions:

Context/The Real User Experience: business people need to know what their customers and users see.  They can’t improve what they cannot measure.  Businesses need more context, particularly about device capabilities.  They no longer want to guess – they need to know.

Convenience: Developers want to test when they want to test.  They don’t want to wait for “the next available slot.”   And they want to use what they already know – Web standards.

Efficiency and Simplicity: Companies want to use the Web and not have to build apps for everything.  On mobile, there is a sense that we have taken a step backwards and lost much of the Web’s value in connectedness, robustness and simplicity.

Customization/Personalization: Each company and each individual likes to look at things in their own unique way.  Being able to evaluate mobile Web performance via custom views or measure against different criteria is important.  Adding this to a single testing and monitoring tool extends the value of the service to multiple enterprise audiences – including, IT, Marketing and Business Analytics/Strategic Development.



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