Marketers use a lot of images on websites. They’re needed to show off products. They’re used for ads and promotions. They form key parts of attractive designs, carefully calculated to turn visitors into customers.
But when images slow web pages down, they have the opposite of the desired effect. They frustrate visitors. They turn people away. They drive potential customers to the competition.
The focus of software testing is changing. It's been moving away from simply checking that an application meets technical requirements and towards ensuring that it delivers better user experiences and business outcomes.
Or at least that's what we'd all like to believe.
The reality is that capabilities can lag behind the desire for change, and not everyone can agree on how best to represent the voice of the customer in the testing process.
Performance impact prediction is a key part of our Customer Experience Insights product suite. It analyzes website performance, showing how load times relate to conversion, bounce rate, session length, and revenue. This data can be then used to predict what will happen to these KPIs by making incremental speed improvements.
Businesses want software that delights end users. Customer experience is the priority. But even as the requirement for ever better experiences grows, actually delivering on that requirement is getting harder.
Any marketing campaign is only as strong as its weakest link.
No matter how effective ads, emails, and landing pages are, they depend on the rest of the conversion funnel for success.
And one often-overlooked factor in conversion rate optimization is speed.
The web performance world is all about delivering better, faster online experiences. And from the outside, it can all look very technical. It’s niche, specialized. It’s technical people tinkering with code.
But it’s important not to lose sight of the ultimate business goals. Most of the time, we’re helping organizations to make more sales. And that makes it something that marketing departments should care about.
So we thought we’d highlight a few things about web performance that we think every marketer should know.
By improving load times to just under a second, COOK saw a seven-percent increase in conversion rates. At Eggplant, we deliver insights that result in better customer experiences and drive better business results — something we call Customer Experience Optimization (CXO). With this in mind, we recently renamed a number of our solutions to better reflect the outcomes they’re designed to help organizations achieve.
If you’re an online retailer, there’s a good chance you’re busy gearing up for the pre-holiday rush. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have been pushing retail sites to the limits of their ability to cope with surges in visitor numbers.
The weather, the tennis, the football — with all the distractions, you’d think those of us on the Real User Monitoring team would be kicking our feet up, right? Not a chance! I'm super excited to tell you about our latest release: a brand-new version of our Performance Trends Report.
