ROInternet

Measure Page Load Time with Site Speed Analytics Report

I’ve been telling people for some time that load speed is important. Google’s search algorithm takes it into account. And now Google Analytics will track it. Check it out at the link above. For a little more perspective, here’s what ReadWriteWeb had to say.

A moment of decision is about to arrive for clothing retailers. Should they take the lead in embracing a new technology, or should they wait and risk being left behind? The virtual fitting room is a simulation of trying on clothes — similar to a video game version of a dressing room, but with a possible purchase of real clothing at the end. Like the mobile phone and the interactive kiosk, this high-tech Internet marketing strategy has the potential to transform the retail experience, with particular relevance for apparel and fashion.

As it happens, the virtual fitting room is coming online just when the conventional apparel retail industry is in crisis, in part because of the shift of consumers to online sales. Industry experts estimate that one in four existing clothing shops, in both Europe and the United States, will shut its doors by 2018 — and this forecast could be modest. Forrester Research Inc. predicts that online clothing sales will grow by double digits over the next 10 years, and the gain will inevitably come at a cost to bricks-and-mortar sales.

How can conventional clothing shops compete against a global electronic space? Until now, the answer has been through high-touch physical immediacy. No matter how appealing the clothing itself may be, images on a screen are inherently limited. Face-to-face retail has the advantage of tactile experience and a physical relationship between products and consumers. Most people still prefer to try on clothing before they buy it; indeed, they visit stores precisely for that reason. But high-tech simulations are starting to mimic the emotional experience of bricks-and-mortar shopping, and offer many of the same benefits. In fact, the increasingly personal nature of online shopping is going to create a new challenge for retailers — and a new opportunity.

Several virtual fitting room systems are emerging today, linked with retailers such as Macy’s Inc. and the J.C. Penney Corporation. They use a variety of components, including miniature cameras, apps, and Facebook logins. One of the most fully developed such systems is Fits.me, a clothes-fitting simulation developed by Estonian entrepreneur Heikki Haldre and adopted by the European apparel retail chains Otto and Hawes & Curtis, among others. (Disclosure: I have worked as a business development consultant with Haldre’s company.)

Fits.me’s approach is built on a data bank of human body metrics that an individual enters into an online system. These are used to create a representation of that person’s physical form, or as Women’s Wear Daily called it, a “robotic mannequin.” The tool can be used either at a bricks-and-mortar retail store, to select a garment off the rack without having to try it on physically, or through an online vendor to virtually simulate the fitting room experience. As a customer, you see a simulated mannequin onscreen with a shape resembling your body. The system shows how each garment fits you, how it drapes, and how its contours will appear when you wear it. If buttons are popping with size Small, you can shift to Medium or Large by using a slider. If you purchase the item online, you can feel confident that it will match your body’s actual dimensions when it arrives.

Apparel is not the only retail category that will be affected by this type of Internet marketing strategy. Two other simulation systems already in existence are FittingBox, used either on a remote computer or in a store for trying on eyeglasses and sunglasses, and the EZface Virtual Mirror, a cosmetics kiosk that allows people to try on makeup electronically. These systems give shoppers a sense of physical relationship between the product and their face. Individuals can experiment with a variety of options in video simulation, with their own face captured by camera. (cont’d. at the link)

Just another sign of things to come.

FROM SEL: Google Analytics Unveils A New User Experience

Mar 17, 2011 at 1:19pm ET by Daniel Waisberg

Google has just announced a new version of Google Analytics, introducing a completely new user experience. The product got a significant face lift and it now looks more enterprise-like.

The last time Google Analytics released such a major version was 1.5 years ago; we covered the release in-depth on this post, but basically the release included the intelligence engine, custom variables, expanded goals, expanded mobile reporting and others.

Below, I share a few screenshots of the new face of Google Analytics (still in closed beta) and explain how they will change product usage. The new version of Google Analytics will gradually rollout to users in phases according to Google.

Main Navigation

It is interesting to see that Google Analytics has adopted the look and feel of the new Google navigation bar released back in February. As we can see below, the new navigation bar prioritizes the following:

1. Account Home: page where we can find all the accounts to which we have access to.
2. Dashboards: page where we can find all dashboards from a specific account.
3. My Site: the place where all reports live, which is now divided between reports and intelligence.
4. Custom Reports: page where we can manage and create custom reports.
5. Account Manager: links to all accounts we have access to.
6. Settings: page with all the accounts in which we can change the settings (i.e., those we are granted with administrator access)

 

Account Home

The Account Home got a face lift in v4 (see link above), turning it into some kind of dashboard. However, it looks like Google has abandoned this idea and now we will not be able to see metrics on this page, as is currently the case.

The good news is that instead of the metrics, we now have links that can be used to jump to specific reports on a chosen profile. The icons link to the main reporting tabs: visitors, traffic sources, content, and conversions.

 

Multiple & Improved Dashboards

This is probably one of the biggest hits of the release: the capability to create multiple dashboards, each containing any set of graphs. This is a much wanted feature, especially for large organizations, where employees have very different needs from the tool. Now dashboards can be set by hierarchy, department, interest or any other rule.

In addition, as we can see in the screenshot below, the tool has also adopted Google’s naming convention, now all boxes are called widgets. And the widgets are significantly more customizable than in the past. Now it is possible to define which metric you want to see as well as which visualization you prefer.

The only strange change when it comes to the dashboard functionality is that they can no longer be found on the header of each report. Traditionally, there has always been a button in all reports that enabled adding the report to the dashboard; this was a good shortcut to adding interesting views directly to the dashboard, and now this process will be more difficult.

 

Report Nomenclature

Besides changing the UI of the product, we can also see that the names of reports have changed. For long time users, the names will sound a bit strange, but they do seem to be more accurate and intuitive. Here are a few examples:

• Network properties & browser capabilities now sit under one tab called Technology.
• Top Content is now Pages
• Goals are now Conversions
• Visit Duration and Page depth are now Engagement

User Interface Improvements

In the screenshot below we can see some of the improvements on the UI of the new Google Analytics version.

 

Closing Thoughts

As we have seen above, this release is very significant and I believe it is great news for users and the industry in general; once again, Google has raised the bar, especially when it comes to usability and data visualization.

However, I still believe there are some very important issues that should be addressed by Google in the near future. As I wrote on my Google Analytics Wishlist, I think the most critical improvements needed are:

• Import API for Marketing Campaign Data: the possibility to import into Google Analytics different campaign cost data from places like Bing, Facebook, Yahoo and others.
• Adsense Clicks as Ecommerce Transactions: the possibility to track adsense clicks as goals but using the amount received per click as ecommerce transactions
• Website Optimizer / Webmaster Tools integrations: being able to use one platform for online marketing activity (see my thoughts on Analytics and Webmaster tools integration)

Did you like the new look and feel? What would you like to see changed on Google Analytics?

 

Google keeps rolling out the changes.

Gawker Media’s radical redesign of all its sites has left a lot of readers unhappy, and they’re apparently leaving in droves. TechCrunch reports that a couple of the sites have suffered major traffic hits, with Gizmodo and Gawker.com losing up to half of their accustomed page views.

The comments from upset readers point to issues with the sites’ new design and architecture, but my hunch is that people will often complain about a website’s design, when what they’re really reacting to is speed and usability. So I ran Webpagetests on Gawker’s three biggest sites, then compared them to archived tests from November 2010.* (Here’s where I thank Pat Meenan profusely for keeping such a great public archive of old tests. It’s really useful to have them around for benchmarking purposes.)

Time to start render: Sites are up to 3X slower

Megablogs typically have abysmal page load times because of ads and third-party content, so let’s focus on start render time, aka the amount of time before usable content appears on the page.

Website	Before (November 2010)	After (February 2011)
Gawker	2.990 s	5.569 s
Gizmodo	2.067 s	4.142 s
Lifehacker	2.006 s	6.572 s

These sites are two to three times slower now than they were before the redesign. Gizmodo and Gawker have suffered a 50% loss in page views. These numbers roughly correlate to research that finds that:

• A 1-second delay in page load time equals, on average, 11% fewer page views. (source)
• Visitors in the top ten percentile of site speed view 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom ten percentile. (source)

If you want a site to feel like an app, it has to be as fast as an app.

Possibly as a way of meeting the opportunities presented by the iPad and similar devices, Gawker seems to want their new websites to perform like apps. This is a bold and cool idea. But if you want a site to feel like an app, it has to be as fast as an app. Users are more likely to assimilate a new interface if it is responsive. New interface + sluggish response times = angry users.

*All tests conducted on IE8/DSL via the server in Dulles,

via webperformancetoday.com

Important stats:
* A 1-second delay in page load time equals, on average, 11% fewer page views.
* Visitors in the top ten percentile of site speed view 50% more pages than visitors in the bottom ten percentile.

Retailers don???t need to overhaul their sites to get significant results???small tweaks can also bolster sales, Reid Greenberg, director of e-commerce and direct channels at online retailer Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, said today at the Internet Retailer Web Design & Usability Conference 2011 in Orlando.

For instance, when Green Mountain Coffee Roasters added a VeriSign security seal to its checkout pages in the fourth quarter of 2009, the retailer???s conversion rates increased 4%.

???When a visitor comes to our site, we want to make them feel safe,??? he said during a session entitled, ???10 simple things you can do next week to boost your conversion rates.??? ???The seal is a great way to take fear away and tell consumers you can trust us.???

Retailers have to pay heed to the ways that consumers arrive at a site???with more consumers navigating to product pages not from a home page but from search results or ads, data show that consumers are visiting 7.5% fewer pages while on a merchant???s site, he said. To cope with that shift, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters added a pop-up window with product details and an Add to Cart button that appears when a consumer mouses over a product on a category page. The move increased the site???s conversion rate 4% and boosted the number of items added to consumer???s carts 2%.

Testing how consumers use a site is essential to understanding what changes need to be made, said Lynn Stetson, senior director of e-commerce marketing and site merchandising at OnlineShoes.com, during the same session. However, testing doesn???t require substantial resources. Sites like UserTesting.com, which charges $39 per tester for an hour session, can allow a retailer to quickly and inexpensively gauge the potential ramifications of a site tweak. Tests with just five to seven testers will reveal 80-90% of the usability problems on a site, Stetson added.

Those tests can also help retailers design a clearer visual hierarchy on their sites so that important information, such as free shipping offers and generous exchange policies are clearly visible, she said.

For instance, the retailer has long had its value propositions???free shipping, free returns and a 365-day return policy on its product pages. But when consumers visited the pages, they didn???t notice them. By moving the value proposition next to the Add to Cart button it posted a 20% increase in consumers??? clicking to Add to Cart.

However, just because that tweak worked for OnlineShoes.com doesn???t mean it will work on another retailer???s site, she said.

???Don???t take what experts say as gospel or law,??? she said. ???Observe your own site, experiment and test often so you can learn what works best.???

Online Sales: Growth: See More

Your site can always be better. Now it’s just figuring out how to make it better.

More reasons to improve your online presence.