| the industry analysis group of Keynote Systems, the global leader in solutions for continuously improving the Internet and mobile experience, today announced the first ever smartphone mobile commerce index. The Keynote Mobile Commerce Index is a weekly performance ranking of leading and up-and-coming US retail mobile Web sites being accessed using popular wireless device profiles, including the Apple iPhone. Internet Retailer, the leading e-retailing magazine, is featuring the new weekly Index on its site under an exclusive arrangement with Keynote. The new mobile commerce Index is important as it underscores the critical issue of mobile site performance and establishes, for the first time, and in a very public way, performance benchmarks across a representative sampling of large -- and some not-so-large, but growing in popularity -- mobile Web sites. Walmart’s mobile site led the Index for the week of September 13 with a perfect score of 1,000 points, an average load time of 3.18 seconds and an availability of 99.37 percent. |
To compile the weekly index, Keynote gathers data from across the top US mobile carriers by emulating popular smartphone profiles such as the Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid, and BlackBerry Curve. Each week Keynote calculates the average response time (load time) and reliability (success rate) for each of the sites. Response Time is the average time in seconds it took to download the Web site to the mobile phone. Success Rate is the percentage of time the Web site successfully downloaded the complete content to the mobile phone.
“We are very pleased to partner closely with Internet Retailer on our mobile commerce Index as the executives that read the publication are industry leaders and on the cutting edge of wireless and connected retail technology. More than anyone else they are best positioned to put mobile commerce performance issues front and center within their organizations. We look forward to the Index fostering a healthy competitive focus on mobile site performance, which in turn will drive a more positive experience for all end users,” said Ken Harker, mobile technology evangelist at Keynote. “From a technical perspective, we find that the fastest home pages of the sites on the Index are those that have been heavily optimized for the mobile experience, with the fewest elements on the page and the fewest bytes. With mobile pages on the Index taking five to six seconds on average to load, staying focused on performance is critical to users adopting mobile services.”
To learn more about performance indices and industry studies published by Keynote Competitive Research, please visit: http://www.keynote.com/keynote_competitive_research.
Methodology
Keynote’s Mobile Commerce Index is the competitive performance index for leading m-commerce sites as experienced on a variety of popular smartphone profiles. The Keynote Mobile Commerce Index measures the responsiveness and availability of the Web sites on leading smartphones, emulated by Keynote’s commercially available Mobile Application Perspective monitoring service. All measurements are taken at the highest network speed that is available for the network at the location of measurements. Index measurements are taken over the top three wireless operator networks by emulating a popular smartphone. Listed below are the carrier/device profile configurations used for the index:
AT&T – Apple iPhone
Sprint – Blackberry Curve
Verizon – Motorola Droid
Measurements are taken from 4 locations in the US (New York, Dallas, Chicago and San Francisco – Bay Area). The mobile index measurements include single page downloads of the home page of the mobile Web site. Measurements are taken every hour on each wireless operator for each mobile Web site, across all locations. All locations download the same list of mobile Web sites for the mobile index. For every Web site in the mobile index, there are 24 measurements a day times three operators, times four locations. At the end of every week, all the measurements for each mobile Web site are aggregated across all locations and all operators to give a unique value for the week.
Combined Score methodology: The sites are also scored based on their performance in both metrics (response and reliability). A combined score is created (equally weighting their response and reliability). The higher the score, the more high quality the site is technically. The distance between sites (in terms of their response and reliability) is represented by the distance between scores.
