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Stephen Condon brings more than 25 years of marketing experience to Limelight Networks from the technology, advertising, and entertainment industries. His primary role as Vice President of Global Marcom is to establish a leadership position for Limelight in the cloud-based services market and to drive lead generation for the business units. His responsibilities include strategic marketing, marketing communications, lead generation activities, and packaging solutions for the media and entertainment and enterprise marketplaces.

Condon commenced his career in advertising working for J. Walter Thompson and Chiat/Day on leading brands such as Kraft Foods and NutraSweet. His advertising career introduced him to the high technology entertainment business when he worked on the hugely successful launch of DIRECTV. He later joined DIRECTV, as Senior Director of Marketing. In 1998 Condon moved from delivering video over satellite to delivering video on the Internet and joined INTERVU as Vice President of Marketing, where he lead strategic marketing efforts and marketing communications up until the Akamai acquisition.

Since then, Condon has held various senior technology marketing positions, including Chief Marketing Officer of Intertainer, Vice President of Marketing for broadband video ASP Entriq, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Verisign and, most recently, Director of Market Development at AT&T. He holds a bachelor's degree in business and has undertaken post-graduate studies in Marketing at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

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The Need for Speed: Satisfying Demand for Immediate Content

Written on
Jan 27, 2012 
Author
Stephen Condon  |
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The Need for Speed: Satisfying Demand for Immediate Content

ADOTAS - Faster page loads equal more page views, and as a result, website marketers face a constant tug of war between content demands and performance requirements. On the one hand, sites need rich, dynamic content to engage users. On the other hand, we know that visitors grow impatient after only two or three seconds of wait time, and that site abandonment rates rapidly escalate with every second of delay. Google has noted that even an extra half second of waiting can create a 20 percent drop in traffic.

In order to improve the website experience, marketers need to take a hard look at the factors that impact site performance. That doesn’t mean throwing out multimedia and interactive content to improve page load speeds, but it does mean evaluating the options for website acceleration. Acceleration services are designed to make sites more responsive, and can significantly improve consumer conversion rates. This includes everything from the number of users who register for more information on your site, to the number of visitors who complete an online purchase.

There are two types of web acceleration to consider. Traditional content delivery networks cache website elements in servers around the world so that popular content is stored closer to end users. This distributed storage approach provides faster object delivery and has proven to increase the speed of overall page load times dramatically. Over time, technologists have perfected caching algorithms so that content is stored and delivered as efficiently as possible. While caching still plays an important role in website performance, there are newer techniques designed to give website publishers a greater degree of control over the experience they are delivering to their users.

Introducing Front-End Optimization

On top of network-based acceleration services, a new generation of technologies is addressing how efficiently a browser delivers content. Front-end optimization, or FEO, combines several techniques to improve web page rendering. As background, when a user requests a web page, the web browser sends sequential requests for each of the elements on that page, and then waits for a response for each one. As websites have grown more complex and more dynamic (content is being generated for each user on the fly based on user action, geolocation, etc.), this serial HHTP process has become a drag on page load times. In particular, once adding in scripts to personalize content or create user interaction, serial delivery only stalls things further by postponing the rendering of even simple objects while scripts are processed in order of their request.

To combat the lag of sequential rendering, FEO does two things. First, it combines instructions on a web page to decrease the number of requests for content that the web page has to make. This includes consolidating requests to process scripts that support active modules like product recommendations or news feeds. Second, FEO prioritizes which content on a page is most important for getting a user engaged quickly with relevant information, so that they can take the action that’s going to get them to where they want to go. FEO delivers high-priority content first in order to decrease a user’s time to action.

Improving Time to Action

Improving time to action means optimizing websites for first-byte delivery rather than last-byte delivery. In other words, it matters more how quickly you can get a user engaged than it does how fast an entire page loads. For example, content above the fold on a web page (i.e. in the area before a user needs to scroll down) is more important than content below the fold. A real-time chat box is likely less critical than initial company information. And a news feed may be less urgent to render than specific product or service details.

By consolidating server requests and prioritizing certain content on a web page, you can drastically improve the user experience and the effectiveness of your site. Allbarstools.com, a CSN Stores site, recently saw a 17 percent increase in page views per visit when it implemented front-end optimization. However, FEO is both a science and an art. Prioritizing content above the fold over content below is an obvious way to accelerate time to action. However, determining what content should be rendered first on an e-commerce site versus a corporate web page is not as simple a decision. Perhaps there’s a priority on rendering ads. Or maybe a personalized message is the most critical element to deliver first. In either case, the most effective web acceleration technologies know how to promote the highest-priority elements for first delivery. This is done through a combination of automated settings, customized configurations, and the ability of the site to learn user behaviors and improve performance over time.

Reaching the Mobile Browser and Finding the End Game

There is one critical element of FEO, and that is the act of optimizing content for mobile devices. Mobile browsers are under the constraints of available screen real estate, hardware processing power and bandwidth connectivity. Front-end optimization takes those constraints into account and tailors the content delivery sequence so that mobile users get the fastest and best experience possible. It’s perhaps the last element of front-end optimization: optimizing on-the-fly for a diverse and mobile landscape of web users.

As the complexity of website delivery continues to grow, web marketers need to take an active role in ensuring site performance, and the quality of the online experience. Web acceleration will continue to take advantage of traditional content caching technologies, but also layering on additional front-end optimization services to decrease time to action and improve marketing results.

Here, in summary, are the key points to remember:

Two Layers of Web Acceleration: The combination of network-based acceleration, or content caching, and front-end optimization.
Front-End Optimization: The ability to render web pages more effectively by consolidating server requests and prioritizing delivery of the most important content.
Time to Action: The time it takes for a user to engage with your site.
Optimizing for Mobile Delivery: The ability to factor in mobile browsing constraints when rendering mobile content.





Reader Comments.

Content delivery and content acceleration are only two aspects of an integrated content performance strategy.
Web site operators need to also consider vendors that provide both measurement and management of the components to form and end to end audience maximization solution. Lastly, and a piece many high profile web site operators are not yet addressing, is meeting their mobile audiences’ expectations in terms of having the most optimized mobile facing content. No one operator can provide a complete integrated content delivery solution. The opportunity is prime for the best solutions providers to ensure both technical and strategic interoperability and fit, making it easy as possible for the customer to work with all component partner services and build their web delivery strategy.

Posted by David Hamburgh | 1:19 pm on January 28, 2012.

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