By now, everyone understand the importance of having a mobile-friendly website. More people are using mobile devices to access to Internet each passing day. As a result, these users can account for anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of a site’s total visitors. With that said, making the transition into these sites is challenging. Business owners are designing with general advice that actually hurts their site’s performance. Here are three common design tips you need to avoid.
1. Converting Desktop Websites into a Mobile-Friendly Version As Is
Too many business owners think that all they have to do is convert their regular desktop site into a mobile-friendly one. While this seems like a logical decision, they are forgetting that this doesn’t translate well. You have to adapt to the devices that are being used and focus on serving to the user’s needs rather than trying to maintain a certain standard.
Mobile-based users spend less time and have a lower attention span than desktop users. The devices they are using often have smaller screens and are being used while they are on the go. So when the users are presented with a content heavy and graphic heavy website, they become overwhelmed and will more likely than not, abandon the website.
You also need to remember that the Internet connection on these devices is far slower than desktop devices. Users understand this intuitively and are looking for a quick solution that loads quickly. You need to design your site to provide what these users want to see and present them with a focused navigation path to help them find what they need. You also need to make the content more concise and focus on conversions rather than entertaining or educating the user.
2. Designing the Mobile Version of Your Site Based on Your Desktop Site’s Analytics
While there is a lot of advice given about using your analytics to adapt your design, not enough people are telling you to dig deeper into the performance on mobile-devices. You’ll quickly learn that how people behave on your desktop will be drastically different from how people behave using these devices.
That’s why making design and structural changes based on the analytics data for your desktop is a bad choice. You need to collect data on mobile-only users and use that exact data to adapt the design and structure. Don’t forget that users are browsing the Internet in a completely different way when using devices. They’re using their thumbs and pointer fingers to browse, sliding their fingers to scroll, and pressing down parts of their screen.
3. Setting Up a Separate Mobile-Dedicated Site
One of the worst advice that marketing firms have made in the past is pushing their clients to set up a mobile-dedicated site that is separate from desktop site. This meaning that both sites will have different URLs. There are numerous downsides of implementing this strategy.
First of all, you may face search engine penalties for duplicate content. If you want to avoid this, you will have to go back to rewrite your archived content or produce two pieces of content every time you want to put up something new for your site.
Second, if you’re planning on getting traffic from the search engines, you’ll have to double your efforts since the search engines will see both sites as two separate entities. You’ll have to build separate links, have separate Google Authorship accounts, and have separate content. This is a lot of work to undertake.
Third, promoting your brand and taking part in any kind of offline advertising for your business site will become a headache. You want to get the brand value out of your advertising, but having two distinct websites will make it confusing for your target audience. The bottom line is that it’s a better idea to use responsive or adaptive web design.
Switching over to a mobile-friendly site is no easy task. Part of creating a site that works for both audiences means avoiding critical mistakes that hurts the user’s browsing experience and making it easier for you to promote your site.
Online shopping is easy and convenient, and more people are doing it than ever before. The rise in e-commerce also gives cybercriminals more opportunities to rob you blind. Here’s how to stay safe.
Online shopping is predicted to increase by 8% in 2016, meaning 56% of holiday shopping will be done online. Odds are good that you or someone you know is going to buy at least one gift through a desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet. But how do you ensure sensitive information stays secure?
Data breaches tend to make headlines in the news but they’re hardly the only means of identity theft. Countless people have had information stolen by unscrupulous websites, fraud, and hacking. Here are six tips to share with your end users, friends, and family members to help them become smarter online consumers.
1. Pay attention to your browser’s URL
Whenever you’re online there’s a web address in the top bar of your browser. It tells you where you are on the internet, and it can be a good indicator of the legitimacy of the website you’re on.
For shopping purposes, and anything else that involves personal information, you need to be sure the website’s address starts with HTTPS. The S indicates a secure connection and any site trying to earn your business should have it.
2. Watch out for email deals
Regular online shoppers have inboxes filled with digital ads from the places they frequent, and those ads are legitimate. What you need to watch out for are ads from places you aren’t familiar with or that seem too good to be true.
Detecting phishing emails can be tough. If you’re not sure what to watch out for check out CNET’s guide for some good tips.
3. Don’t shop on public WiFi
Public WiFi is great, but it’s not necessarily safe. You don’t know who’s on the network, what they might be doing, or what they’re capable of—they may just be hanging out waiting to steal credit card info.
Shop from home, or from any secure connection. Make sure your home WiFi is secured as well—an openly accessible WiFi network is a serious security risk.
4. Use a password manager
Complex passwords are a must, but even those can be stolen if you type them into a spyware-infected computer. You can beef up security even more by using a password management app.
Not only will these apps allow you to sign in to websites with a single click, they can also generate random passwords that are incredibly secure. All you’ll have to do is use a master password to unlock the app and it will do all the hard work for you. And since you aren’t typing your passwords manually there’s much less risk of theft.
5. Keep your computer and antivirus software up to date
No one likes to be reminded of software updates: They interrupt us, take a long time to install and configure, and sometimes come with bugs that make life harder. That doesn’t mean they aren’t essential, though.
Operating system updates often patch security holes, and antivirus software is completely useless without updated virus definitions. If you’re the kind of person who avoids updating their machine take some time before you start shopping to run all your updates and doing a full scan of your computer.
If you don’t have any antivirus software on your computer now is the time to install some. Free applications like Avast and AVG are both great options.
6. Use Paypal or stick with a single credit card
Paypal and websites like it act as intermediaries to online vendors. Anyone who has ever forgotten their Paypal password knows how many security hurdles you have to jump through—it’s serious about security.
If you don’t want to use Paypal or are buying from a vendor that doesn’t accept it stick to using a single credit card. This isolates your risk to one account and if you pick one with good security features you’ll be alerted as soon as something bad happens.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the Super Bowl for e-commerceOpens a New Window.. The holiday season kicks into gear for businesses with the biggest online shopping days of the year during Cyber Week. The window from Black Friday to Christmas can make or break the sales and revenue for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) all the way up to large businesses such as Nordstrom and Target. For every business, though, success or failureOpens a New Window. comes down to how well your website holds up to the influx of holiday user traffic.
When customers are entering and browsing your website, adding products to their cart, and checking out, every second counts. Digital performance management company SOASTAOpens a New Window.said the sweet spot—the website load time that corresponds to peak conversions—could be two seconds or less in 2016. Between Cyber Week 2014 and 2015, SOASTA analyzed 1.5 billion beacons worth of user session data. SOASTA found that peak conversion load time shrank from 3.8 to 2.4 seconds, and also found that, in 2015, slower pages experienced up to a 58 percent increase in bounce rate. The numbers go on and on, but the correlation is simple: website problems in those key moments equal lost revenue.
To make sure their website is prepared, businesses need to do the legwork before and during the rush. I spoke to Gus Robertson, CEO of application delivery and scalable web infrastructure provider NGINXOpens a New Window. (pronounced “engine-x”) about how businesses should prepare. We discussed the mechanisms that should be in place to prime for the best and plan for the worst during Cyber Week.
NGINX and its open-source softwareOpens a New Window. have been around since the early days of the internet. According to the company, NGINX software powers more than 55 percent of the internet in one form or another. Robertson said he’s seen the internet evolve from simple webpages into complex, web-based applications that deliver user experiences (UXes) to a wide range of devices and screen sizes. At the same time, more and more retail revenue every year comes from the web.
“We’re seeing this transition where e-commerce transactions are becoming equally [as], if not more, important than brick-and-mortar sales in physical stores,” said Robertson. “When your website goes down, you shut down a large chunk of your business opportunity. Don’t let your best and busiest day become your worst day. There are very basic things you can do to make sure you’re as well-protected and prepared as possible.”
Robertson laid out 10 tips to help your business test its website and make a game plan for the rush. This way, you’ll be prepared and know how to respond if something on your website goes wrong at the worst time on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
1. Monitor Your Website Robertson said it’s a no-brainer for businesses to have a website monitoringor application performance managementOpens a New Window. (APM) solution in place. These kinds of tools give you complete visibility into not only the front end of your website, but a holistic look at the entire web application and compute resources.
“We’re dealing with very different application architectures than we were a couple years ago. When something goes wrong, you need to look not just at the infrastructure itself and things like response time, but the cause,” said Robertson. “Customers of ours use tools like New RelicOpens a New Window., AppDynamicsOpens a New Window., and DatadogOpens a New Window. to find out not just what’s faulting or not performing on the back end, but the UX on the front end. Several seconds of delay could mean a user goes to your competitor’s site and buys the product there instead.”
2. Preemptive Load Testing Load testing means putting demand on a website by using simulated traffic to see how many concurrent users it can handle. Robertson stressed that load testing should be done early and often, not just on normal traffic but by pushing the website to its limits to handle peak traffic levels.
“You need to load test at normal traffic—what you expect it to be—and then [on] the maximum traffic you could ever potentially expect,” said Robertson. “You need to see how that load testing impacts performance, but also the back-end resiliency of your site as that traffic comes in.”
3. Performance Testing As you load test, Robertson said it’s also important to think about the UX. Load and performance testing go hand in hand because your website need to be able to not only handle many users without crashing, but then it needs to deliver fast-loading pages and a responsive interface to keep those customers happy and engaged in the shopping experience.
“You want to deliver the best user experience you can for the customer that’s trying to interact with your site and have a relationship with your company,” said Robertson. “A high-performance web application should be getting the customer to the right information through the site without a lot of hassle. That’s what the customer experience is about.”
4. Test Critical User Workflows Part of that performance testing is going beyond load times to actually test the user flows that will receive the most metaphorical foot traffic on your website. Robertson said testing things such as the hottest product pages, shopping cart management, and, most importantly, the seamlessness of the checkout process is a key step in successfully driving online sales.
“Businesses are load testing the front of the site but not necessarily the back-end [application programming interface or] API that connects you to the payment gateway,” said Robertson. “You have X amount of people in the front of the application but that doesn’t tell you if it will work the whole way through. If people are trying to check out from their shopping cart and they can’t, you’re done. You’ve lost that conversion.”
5. Put Scaling Tools in Place Regardless of how you’ve architected your web application underneath (we’ll get to that later), NGINX has made its name on being able to quickly scale and allocate web resources where they’re needed. Robertson discussed a variety of tools you can put into place on your website to give you some flexibility when high traffic comes in.
“We like to think of NGINX as the shock absorber at the front end of an application,” said Robertson. “We do the HTTP heavy lifting. There are all these tools you can put in the front of the app like load balancers, caching mechanisms, or a [content delivery network or] CDN that can help you auto-scale and prioritize certain traffic. So, if users are coming back into a workflow and you have to trade off one traffic source versus another, you could prioritize something like shopping cart checkout to maximize conversions over the resources that are going toward powering the product search bar.”
6. Set Up Traffic Cops Scaling tools such as load balancers and CDNs are one element of NGINX’s “shock absorption,” but the company also sets up what it calls “traffic cops” for websites. These traffic cops stop security breaches and faux pas such as Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Robertson said “edge services” such as CDNs, DDoS mitigation services, and firewalls can help divert malicious traffic to let the real user traffic through to your website.
“DDoS [attacks] can happen from external bad agents that can take your site down, but you can also accidentally DDoS yourself by having one server pinging another and taking it down,” explained Robertson. “Traffic cops mean setting up things like weight limits, pre-set IP addresses, blocking and whitelisting external applications. [There are] a number of mechanisms NGINX can put in place to ensure that service isn’t interrupted and you don’t allow one to DDoS another. Then, on the front end, you have a [web application firewall or] WAF looking for things like external DDoS and SQL injection attacks.”
7. Make a Failure Plan No business wants to see their website go down during Cyber Week but it happens every year, even to high-profile retailers. Because of this, every business needs to plan for the worst. Robertson said that starts with having a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution in place to have a backup website tested and ready to go if your main website goes down.
“Make sure your DR site is sitting there as an insurance plan, but also be sure to activate and test it beforehand,” said Robertson. “When you’re load testing the main site, do the same to your DR site so that, if something does go wrong, you can move the site quickly to that infrastructure.
8. Social Damage Control The other half of your backup plan is to know your customer service and outreach strategy and, in 2016, that means social media managementOpens a New Window.. Social media is the front line for customer interaction with your brand. If your website goes down, then the first places customers will look for answers are your company’s Facebook and Twitter pages.
“If things do go wrong, think about how you would respond on social media and how your representatives would go about informing customers and keeping them up to date,” said Robertson.
9. Consider Website Architecture One of the longer-term conversations your business should be discussing when it comes to your website is about how it’s architected and whether it’s time for a change. We’ve written about how applications of all kinds are moving away from monolithic architectures and toward more modular microservicesOpens a New Window.. Robertson said that, ultimately, the front-end tools NGINX provides are no substitute for a dynamically scaling, microservices-based web app.
“Microservices is the way we’re seeing large web properties getting the ability to really scale,” said Robertson. “If you’ve written a monolith, you can’t rearchitect between now and the holiday shopping rush. But you should be looking at your architecture and thinking about how you can eventually transition. The benefit of a microservice is that you can auto-scale individual components as traffic is hitting them. So, if the image library is getting hit, you scale that or any other service in the app. It’s this application architecture valve to adjust for inbound traffic that, around this time of year, can be excessive.”
10. C-Suite Buy-In When a website goes down on Black Friday, the fallout from that doesn’t just impact the IT team that’s running the website. The CEO or CTO of the company then has to answer to shareholders or to a board of directors about why the website went down and how much potential revenue was lost. Business and technology issues are inextricably linked for online businesses, and Robertson said management and other executives need to know and understand them.
“If you’re a CEO and 20 percent of your business is coming from the website, asking the same questions of your CIO is as important as the CIO asking them to their team,” said Robertson. “This is high-level, but it’s important for executives to know enough about the technology in their company and on their sites to ask the right questions and have a good answer for the shareholders if they’re unfortunate enough to need one.”
Holiday shopping is already on the minds of many people. Some will be hitting the stores to cross things off their shopping lists. Others prefer to find the seasonal bargains from the comfort of their homes.
Americans on average are expected to spend about 908 dollars this season, an 8 percent increase from last year. The national retail federation shows 57 percent of consumers plan to buy gifts online this holiday season. The scary thing though — Americans lost over 800 million dollars to cyber theft in 2014 alone.
“When you’re doing online shopping, a couple things you need to watch out for, make sure you’re on a secure site, that you know the site that you’re on. You need to check that you’re on a site that has ‘HTTPS” in the address bar, and also there should be a little lock in that address bar too,” Cheryl Parson, President at the Better Business Bureau of West Central Ohio, said.
To protect yourself from online fraud, Parson says there are some additional things you can do: make sure to Use a credit card, track your online transactions for any red flags, and double check the web address to make sure it’s not trying to imitate a popular site like Amazon.
“There’s another out there that is not really Amazon, but it looks like it. People are using sites that you think you are on the right site, the name’s similar and everything, but it’s not the correct site,” Parson said.
If you realize you’ve been a victim of online fraud, contact your credit card company right away, and you can also report it to the Better Business Bureau for additional help.
Today, smartphones are more like an extra limb than a device for most people. Consumers take their phones with them everywhere they go, and each time they unlock their home screens is a chance for brands to become a part of their digital lives.
With 85.7% of smartphone internet time spent in apps versus mobile web, more consumers are opting for the seamless experiences that apps offer.
By keeping a few key tips in mind, brands can make the most of this mobile shift, using apps to drive awareness, engagement and conversions—both online and off—and give consumers the optimised, personalised and engaging experience that they have come to expect in the digital world.
Set goals
It’s a mistake to launch an application for the sake of having one. A successful app begins with planning and setting goals.
These goals will help to target the right audience, measure success and, if needed, adjust strategies. Goals should also be specific. Are you looking to drive more traffic? Increase conversions? Raise awareness?
Clear and defined goals will help deliver an experience that will benefit both brands and consumers.
Offer value
Providing consumers with a 1:1 branded application experience starts with understanding why your application deserves to be included on users’ valuable home screen.
Mobile real estate is a hot commodity, and when consumers run out of mobile storage space, what’s going to compel them to keep your app?
Offering users value, whether it’s through promotions, immersive entertainment or exclusive content, will drive consumers to use your app and engage actively with your brand.
Mobile functionality can also turn a standard branded opportunity to a one-of-a-kind, engaging experience
For example, Phunware teamed up with international media agency MEC and Paramount Pictures International to promote last year’s summer blockbuster, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation.
The campaign used branded content within two popular mobile games, creating custom levels that let users experience the thrilling life of an Impossible Missions Force agent.
By offering players unique content not available elsewhere, we were able to drive results, including 13 million overall gameplays, an 87% video ad completion rate and a 6.65% click-through rate.
Understand your audience
As consumers spend more time in apps, brands gain access to an unprecedented amount of user data.
With each interaction, consumers leave behind a digital data trail, giving brands valuable insight into who their users are, when and where to engage and how to hold their attention.
From time spent in app to content and ad engagement to mobile purchasing behavior, mobile app data enables more comprehensive customer profiling and the ability to better segment and target customers.
Consumers also have a lot to gain from the data they leave behind.
The more a brand knows about them, the more personal and relevant content can be. For example, by paying attention to the playlists most frequently used—like Running or Dance—brands like Pandora can learn a lot about who their users are and deliver relevant ads for a more personalsed, less disruptive listening experience.
For retailers, frequent shoppers may receive special offers or rewards upon entering a store, generating quick sales and ultimately, happy shoppers. What’s more, with a deeper understanding of the traits of power users, brands can more easily find lookalike targets to grow their audience even more.
Leverage mobile functionality
Coupled with the first-party data brands get from their own applications, mobile allows for unique experiences users can’t get from a laptop. Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi technology give brands valuable information about users based on where they engage the most.
For instance, those who engage most in airports or hotels during the week are likely to be business travelers. But these functions also enable more ways to reach on-the-go users, including the ability to send contextually-triggered messages and promotions.
Mobile functionality can also turn a standard branded opportunity to a one-of-a-kind, engaging experience.
For example, game immersion experiences that turn a smartphone into a wand or a steering wheel yield a level of consumer engagement that can’t be replicated through traditional channels like websites and subscription-based newsletters, and help garner brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
One-to-one indoor and outdoor contextual targeting will be critical for brands as consumers continue to spend their time in-app.
According to comScore, with mobile now representing more than 65% of digital media time, mobile applications are a must for brands that haven’t incorporated them yet, and optimisation should be the next step for those that have.
With clear goals in mind, brands that offer valuable content and engaging experiences and utilise the wealth of available mobile data will be on their way to mobile success.
