Gomez and dotMobi
launched benchmarks to compare and rank the mobile web for airline, banking and search and show the mobile web is thirty percent slower than computer web-broswing. For search, Yahoo ranked highest in March. Bank of America rated highest for Banking. AirTran was tops for airlines.
Mobile device use is rapidly, however, they do
not yet match performance levels of "traditional" web applications. To
help content providers address such issues, Gomez and dotMobi are
testing five critical aspects of mobile web experience - readiness,
discoverability, speed, success and consistency - and publishing the
results as monthly Mobile Web Experience Benchmarks.
The Mobile Web Experience Benchmarks highlight how major brands
address the challenge of delivering quality Web experiences to
consumers who access information via the mobile web. The benchmarks
will help everyday users better understand the mobile experiences
delivered by the brands they use for travel, online banking and search.
They use a "Five dimension" approach to mobile Web experience benchmarkin.
Gomez has combined its industry-leading web experience measurement
methodology for the "traditional," PC-based Web with tools from dotMobi
to create unique benchmarks that test mobile Web performance across
major wireless networks. The benchmarks test these five core metrics:
- Discoverability - how readily a consumer can find the mobile Web site using different URLs.
- Readiness - how well the mobile website renders on popular mobile devices.
- Availability - the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page.
- Response time - how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction.
- Consistency - how well the mobile Web site performs on different
mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.
"End-users expect great Web experiences, whether accessing the
Internet from a mobile device or a desktop computer. However, Gomez's
new benchmarks indicate that the mobile Web has some catching up to do
in order to meet end-users' expectations," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's
VP of Performance Strategies. "Applying a universal benchmarking
methodology makes the most sense. It helps businesses baseline and
improve their mobile Web performance so that, over time, they can
deliver quality online experiences to all consumers - no matter how
they access the Web."
"As dotMobi announced in a recent study
(http://dotmobi.mobi/node/1367), there are now more than 1.1 million
Web sites designed for mobile users, and that number is continuing to
grow at a incredibly fast pace. Helping consumers better understand
which of those sites will offer them a good experience - no matter what
handset or operator they're using - will help increase the use of the
mobile Web," said Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi. "Benchmarking allows
businesses to see their sites in relation to the sites of their
industry peers, which will also help drive the creation of more good
sites for consumers to use."
The disparity of performance between "traditional" Web applications
and mobile Web applications, as highlighted by the new Gomez/dotMobi
benchmarks, underscores the need for tools that can help organizations
optimize the quality of their customers' mobile Web experiences. In a
related announcement, Gomez today announced new capabilities for
testing, monitoring and benchmarking the performance of mobile Web
sites, mobile applications and SMS services. For more information see
"Gomez Expands Web Experience Management Suite to Encompass Mobile Web
Sites & Applications" at
http://www.gomez.com/news_events/releaseview.php?prid=141.