More than page load time, site performance metrics are going deeper

As sites have become more complex, so have the measures of what constitutes acceptable site performance. E-commerce sites now monitor more than the basics of page download time and site availability, collecting performance data on a more specific and granular level that they can tie back to business results. The findings from metrics measured since December on Panasonic.com , transaction availability, already have led to internal fixes that have improved the stability of the site relative to specific transactions by 11%, vice president of e-commerce Jeremy Dalnes tells Internet Retailer.

Panasonic of North America’s Panasonic.com sells Panasonic products direct and also drives shoppers to online and offline retailer channel partners to buy. A recent review of its BizRate customer reports turned up comments on difficulty with its checkout page, according to Dalnes. To validate that, Dalnes used Transaction Perspective, a monitoring product of Keynote Systems Inc., to test sample sessions he mapped out on paths through the site that users might take to buy specific products on Panasonic.com. The sample transactions were tested four times an hour from computers on the west and east coasts.

Testing showed a slowdown at certain times of the day. That finding allowed IT managers to fix the problem by re-architecting how back-end systems communicated with each other. In fact, since implementing the service from Keynote in December, Dalnes says changes informed by the data have improved stability of the site with respect to visitors’ ability to complete given tasks by 11%.

“The interaction between our disparate systems was causing performance hits in ways that would not have been evident had we not implemented Transaction Perspective,” says Dalnes. As the result of that experience, the new metric of “transaction availability” has now been added to service level agreements with Panasonic.com`s outsourced IT partner, IBM. Corp.