Report Quantifies How Slow Web Pages Directly Impact Revenue

LEXINGTON, Mass., Dec. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- A company's business performance suffers when its web pages take longer than five seconds to load, according to a new report by Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks company (NYSE: HHS), sponsored in part by Gomez, Inc., a leading provider of web application experience management solutions.

The report, "The Performance of Web Applications: Customers are Won or Lost in One Second," finds that an additional delay of even one second can impact conversions by seven percent, page views by 11 percent and customer satisfaction by 16 percent.

Aberdeen found the average company achieved 97.8 percent availability for their business critical web applications. Over the course of a year, this equates to eight days of downtime and lost revenue(1).

Additionally, according to Gomez's web performance benchmarks for the month of November, 20 percent of the 700+ home pages monitored are at risk of underachieving Aberdeen's stated 5.1 second response time threshold.

"Aberdeen's new study provides concrete, quantifiable evidence that improving web application performance can positively affect the bottom line," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez VP of performance strategies. "However, it's clear that for many businesses across many sectors, there is still a lot of work to be done. Using the Gomez ExperienceFirst suite of applications is an important - and easy to implement - action that can help close the performance gap and quickly reap the benefits."

The Aberdeen report highlights that many organizations have limited understanding of their end-users' online experience because they are unable to externally monitor web application performance and optimize it for multiple browsers. It found that that Best-in-Class companies who have this expertise are:


    --  Nine times more likely to report decreases to mean time to repair,
    --  Four times more likely to reduce labor cost as a percentage of IT spend,
    --  88 percent more likely to improve customer satisfaction, and
    --  Twice as likely to improve brand reputation.

"For businesses relying on the web to generate revenue or communicate with customers, partners and employees, it's apparent how vital it is to externally monitor the end-user experience and optimize it for all constituents, whatever their browser," said Bojan Simic, research analyst, Aberdeen. "Without these capabilities, businesses are, essentially, flying blind."

Webinar

Gomez and Aberdeen analyst Bojan Simic will co-present a webinar entitled "Best Practices for Web Application Performance - Customers are Won or Lost in One Second" on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 at 1:00 p.m. EST.

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company

Aberdeen is a leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to AberdeenTM for insights that drive decisions. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890.

About Gomez

Gomez, Inc. is a leading provider of web application experience management services, which businesses use to test their web applications while in development and to monitor their web applications after deployment. More than 2,000 customers use Gomez's on-demand services to improve the quality of the web experience in order to increase their revenue from web applications, reduce their operating costs, and extend their brand reputations. For more information, please visit www.gomez.com.

(1) Days downtime was calculated as follows: 100% - 97.8% = 2.2% x 365 = 8 days.

Gomez and gomez.com are registered service marks and ExperienceFirst is a service mark of Gomez, Inc. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

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Matt Poepsel

https://profnet.prnewswire.com/Subscriber/ExpertProfile.aspx?ei=69339

SOURCE Gomez, Inc.