Friday 31 October 2008

Downtime is bad, right?

Not always no. This week we did a pretty large update to www.beautifulpure.com involving some lengthy database work. Whilst this is happening, of course transactions cannot happen on the site.

So, we do this work in the dead of night and plan the downtime. With appropriate planning, testing the deployment as well as testing the new functionality and faultless procedural execution of the deployment we still met our 99.9% uptime SLA.

Overall for this year we are running at 99.91% which roughly equates to 6.5 hours of downtime accross all clients for the whole year so far.

The next part of this analyis will take into account planned vs unplanned downtime and of the unplanned downtime - what time of day did it occur?

Watch this space.

Monday 27 October 2008

Stop Press!

Catalogue|e-business magazine reported today that Snow Valley has partnered with Site Confidence to provide monitoring for their client's sites.

Woo hoo...

Moneyspyder have done this for over two years. For Free. Coupled with Pingdom for a back up. Engineyard run their own in house server monitoring in addition. For Free.

Using these services mean that Moneyspyder can honestly claim to have 99.9% uptime or better for all sites for as long as we have been running.

Saturday 4 October 2008

Why Formula 1 is boring and what we can gain from it.

You may have seen the recent Grand Prix on television....You did? And you fell asleep? Thought so. Dull huh? But what does it have to do with Moneyspyder and why?

There are so many reasons but there is one main reason we can learn from and make use of: the precision with which the teams race now pretty much ensures they know what the result will be bar any accidents or freak weather. With 20 or so cars flying around a track at over 200mph how can they be so certain of the outcome? These are pretty complex pieces of machinery after all! Be great if we could be so certain about the outcome of our businesses, huh?

thing is, the science of Formula 1 has been applied to the measurement of key performance indicators on racing cars enabling the teams to know to the nearest 10th of a second how well the car is performing against expectations set by a mathematical model of what should be possible.

Sounding familiar yet? Think about an internet retail site; What sort of bounce rate, conversion rate, daily unique visitors, email open rate, basket abandonment rate, etc. etc. is expected? How does current site performance measure against the expectation? How are these expectations set? In a similar way to Formula one cars funnily enough.

By now, you should be saying 'yeah yeah, I have Google Analytics. So what?'. If you aren't saying this please call Moneyspyder now! So you dohave Google Analytics (GA)? Are you able to measure your site performance to an adequate level of precision? Are you confident in the accuracy of your data?

Recently we've seen a fair amount of GA data with a broad spectrum of precision and quality of data. To get any value from GA it is fundamentally important to get clean and precise data on which to base our expectations and indeed any subsequent measurement.

For example, customers arriving on your (all important) landing pages from marketing emails will probably arrive with a url payload:

http://yoursite.com/email=abc123

Now, each email is likely to have a different value associated with it. How is this going to manifest itself in your GA reports? Your landing page usage measurement will be totally useless if you measure each unique request based on unique url's.

http://yoursite.com/email=abc123
http://yoursite.com/email=abc124
http://yoursite.com/email=abc125
http://yoursite.com/email=abc126

Nightmare!

'Course, You don't have to be on the Moneyspyder platform to get quality GA data...but it helps! The quality of your analytics data will define the quality of you analysis and how much trust you can place in it. Treat you online business to a bit of Formula one style accuracy - give us a call.

Friday 3 October 2008

Congratulations Terry

Congratulations to Terry Jones and everyone at PSL on the launch of their new website - http://www.idirectdebit.co.uk/.

Another quality Mephisto driven website launched by Moneyspyder!