5 ms·

I don't think this is an issue with the on-site analytics, but with the quality of the traffic and website performance. If you make sure that: 1) Your site loa

by XCSme 6y ago

I don't think this is an issue with the on-site analytics, but with the quality of the traffic and website performance. If you make sure that: 1) Your site loads in under 3-4 seconds for any user. 2) The user is interested enough to wait 3-4 seconds until the page loads. Then most issues will be solved. The problem with ads in many cases is that the traffic they send is of very low quality or just bots. In the end you already know from your ads provider how many users they say they sent and you should always use that when calculating ad conversion rate. Also note that using Cloudflare will count as bounced users who never actually even tried to load your page (bots, crawlers, scrapers, all HTTP requests).

dogfoods 6y ago
It's amazing that 3-4 seconds is considered a reasonable target in 2020 when 8 seconds was a target on freaking dialup. It's like having a Ferrari and considering outrunning a horse a success.
- amluto 6y ago
  Every time I see an article about the growth of data usage, I thing that data usage in bytes is increasing much, much faster than data usage in terms of end-user utility.
  - dogfoods 6y ago
    Twitter weighs about a MB, a tweet is at most 280 characters, and typically of negative utility to the user and society. So yes.
- ianamartin 6y ago
  No one thinks that's a reasonable target. That's insane. I don't know who that person is or what he's in charge of, but that's the fastest way to being a dead company. 100 ms max on backend processing, 500 ms max on first time to interaction. Client connection speeds matter, obviously. 3-4 seconds is get your fired ass out of here in my world.
  - progman32 6y ago
    What industry sector are you in?
    - ianamartin 6y ago
      I've worked in both b2b and consumer spaces. Finance, Market Research, Payments, Education, and Real Estate.
  - dogfoods 6y ago
    Then why the fuck is the average website measured in megabytes
  - XCSme 6y ago
    3-4 seconds includes the DNS resolving, downloading HTML, CSS, JS, media, parsing them, creating the DOM, layout, calculating styles, rendering, etc. It's very hard even for a static imageless site to load in under 1 second for low-end mobile device. That being said, for good UX the target should definitely be under 1 second to interactice, but even on desktop, if your users can't wait 3 seconds after they click the ad, they are not actually interested at all in your product. People are also used with waiting a bit after they change sites/applications when they initiate the transition, so transition feels faster than it is. It starts feeling slow when you are already on the blank page, having time to look at the loading spinner. I'm not saying slow is good, but I highly doubt that you can make any site have 500ms TTI for any user (they could easily have 150ms ping to your closest server). I assume that TTI means having access to all website functionality, not some simplified placeholder UI.
    - ianamartin 6y ago
      If users are used to waiting, it's because people like you have trained them to be. You list all the things that go into rendering a usable UI as though we don't all know that. Users probably don't, and that sounds like a lot. It sounds like the kind of excuse for shitty load times that PMs use when people do complain about slow websites. And you can doubly tell how much of a PM you are by assuming that everyone is accessing your product by ad and how much you don't care if they are interested after 3-4 seconds. That's a lot of money you're leaving on the table. Low-end mobile devices are not the right metric for TTI. Most people don't realize how fast the web can be because they don't bother to benchmark until they are well into the tooling choices and feature development and maybe someone somewhere decides to complain about speed. A functional Pyramid app with dynamic templates using Mako, and some db queries via SQLAlchemy can fully load in under 100ms. The bottom line is that speed is a feature. It's not just one feature; it's your most important feature if you want users. It's more important than developer productivity; it's more important than any other feature. You don't know this because you work in a b2b/enterprise space where users don't have a choice. Their managers make the choice. But if you ever work directly on consumer products you'll find this out really quickly. The difference between ~.5 sec TTI and 4 sec TTI is millions of revenue per minute in eCommerce. But even though it's b2b doesn't mean it has to be bad and suck people's time away from them. You have the option to learn something and change your priorities. But you won't.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I hope that with "for any user" your parent means something like p99 load times which include people on GPRS connections.
  - tpetry 6y ago
    I dont know where you live but in most countries gprs will not be included in p99. The few cases of mobile usage in p99 will be lte and the different 3g connections. This may be different for mobile apps.
    - TruffleMuffin 6y ago
      Live in a world where most people connecting to my website dont have reliable internet connections and low quality mobile is actually pretty standard.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      The train Wifi in German trains feels like communicating through a tin-can-telephone with the servers as soon as you leave the city.
- higeorge13 6y ago
  When doing research on QoE and QoS for page and video loading i remember the upper threshold of QoE being ~100ms, and every 100ms delay would have significant impact on sales. 3-4 seconds would be considered as a joke back then.
defjosiah 6y ago
I worked with Alexey on this project. It’s pretty straightforward to filter out bots (either before send, or in analysis later). For our traffic, it was mostly commonly known bot user-agents. I’m also pretty sure malicious bots get blocked by Cloudflare before hitting the Cloudflare workers.
- XCSme 6y ago
  When dealing with ads, most "bots" are actually clicks coming from click farms, which are from real devices. I'm not sure what's the best way to filter those though.
ianamartin 6y ago
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and assume you're a product manager for atlassian.
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  You nailed it. That is probably the most likely correct conclusion. I mean, it almost must be that way. I do not know of any other "service" (more like disservice really), with so many products, which fails so terribly to get to a minimum standard in usability and page speed. Even the login in Atlassian is f'ed up, and you cannot login with sane ad blocking. I have to create a separate browser profile and start FF with profile manager each time, so that I can choose, all just to keep the Atlassian infection at bay.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    I don't know, I find the MS/live/hotmail/office.com/outlook login thingy quite entertaining (will it hop from more servers than the standard ttl TCP packet value ?) ^^
    - unmole 6y ago
      > standard ttl TCP packet value Nit: TCP doesn't handle TTL, IP does.
  - ianamartin 6y ago
    To be fair, this is a blight that infects all b2b/enterprise platforms. The devs and PMs don't care about speed because they aren't punished for being slow. They don't value speed as a feature because they don't have to and don't lose customers because of slowness. These deals are made by people who don't use the software because they passed some checklist of features and security audits, not because they are good. Consumer websites, blogs, and especially eCommerce websites can't get away with that without losing users almost instantly. The moral of the story is that if you are already a big, wealthy company with a big reputation, you can afford to be shit. If you aren't, you're making a big mistake with 3-4 sec load times.
dccoolgai 6y ago
Not trying to be provocative here, but I've read on this subject for years and the any time I've seen it measured it points to your assertion here as being deeply deeply wrong. I don't have the energy to gather the links, but pretty much everything written by anyone credible concluded that _milliseconds matter_. Don't take my word for it, though.

by XCSme 6y ago

dogfoods 6y ago

It's amazing that 3-4 seconds is considered a reasonable target in 2020 when 8 seconds was a target on freaking dialup. It's like having a Ferrari and considering outrunning a horse a success.

amluto 6y ago
Every time I see an article about the growth of data usage, I thing that data usage in bytes is increasing much, much faster than data usage in terms of end-user utility.
- dogfoods 6y ago
  Twitter weighs about a MB, a tweet is at most 280 characters, and typically of negative utility to the user and society. So yes.
ianamartin 6y ago
No one thinks that's a reasonable target. That's insane. I don't know who that person is or what he's in charge of, but that's the fastest way to being a dead company. 100 ms max on backend processing, 500 ms max on first time to interaction. Client connection speeds matter, obviously. 3-4 seconds is get your fired ass out of here in my world.
- progman32 6y ago
  What industry sector are you in?
  - ianamartin 6y ago
    I've worked in both b2b and consumer spaces. Finance, Market Research, Payments, Education, and Real Estate.
- dogfoods 6y ago
  Then why the fuck is the average website measured in megabytes
- XCSme 6y ago
  3-4 seconds includes the DNS resolving, downloading HTML, CSS, JS, media, parsing them, creating the DOM, layout, calculating styles, rendering, etc. It's very hard even for a static imageless site to load in under 1 second for low-end mobile device. That being said, for good UX the target should definitely be under 1 second to interactice, but even on desktop, if your users can't wait 3 seconds after they click the ad, they are not actually interested at all in your product. People are also used with waiting a bit after they change sites/applications when they initiate the transition, so transition feels faster than it is. It starts feeling slow when you are already on the blank page, having time to look at the loading spinner. I'm not saying slow is good, but I highly doubt that you can make any site have 500ms TTI for any user (they could easily have 150ms ping to your closest server). I assume that TTI means having access to all website functionality, not some simplified placeholder UI.
  - ianamartin 6y ago
    If users are used to waiting, it's because people like you have trained them to be. You list all the things that go into rendering a usable UI as though we don't all know that. Users probably don't, and that sounds like a lot. It sounds like the kind of excuse for shitty load times that PMs use when people do complain about slow websites. And you can doubly tell how much of a PM you are by assuming that everyone is accessing your product by ad and how much you don't care if they are interested after 3-4 seconds. That's a lot of money you're leaving on the table. Low-end mobile devices are not the right metric for TTI. Most people don't realize how fast the web can be because they don't bother to benchmark until they are well into the tooling choices and feature development and maybe someone somewhere decides to complain about speed. A functional Pyramid app with dynamic templates using Mako, and some db queries via SQLAlchemy can fully load in under 100ms. The bottom line is that speed is a feature. It's not just one feature; it's your most important feature if you want users. It's more important than developer productivity; it's more important than any other feature. You don't know this because you work in a b2b/enterprise space where users don't have a choice. Their managers make the choice. But if you ever work directly on consumer products you'll find this out really quickly. The difference between ~.5 sec TTI and 4 sec TTI is millions of revenue per minute in eCommerce. But even though it's b2b doesn't mean it has to be bad and suck people's time away from them. You have the option to learn something and change your priorities. But you won't.
adrianN 6y ago
I hope that with "for any user" your parent means something like p99 load times which include people on GPRS connections.
- tpetry 6y ago
  I dont know where you live but in most countries gprs will not be included in p99. The few cases of mobile usage in p99 will be lte and the different 3g connections. This may be different for mobile apps.
  - TruffleMuffin 6y ago
    Live in a world where most people connecting to my website dont have reliable internet connections and low quality mobile is actually pretty standard.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    The train Wifi in German trains feels like communicating through a tin-can-telephone with the servers as soon as you leave the city.
higeorge13 6y ago
When doing research on QoE and QoS for page and video loading i remember the upper threshold of QoE being ~100ms, and every 100ms delay would have significant impact on sales. 3-4 seconds would be considered as a joke back then.

defjosiah 6y ago

I worked with Alexey on this project. It’s pretty straightforward to filter out bots (either before send, or in analysis later). For our traffic, it was mostly commonly known bot user-agents. I’m also pretty sure malicious bots get blocked by Cloudflare before hitting the Cloudflare workers.

XCSme 6y ago
When dealing with ads, most "bots" are actually clicks coming from click farms, which are from real devices. I'm not sure what's the best way to filter those though.

ianamartin 6y ago

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and assume you're a product manager for atlassian.

zelphirkalt 6y ago
You nailed it. That is probably the most likely correct conclusion. I mean, it almost must be that way. I do not know of any other "service" (more like disservice really), with so many products, which fails so terribly to get to a minimum standard in usability and page speed. Even the login in Atlassian is f'ed up, and you cannot login with sane ad blocking. I have to create a separate browser profile and start FF with profile manager each time, so that I can choose, all just to keep the Atlassian infection at bay.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  I don't know, I find the MS/live/hotmail/office.com/outlook login thingy quite entertaining (will it hop from more servers than the standard ttl TCP packet value ?) ^^
  - unmole 6y ago
    > standard ttl TCP packet value Nit: TCP doesn't handle TTL, IP does.
- ianamartin 6y ago
  To be fair, this is a blight that infects all b2b/enterprise platforms. The devs and PMs don't care about speed because they aren't punished for being slow. They don't value speed as a feature because they don't have to and don't lose customers because of slowness. These deals are made by people who don't use the software because they passed some checklist of features and security audits, not because they are good. Consumer websites, blogs, and especially eCommerce websites can't get away with that without losing users almost instantly. The moral of the story is that if you are already a big, wealthy company with a big reputation, you can afford to be shit. If you aren't, you're making a big mistake with 3-4 sec load times.

dccoolgai 6y ago

Not trying to be provocative here, but I've read on this subject for years and the any time I've seen it measured it points to your assertion here as being deeply deeply wrong. I don't have the energy to gather the links, but pretty much everything written by anyone credible concluded that _milliseconds matter_. Don't take my word for it, though.