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Preparing Your Mobile App for the Black Friday Digital Swarm

Derek Stevens

The Black Friday digital swarm is approaching. Are you prepared? Sure your infrastructure is ready to scale, you've issued a production code freeze, and you're actively monitoring your applications with Application Performance Management (APM), but many organizations are overlooking one major component that can have a direct impact on Black Friday revenue: the mobile app.  

Appbusters are the New Doorbusters

Mobile commerce is at an all-time high. In 2014, one in three online purchases came from a smartphone or tablet on Black Friday and at one point, mobile traffic surpassed 50% of all Internet traffic . From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, 70% of all traffic to Walmart.com was from mobile devices. This growth in mobile purchases is set to continue this year with an increasing number brands offering exclusive deals on mobile apps and in-store digital experiences. 
 
Despite the increasing importance of providing a great user experience for mobile apps, there are few companies who have mastered the mobile space. In fact, only 48% of organizations are using a mobile app analytics solution to understand user pain points and behavior. Without understanding how your users are interacting with your mobile app, it's impossible to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and answer key questions like: 

■ Where and when is the app used?

■ What are my users doing with our app?

■ Who is using our app?

■ Is our mobile app successful? 
 
But even if you have insight into user behavior, that alone isn't enough. Without a view into app crashes and performance, you won't understand why your users are behaving in certain ways. Take the following scenario as an example: it's Black Friday and you discover that 20% of your users are dropping off your mobile app at checkout. If you only have a view into user behavior, you won't know if users dropping off because the app is crashing on a specific device type or OS, if it's a certain carrier or network performance issue, if the transaction was taking too long to complete or if the users just decided to not to complete the checkout process. 
 
A mobile app analytics solution that provides you with insight into performance, crash, and usage analytics while providing end-to-end transaction visibility when combined with APM can give you the comprehensive view you need to effectively eliminate your mobile app blind spots.

Derek Stevens is Sr. Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies.

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

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IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

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2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...

Preparing Your Mobile App for the Black Friday Digital Swarm

Derek Stevens

The Black Friday digital swarm is approaching. Are you prepared? Sure your infrastructure is ready to scale, you've issued a production code freeze, and you're actively monitoring your applications with Application Performance Management (APM), but many organizations are overlooking one major component that can have a direct impact on Black Friday revenue: the mobile app.  

Appbusters are the New Doorbusters

Mobile commerce is at an all-time high. In 2014, one in three online purchases came from a smartphone or tablet on Black Friday and at one point, mobile traffic surpassed 50% of all Internet traffic . From Black Friday to Cyber Monday, 70% of all traffic to Walmart.com was from mobile devices. This growth in mobile purchases is set to continue this year with an increasing number brands offering exclusive deals on mobile apps and in-store digital experiences. 
 
Despite the increasing importance of providing a great user experience for mobile apps, there are few companies who have mastered the mobile space. In fact, only 48% of organizations are using a mobile app analytics solution to understand user pain points and behavior. Without understanding how your users are interacting with your mobile app, it's impossible to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and answer key questions like: 

■ Where and when is the app used?

■ What are my users doing with our app?

■ Who is using our app?

■ Is our mobile app successful? 
 
But even if you have insight into user behavior, that alone isn't enough. Without a view into app crashes and performance, you won't understand why your users are behaving in certain ways. Take the following scenario as an example: it's Black Friday and you discover that 20% of your users are dropping off your mobile app at checkout. If you only have a view into user behavior, you won't know if users dropping off because the app is crashing on a specific device type or OS, if it's a certain carrier or network performance issue, if the transaction was taking too long to complete or if the users just decided to not to complete the checkout process. 
 
A mobile app analytics solution that provides you with insight into performance, crash, and usage analytics while providing end-to-end transaction visibility when combined with APM can give you the comprehensive view you need to effectively eliminate your mobile app blind spots.

Derek Stevens is Sr. Product Marketing Manager at CA Technologies.

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...