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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.

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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

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...