World Cup web winners and losers

The 2010 World Cup featured a feast of football, some fancy footwork and a few controversial refereeing decisions.

During the course of the World Cup, Gomez tracked the online performance of a selection of the leading sports books to see how well their sites performed under increased visitor levels as gamers placed bets on the various results.

The page, page object performance and availability were measured from Gomez’s Last-Mile and Backbone peer networks within the UK. The Last-Mile network comprises over 3,500 actual end-user’s desktops in the UK, giving a real-world reflection of what customers actually experience, whereas the Backbone network measures performance from the ‘clinical’ environment of the ISP. Gomez also used its cross browser compatibility tool to check the compatibility of the home page from major browsers and mobile devices.

Before England’s first match on June 12^th, Stan James’ site performed well, with website availability at 100% and the fastest average homepage download times. In contrast, customers at Ladbrokes would have been frustrated with an average homepage response time of nearly 6 seconds.

In the run-up to the World Cup final, Victor Chandler’s web site was a very strong performer with almost 100% availability and an average response time of 1.6 seconds. However Stan James’ website took over twice as long to load, with an average response time of 3.6 seconds. This should have caused real concern because research shows the amount of time a user will generally wait for a website to load is down to three seconds or less.

So how can the online sports books ensure they grab a big slice of the market share during the 2010-2011 football season? Here are a few key points:

1. Know your customers, their profiles and their usage patterns. What kind of browsers do they use? Where and how do they connect to the Internet?

2. Continually check on your customers’ experience. Continually monitor the customer experience from various locations around the world ““ and remember that many of your users don’t always have fast Internet connections.

3. Know what contributes to your customers’ experience. Today’s websites include an average of six third party web services, so make sure you are monitoring every piece of content on your website.

4. Benchmark. Identify your key competitors and find out exactly how the web experiences you deliver match up to theirs.