ccbill thinks they figured out the solution to the slow sales problem
 

just got this email

CCBill Client Worldwide Content Performance Study Results


On a daily basis, CCBill receives a variety of calls and emails regarding issues with performance and connectivity. When sales dip, Clients contact us asking for insight. When Client website connectivity is the issue, our Consumer Support department receives the cancel requests.

Because we take performance and satisfaction very seriously, we decided to task our Policy Review group with testing sites from our main offices, as well as other locations around the globe, to uncover the major performance differences from different geo locations and during certain peak times.

We began by mapping out those times and areas, against the afternoon/evening hours of the population concentrations with relatively easy access to the internet, and the ability to pay for products online.

What we found was that up to 35% of the time, depending on the time/region, qualified consumers who were able to join your sites and access your content online, were unable to join because of connectivity issues.

In an effort to address our side of these issues, some months ago we placed all our Sign up Form images (banners, logos, etc.) on a Content Delivery Network (a network of servers around the globe that enables content on the network to be loaded from the closest/fastest ?node? to the user). As a result of this switch, we have seen a noticeable decrease in form load times, most notably in Western Europe, due to the use of CDN in the delivery of our CCBill Forms.

We think the next step in addressing the balance of the website performance issues is to encourage the use of Content Delivery Networks across our client base. Almost every major US website (mainstream) uses content delivery in some form or another in the delivery of their high-traffic and bandwidth pages and images. Because of this increase in the amount of CDN bandwidth, pricing for content delivery is generally now the same as regular bandwidth pricing. Best of all, CDN does not require additional hardware, so there is really no downside to using these systems.

In closing, we at CCBill want to support our entire Client-base in their efforts to:
? maximize site performance
? decrease lost sales and increase member retention
? increase overall revenue

To assist you in this process, we have listed CDN providers below that have the technology to support both your Tours and your protected Member content, as well as flash and windows media streaming technology:

? Cavecreek CDN - Special Offer: 2 week free trial. A great way to test the performance difference between your current Host and CDN. With no commitment or automatic billing. One call to Cavecreek at the end of your trial places you back with your current hosting provider.)
? Natnet CDN
? Mojohost CDN


Thank you


Mark Greenspan
VP of CCBill Risk

Interesting i wonder if Webair offer this option ?

Don't forget Amazon S3 service. Cheap, no minimums, although their are only east-west US servers last I knew of. At the very least, a good place to stuff your images and other static crap on critical pages.

Kind of looks like creative spam to me.

Nonsense. Localized content being faster is truly worthy of a P.R. campaign.

Sounds like a pretty lame spam,
they throw out meaningless numbers like "up to 35% of the time .... were unable to join because of connectivity issues"

but where it really counts they give out vague stats: "noticeable decrease in form load times"
noticeable?!

Like they couldn't have said: "On average form load times dropped by 15.3%, which resulted in 4.3% better conversion rates"

For some mysterious reason they forgot to include the punchline, that conversions increased by X.X%...

What I want to know is, how did they find these Cavecreek people? :karaoke

Let me comment here. Generally, the peak transaction time during the day in a region is in the afternoon/evening, and this is going through the various regions. Ie conversions and declines are higher in the morning(MST) because it is peak time in other parts of the world and domestic traffic generally converts better.

At any given point, connectivity is poor for 10-35% of the regions that are hitting their peak time. In other words, when we hear a consumers complaints about a clients sites speed, we will hit it from other parts of the world and its is frequently slow in some areas?you cant download a trailer faster than 2k

We don?t want to throw conversion numbers out because its hard to qualify unless both the site + processing pages are on the CDN?but it does make a difference when one site lets you download a 300 meg file in 30 seconds and the other site takes 4 hours.

Good work Mark:thumbsup

my sales after averaging certain numbers, certain highs/lows for years, have hit an incredible AMAZING lows, for the past 2 weeks, i'm shocked

this is based on the same traffic amounts and same traffic sources

i'm scared, and shocked at the numbers now

Mark, thanks for taking the time to explain this.
its valuable.

thanks mark for the info

for me this has been my worst sales past 2 weeks with an increase in freakin traffic!

This is pretty interesting. I'm surprised not more companies offer content delivery network service.

Compare the difference between the CCBILL join form and the Epoch join form. Layout and loading times.

It?s a hard concept to get across in a small paragraph.

Lets say the prime purchasing time for our product is 4pm to 10pm, around the world.
It helps for me to picture a globe with a revolving ?slice? in it that represents the 4-10 time slot from around the world.

Now throughout your 24 hour day, visitors from that 4-10 slot are hitting your site from around the world. At any one point during the day, 10-35% of the users in that slot that could purchase products from your site, are unlikely to do so because of very slow connectivity issues. We have tested our clients sites in many cities where there is a lot of purchasing power (ie London) and the site would take forever to load, or the videos would lag and be unviewable.

The point being that your site may be quick for most people, but you have a small-mid percentage of people that have a way to pay you, and have access to the internet, but cant because they are getting download speeds of 2k/sec.

This has been frustrating the Policy Review Department for years, as they are required to test our sites from multiple locations around the globe whenever we get complaints and this has been an ongoing issue for years, with no real solution until the Content Delivery Solution (mainstreams solution to the problem) entered adult.

i just think its funny that they wrote all that then slipped in linkss that go to the hosting company that they own. create spam, but helpful none the less.

on a side note, you might not even need new servers, just new apache settings. default settings usually aren't good for paysites that are sending out lots of images with every request.

paul,

i cant comment on speed times because all my testing tools cant get to ccbills form, keeps throwing errors, even if i hardcore the variables into the link to test.

I can however verify that Epochs page would load a lost faster if all other variables were equal based on the fact that Epochs join form is 84Kb and CCBills is 137Kb.

Aesthetics wise, I prefer the Epoch form, but thats a personal opinion. I also prefer it because Epoch shows it to me in MY language, not by guessing a language based on my IP, every browser tells the server what language it prefers. guess some people ignore this fact.

Neither one are hosting their join forms in Europe. So no real added value from where i am standing.

i hope not so many people discover the advantages of CDNs soon ;)

hey bro, read again what you wrote:

you have had the same traffic amounts and same traffic sources for years? come on man that's just not possible, think about it.

For example: If you bought traffic from Google for years, the traffic you bought back in 2003 is a helluva lot different than what you get today.

A hun spot is a helluva lot different today than it was in 2002 also.

Same for Yahoo.

It's all going to shit. :(

i agree, there is a steady decline in traffic per sale, yes i agree

i'm saying, my traffic is still niche-targetted traffic that i send to niche paysites, and the amounts of clicks are roughly the same amounts, no avoiding steady decline, but just saddens me how 2 weeks ago my traffic seemed to skipped a few years ahead

I disagree.

A lot of the solo girl programs rely on only CCBill for their billing and they've noticed a drop in sales in the past three months. This is a serious business and has obvious trends, and something isn't right.

Seems to me like CCBill is on top of it.

CCbill is the fucking shit! They are always looking to help the webmaster make more cash.

Thanks Mark, we love the insight of the Content Delivery Service Network.

Why not boost connectivity to those rotating 4-10 Nodes by having servers ramp up and down during a 24 cycle?

I invented Chronglobal Targeted Connectivity.

I dont think the drop in sales over the past three month is down time.The economy is going in the shitter, people cant pay mortgages, credit card companies are increasing interest rates just for the fuck of it. This all plays in making sales you don't need a membership to jack off.

People that believe all the hype about cdn are fools. A good solid backbone of solid tier 1 providers and solid peers offers just as fast and at a better price then most over priced cdn networks. The time difference is nill if any at all.:2 cents::2 cents:

Seeing the same here the past two weeks have gone to complete shit with my CCbill sites...:helpme

I think in all fairness all hosts that offer CDN should be listed in this 'campaign' WEBAIR has offered CDN services to our clients for years, as do most notable hosting companies IMHO. If you are interested in CDN services check to see that your existing host offers it as well.

Details on WEBAIR'S GLOBAL HOSTING CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN) can be found here: http://www.webair.com/host_cdn.htm

We will also offer a 2 week CDN trial free of charge to all interested parties.

WEBAIR CDN Services Include:

* * 100% Guaranteed Service Level Agreement 24x7 Customer Support Team
* * 24x7 Network Operations Center
* * Networks Web Reporting Package
* * Limelight's network is architected for high-performance, efficient delivery of media content and software.
* * Highly-scalable delivery & storage. Each delivery hub is multi-gigabit connected to top Tier1 Carriers
* * Massively provisioned distribution centers connected to commercial and private peering into all of the major Tier-1 carriers
* * Ultra-scalable distributed delivery network gives best delivery at any usage level and under any network condition.

If your host is carrier neutral you can also purchase CDN directly from Limelight or Akamai. However, since we purchase through both companies in bulk your pricing will be far less with Webair.com. Our CDN technology will support both your Tours and your protected Member content, as well as flash and windows media streaming technology.

If you have any questions of comments we would love to hear from you! :thumbsup

at 14% wouldn't you :winkwink:

we've been running content on CDN networks for several months and it can be very beneficial. When we had our HBO exposure in October and November we wouldn't have survived without CDN.

Thankfully all the tens of thousands of people hitting our sites were hitting cached pages of tour videos. Thank fuck for CDN...

I'll just park my sig right here.

great post, its my understanding that righthosting and nakedhosting offer it as well

nice allen, CDN is just another product that will take forever for adult to adapt and take advantage of, nothing new whatsoever I was selling CDN when I was at Digital Island in 1997 I tried selling to adult but how do you convince people to use a CDN when they were still hosting in house? Fortunately the larger smarter companies get it, others not so much. :2 cents:

So does TechieMedia:winkwink:




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add techiemedia, webair, righthosting and nakedhosting to the list :)

if mark was a woman i would impregnate him.