Your Website's Response Time Will Affect Your Google AdWords Campaigns
Everybody understands that it’s important to monitor a website for uptime, after all if your website is down you’re down. But it’s not as simple as that. You also need to monitor your server’s response times. That is the time it takes from the time you request a webpage to the time loads in your web browser. The longer the response time the worse the user experience. No one wants to wait for a page to load anymore, we’re no longer living in the dial-up modem era.
And for those of you who use Google AdWords, you’ll really want to pay careful attention to your website’s response times. Google has recently indicated that a website’s response time will be incorporated into the Quality Score. And any affects in the Quality Score will therefore affect the eligibility and minimum prices for your ads!
The key to monitoring a website’s response time is to get an average from multiple sources on a continual basis. You need to take the average response time throughout the day to compensate for when your server is handling more requests, and thereby responding slower. You also need to measure the response times from different sources because some paths on the net may get bogged down for reasons unrelated to your web server’s performance.
So how do you this cost effectively? I recommend using a website monitoring service. For my company LandlordMax we use Pingdom, and we’re extremely happy with them. What initially attracted us to their service was Pingdom’s blog, which I recommend reading if you have a chance. There’s lots of great material in there.
In any case a good average response time should be well under 500 ms per request. You can find our uptime and response times graphs for LandlordMax below:
As you can see there are always some issues. In the first graph, the uptime graph, our website was down for a total of 5 minutes for the month of March. Although we want 100% uptime, it rarely happens, not without excessive costs. To be honest, until you really monitor your website you probably won’t realize the real uptime. A lot of people are surprised when they see these graphs! They never really thought that their websites were ever down. But if you think about it, OS patches often cause a 5 minute outage. Even with load balancers you can go down for a bit as you tweak the load balancers themselves.
Another great benefit with these types of service is that they will contact you when your website does go down. They’ll contact you, depending on your preferences, by email, by text message, and so on. For us we’ve got it checking our server every 5 minutes, so I personally know within 5 minutes by text message when our server goes down. It’s great peace of mind!
But going back to our discussion about response times, on average our (LandlordMax‘s) response times are about 200 ms. That’s great! We’re very happy with this. We had a couple of glitches were the response times exploded to 1 second, but overall it’s a very good looking graph. And even 1 second is better than many many websites out there.
On Pingdom’s blog, they’re kind enough to provide some graphs to show the dramatic differences in response times some websites have experienced. The following shows a very significant difference in response time starting at 4pm. Based on the blog’s comment, the difference in response time is because they switched hosting services.
And here’s another graph from Pingdom which shows what a dramatic difference optimizing your webpage code can have on your response times:
Obviously there’s a lot you can do to optimize your website’s response times. It’s worth monitoring, especially if you use Google AdWords!
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LandlordMax is in the City Newspaper!
Looks like we made it in the newspapers again this last weekend! This time we were written up in the city’s major newspaper The Ottawa Citizen.
It’s a great article explaining the history of my company LandlordMax, who we are, what we’re about, and where we’re going. Very well written and very accurate. I have to say I’m impressed with Gary May, the journalist that wrote the article. He did a fantastic job with the facts. Thank you Gary!
For those of you who might have missed Saturday’s paper or aren’t from around here, you can also read the article online here.
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LandlordMax Sales Mapped in the US
Last week in a discussion with LandlordMax‘s publicist Randy Ray over email, he asked me in which cities we had sales. That quickly reminded me of Ian Landsman’s post on his blog about his company’s customer map (HelpSpot). So I thought why not make a similar one for LandlordMax, a LandlordMax Customer Map if you will.
The map above consists of all the sales we’ve had in the US over the last year and a bit (excluding Alaska and Hawaii as well as Canada and any international sales). I originally had all sales but it was impossible to get any value from it. As well please note that each city is included only once, so if we have one or one billion sales of LandlordMax in New York city, it’s only considered as one dot here. I didn’t know how to scale up the map points, so if anyone knows how I’d be appreciative if you could share.
As well I’d like to give a quick thanks to GPSVisualizer.com for their free service. I took the easy way and had their site generate this map. It’s a great tool! Otherwise I would have used the following PHP code by Monte Ohrt as recommended by Ian.
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
As I generally do, I’m going to share with you another great customer testimonial we recently received. This time it was through our discussion forums, so you can read the full thread. Although it isn’t in the thread, I asked Paul for permission to post it and he agreed through direct email.
“My daughter is putting all out houses and apartment in the trial version,(the correct stuff this time) while i am going. It took me about 5 minutes to show her and she really likes the program.
I want to thank you for all the extra time and help you have given me via our emails. You sure have going out of your way to help me and to made this work for us.”
Thanks again
Paul
If you haven’t already noticed, Paul’s also started several other threads on the discussion forums. He’s an active member of our online community.
Thank you Paul for the testimonial.
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When it Rains it Pours
Just last Saturday, 6 days ago, I posted about our recent big successes. Not only that, but I stated “as a general philosophy I believe it’s a good thing to share your successes AND failures“. Well today I’m going to share our big misadventures that happened yesterday. It was a brutal day! Luckily we’ve surmounted everything that was thrown at us and we’re back up and running at 100%.
What happened? Two major things.
The night beforehand we just noticed that our SSL certificate expired. The exact same thing happened to us last year, and I vowed to myself not to let it happen again. I still can’t believe I missed it, but I did. Of course, again like last year, our website was still completely safe it’s just that our website wasn’t a “trusted” site so we got that horrible warning in the web browsers.Obviously the first thing we did is purchase a new SSL certificate. It was installed by early afternoon the next day. But for about 12 hours our purchase page wasn’t officially “trusted” even though it was completely safe (don’t get me started on how useless and a cash grab I think this market is). Although I can’t know for the sure the impact this had on our sales, I can’t imagine it helped.
Secondly, and with a much bigger effect, a small upgrade was performed on our server the night before which didn’t go as planned and eventually caused our webserver to shutdown right around lunchtime. It took about an hour to figure out what was going on and to fix the issue. So for an hour we were completely down.
But it doesn’t stop there. Once we were back up and running, we were getting seg faults from our server. What this means is that the webserver wasn’t entirely stable and would error out. Something was still wrong. Although it wasn’t completely shutting down the server, something wasn’t right and it needed to be resolved right away. Without getting into the technical details, we basically worked with our hosting provider to resolve this issue over an hour or two. The eventually solution that worked was to rebuild our webserver.
The downside of rebuilding our webserver is many of our settings and customizations were lost. So for about 2-3 hours our main page looked horrible. For example the header and menu items weren’t showing up at all. You could still purchase the software safely and securily, but you couldn’t access the menus to navigate the website.
Before I continue let me just say that Servint, our managed solutions hosting provider, was great and worked with us the whole way. They knew what they were doing, and if it wasn’t for them, well I don’t really want to think about it… Yes they do charge a premium, but they’re worth it. When we really need them, they were there. I’d also like to especially thank Tommy from Servint, he was very knowledge and helpful. He was great. He saved the day for us. Thank you Tommy!
Getting back to our adventure, or should I say misadventure, Tommy eventually figured out what happened and resolved the issue. Of course it didn’t end there. My other site FindYourWeddingDress.com was also down due to some other technical issues. Thankfully they were also able to resolve this pretty quickly. We had a few more issues, but everything seems to be completely back to normal now. What a day!
Before I leave, let me share one last thing that really surprised me. During the few hours we were down, or mostly down, we still managed to generated some sales! I’m still shocked by this now. I expected we’d get absolutely no sales during this time. The site was completely down for an hour, then the site was barely operational. I wouldn’t have bought anything from us during this time. Yet we still managed to get some sales. What does it mean? I don’t know. All I can say is that I’m still shocked by this.
And there you go. Today I’ve just shared with you our most recent failures and struggles. This week we failed to renew our SSL certificate on time. Not only that, but we also struggled to keep our website up and fully operational for a few hours. Thankfully we rose to the situation and we’re fully back up and running now. What a day. When it rains it pours!
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LandlordMax Breaks Sales Record
Every once in a while I share some of our sales metrics, and this month I’m excited to say has been great. We had some clear successes:
- We beat our previous monthly sales record by a full 25.2% (in one month!)
- Unique visitors for the month is up by another 10% (another new monthly record)
- Downloads of LandlordMax trials were up 40%. This is a very significant increase. And since most sales usual come when the 30 day free trial is about to expire, next month should be very interesting…
- We got a great video review of LandlordMax on theREIbrain.com.
- The feedburner stats on this blog clearly increased more than usual (about 20% more than usual)
- This blog had more unique visitors this month than any other month
And a few other successes that aren’t as publicly interesting.
In any case, as a general philosophy I believe it’s a good thing to share your successes AND failures. I’ve shared both of them here on this blog many times. Today I’m proud to share our most recent successes.
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LandlordMax Customer Video Review
As part of my monthly tasks, I look at our affiliate sales to see who’s selling what. As you would expect, the majority of affiliates don’t really generate any sales. To quote Andy Brice “From discussion on various forums it seems that very few products do well enough at affiliate sales to justify the effort involved. If you do decide to have an affiliate program make it as automated as possible”. However as part of running a business you still need keep track of your affiliates, especially those that do convert.
And to my surprise, as part of doing this monthly process, I found that someone had done a full review of LandlordMax. They wrote about two pages worth (a pretty in depth review). But what’s really exciting is that they also went through the trouble of creating a 20 minute video reviewing LandlordMax! A full 20 minutes.
Some of the highlights of the written part of the review include:
- LandlordMax is a property rental management software that is up a level from Quicken. Not that Quicken isn’t a great product… it is… but LandlordMax has more features and is overall a more functional and robust system for people that want more than the basic features Quicken offers.
- The price point of Landlord Max is $147. Compared to Quicken this is about $60 more… but as you’ll find in the video below… it may be well worth it (I’m actually switching over to LandlordMax).
- Really… I have a tough time finding a ton of things I don’t like about the software. Maybe after I use it everyday for a couple months I may come up with a few features that bug me… or that I would like to see… but after going through it really in-depth today… I am extremely pleased with LandlordMax.
- For me, this software is a good hybrid between a commercial rental property management software (ones for $500+ for property management companies) and Quicken (which is an excellent?simple software for people with less than 20 units).
- You get the lower price of a consumer property management software… with most of the advanced features of a $500+ commercial property management software.
Overall the reviewer gave us a 4.5 out of 5! If you haven’t already clicked on one of the links to the review itself, you should go see the LandlordMax review now. It’s a great review. Thank you Trevor!
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LandlordMax Customer Testimonial
As all you long time readers know, I really love to share some of the best customer testimonial we get for LandlordMax Property Management Software. Today’s comes from KK Chan:
“Your support and response time on this matter has been awesome. Am glad I bought your software.”
– KK Chan
Thank you. It’s great to receive such positive feedback as yours!
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The Year 2007 in Retrospect
Seeing as the year 2007 is about to come to a close I thought now would be a great time to go back and reflect on everything I’ve accomplished throughout the year. Like I always like to say, reward your successes and learn from your failures.
Successes
- LandlordMax sales multiplied last years, which is much better than a percentage increase!
- Traffic to LandlordMax Property Management Software has also multiplied.
- We’ve released several updates of LandlordMax for version 3.11, including several new features and reports
- LandlordMax now fully supports Windows Vista
- We’ve contracted a great publishing agent to help us promote LandlordMax, FollowSteph, etc. which has resulted in several articles in the papers so far (and more scheduled to come in early 2008)
- We broke our one day sales records several times
- We broke our monthly sales record
- A lot of progress has been made in getting another major upgrade of LandlordMax out the door for 2008
- We’ve started to work on a networked and multi-user version of LandlordMax
- We’ve started to work on a browser based version of LandlordMax
- We’ve had some great support for an upcoming Mac version of LandlordMax which we hope to offer in 2008
- We’ve received more customer testimonials this year than all other years combined
- We’ve re-opened up a discussion forum on LandlordMax
- We’ve started working on a significant redesign of the LandlordMax website (mainly the front page)
- We completely redesigned and rebuilt the purchase pages to make them much easier
- Traffic to FollowSteph has greatly increased!
- RSS Feed subsribers is growing at a very good rate
- Increase the direct revenues of FollowSteph by about 800% (from advertising, affiliate links, etc.)
- I was interviewed on StartupSpark.com
- Many articles have had very high search engine placements
- Many articles have received high numbers of comments
- Many articles rank very high in the search engines
Others
- I started to write a book interviewing several of the most prominent bloggers online (for which I’m almost done compiling all the interviews and will be sending it off for editing very shortly). A lot of very prominent bloggers accepted to be part of this project which is great (I need to update the list). After reading all the interviews and compiling them, I can tell you this is definitely going to be an amazing book to read. There’s lots of great advice!
- I’m in the process of creating a new website called FindYourWeddingDress.com. We’ve already hired one part-time person to assist us in this task. We’re hoping to fully launch it within the next few months.
- We released the website WhichJar.com
Failures
- We had an issue with our SSL certificate on the LandlordMax purchase page. We always maintained 100% security, it’s just that we somehow didn’t renew our certificate on time and therefore weren’t officially certified for a few days. This was quickly rectified. It won’t happen again!
- Although we released the website WhichJar.com, there is currently not enough data in the database to really make it viable (we only have a few hundred open source projects stored so far). Therefore this project has been sidelined for now until I have the available resources and time or until I can find someone to partner up with. The failure is that I didn’t appreciate the data population effort that would be required
- I started an Online Sales and Marketing book which I didn’t complete. The good news is that it successfully transitioned this effort to the blogging book, which is a great success! I’m hoping to return to it sometime in late 2008 if time permit but for now it’s on hold.
- I had quite an experience with Telus with my cell phone service
This is what I can remember by just going through the blog. All in all a pretty busy year. For next year I expect to achieve even more.
Here are my goals for next year:
Goals:
- I expect the book to be available in bookstores such as Amazon.com by the Spring of 2008.
- I expect to sell over 100,000 copies of the book by end of year 2008
- I expect to more than quadruple LandlordMax sales revenues by the end of 2008
- I expect to multiply my RSS feeds on FollowSteph by end of the 2008.
- I expect to release a new major version of LandlordMax by spring/summer of 2008
- I expect to release the Mac version before the end of 2008
- I expect to release the networked/multi-user based version of LandlordMax by fall/winter of 2008.
- I expect to release the browser based version of LandlordMax by end of year 2008 or early 2009
- I expect FindYourWeddingDress.com to be fully functionning by spring/summer of 2008
- I expect to appear several more times in the media (newspapers, tv, etc.) for LandlordMax by the spring of 2008
- I expect to multiply the traffic of FollowSteph.com by at least five times before the end of 2008
- I expect to break several LandlordMax sales records this year, and again receive more testimonials than all previous years combined.
- I expect to fully complete the LandlordMax website redesign before the end of 2008
- I expect to give FollowSteph.com a significant face lift before the end of 2008
- I would like to release a cash flow analyzer software application as a complimentary product to LandlordMax before the end of 2008. We currently offer a free online cash flow calculator on the LandlordMax website, but I’d really like to expand this offering.
This is my list of successes/failures for 2007, and my goals for 2008. And because I publicly stated them here today, I’ll review them same time next year.
What about you? What are your big successes? What are your goals for next year? Did you know you increase your odds of achieving your goals if you publicly state them, especially if they include concrete terms and timelines.
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HelpSpot a Great Customer Service System
As some of you know we use HelpSpot from UserScape as our technical support system. We’ve been using it for some time and it’s a great product. Today we performed a much needed upgrade as we were behind one major upgrade and at least a few minor updates. That being said, I know Ian, the founder of UserScape, has been very busy increasing its capabilities, adding many new great features.
We’ve been wanting to upgrade for a while, the only issue we feared was that we had significantly customized the templates to our website’s look and feel and it might cost us some effort. Right now we’re extremely busy and will continue to get busier until tax season. Our busiest time is actually from early fall to the end of tax season. We however decided to go ahead with it because our discussion forum is getting hit with more and more spam and we could therefore use the new captcha feature in HelpSpot to try to reduce it. There are many other great features, it’s just that this is the one that interested us the most right now.
Well let me tell you how incredible easy it is to upgrade HelpSpot! They have a page which lists all the changes to the template files you need to make. I’ve never seen clearer instructions. Not only did he highlight the changes, but he also included some of the template code above and below some of the examples. This really helped in cases where we weren’t a hundred percent sure because of the heavier customization we had done. I’ve personally gone over many technical documents which were suppose to be “simple and clear instructions” but were completely useless. This one clearly explained how to upgrade the custom templates.
The upgrade was so easy and simple that I can’t give it proper justice. Based on some of my other experiences I expected it to take some effort, especially since we significantly customized our integration with HelpSpot. It took me all of 15 minutes! Yes, that’s right! In 15 minutes I was able to upgrade all our template files as well as the full system. Everything worked right out of the gate the first time. Even the templates. That’s amazing! Congrats to you Ian and your team.
The only negative thing I can say about this upgrade is that I didn’t do it sooner. Not only is HelpSpot a great product for customer service, but upgrading is a also incredibly quick and easy. Even with heavy customization!
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