

How moving to Amazon Cloudfront increased our App Store conversion by 250% - iamclovin
http://dev.anideo.com/post/15021361987/how-moving-to-amazon-cloudfront-increased-our-app-store

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leoedin
The only problem with this article is that it makes the assumption that app
downloads are correlated with resource loading speed, which really could be
completely incorrect.

The hacker news traffic was very targeted, watching a specific video for the
content. Assuming the HN traffic was during period which saw 6-8% conversion,
the real cause of the low conversion rate is almost certainly due to people
clicking through from HN, watching the video and leaving without looking at
the site at all. I don't even own an iPad, and frankly when someone links a
video on HN or similar social sites, I watch the video and leave, regardless
of the video sharing site.

I'd assume their more day-to-day traffic is getting there via other sources.
Perhaps people saying "check out this app", perhaps people coming through
search engines looking for ipad related video - essentially a much more
targeted audience.

I could be completely wrong. Based on the information presented, I've made a
huge number of assumptions. However, I'd be truly surprised if decreasing the
load time of your static assets is really the driving factor in visitor
conversions.

Edit: It seems their "App store downloads to web visit ratio" isn't really a
conversion factor as much as a comparison of the two. My interpretation of it
is that they now receive 28% of their web visits in downloads (for every
hundred web visitors, they receive 28 app "downloads" (although it's not clear
whether a "download" is a video load, or an app install)). Surely that's just
because their web traffic has fallen after the HN spike? I'm not convinced
that there's any real basis to the key claim made at the bottom.

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PanMan
Interesting datapoint, that the quicker loading of the page made that much a
difference. Also I think the conversion ratio of 25% is really high. 1 in 4
getting your app? whow). Anyway, this pushed me to set-up a cloudfront
distribution to do some tests. And while sometimes it's really fast, sometimes
it is also a lot slower than our normal server (300ms vs 50ms or so).

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Kudos
Try other CDNs. If you're happy to pay, you can certainly get an awful lot
better than Cloudfront.

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ropiku
Can you provide more info ? I'm interested in what CDNs do you think are
better ?

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jerhewet
MaxCDN (subsidiary of NetDNA). They're faster, the support tools are
substantially better (invalidation on Cloudfront is the very definition of
"suck"), the uptime is better, and the cost is a _LOT_ lower.

Their support for .Net isn't very good, so it took me a while to get things
working for their REST services. Overall a much better product with much
better support.

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latch
I see people stick things on S3 and assume it's fast, because it's fast for
them. But, the difference between cloudfront and S3 (US) from Asia is huge.

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justincormack
Out of interest, what is the difference for you of an S3 bucket in Asia versus
Cloudfront?

The other thing I am never sure about with CDNs is whether they will actually
keep your items resident always, even infrequently used ones. If they evict
them and go back to origin it does not help. Has anyone done eviction tests on
say cloudfront to see what the policies are.

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latch
10mb binary file

US Standard avg 112k/s took 1:31

Singapore avg 1290K/s took 0:07

Tokyo avg 895K/s took 0:11

Cloudfront avg 8758k/sec took 0:01

I'm in Hong Kong on a 100mb up/down line (and I can hit 10MB/sec up and down
(at the same time)). The last 3 hops to cloudfront (ctinet is my provider):

    
    
      5  014136128014.ctinets.com (14.136.128.14)  4.673 ms  3.392 ms  3.210 ms
      6  119.27.63.37 (119.27.63.37)  3.624 ms  4.393 ms  3.298 ms
      7  server-216-137-55-171.hkg1.cloudfront.net (216.137.55.171)  3.519 ms  3.594 ms  3.340 ms
    

the relevant hops to singapore (it starts to get blocked at 12)

    
    
      7  * ge-1-0-3-xcr1.hkg.cw.net (203.169.57.33)  7.182 ms  4.902 ms
      8  xe-0-2-0-xcr1.sng.cw.net (195.2.10.30)  37.951 ms  38.858 ms *
      9  p38895.sgw.equinix.com (202.79.197.87)  41.037 ms *  43.288 ms

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rafamvc
Very misleading title. It should read: "How our slow css and js increased our
bounce rate."

