Aptimize

Geekzone

What they needed

By its very nature, Geekzone needs to be at the leading edge of technology use and customer experience. Almost from the moment the Aptimize Web Accelerator software was launched in October 2008, Geekzone wanted to understand how the software could change the web experience for their users by accelerating load times and improving caching.

Until January 2009 Geekzone was jointly hosted in the US and New Zealand, but multiple redirections were leading to unacceptable latency. The decision was made to host Geekzone on a single site in New Zealand, and Geekzone founder Mauricio Freitas said the change presented a logical opportunity to consider Aptimize.

Given the significance of the change, Geekzone needed to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted transition.

As a business whose sole income stream is from advertising, Geekzone also needs to be able to demonstrate to advertisers increasing traffic, pageviews, low bounce rates and growing average time spent on sites.

The Aptimize Solution

Geekzone engaged with Aptimize to discuss their server issues and how the software might assist them address both performance issues and the changes needed. They ran Geekzone on a test server and resolved to place a cap on the number of up loads per second to 50.

With this customisation there has been no repeat of the latency problems and customer behaviour has changed well beyond what Geekzone had envisaged, particularly in relation to duration of visit.

“Aptimize is a response to a real need – broadband is fast within countries, the problem is that there is a big funnel when it comes to access from outside the country,” Mauricio Freitas says.

“Aptimize delivers on what it promises, and it has proven to be very straightforward. We needed to do some degree of customisation, and the Aptimize engineers made it really easy."

“I think the ultimate test of the benefit of faster load times is average duration of visit, the Aptimize solution promises stickier customers, with positive flow-on effects to referrals, advertising revenue and expansion of the site.”

Benefits

Aptimize software played an important role in the successful reassignment of Geekzone’s new server platform, and in addressing the latency issues the site had experienced previously.

The results speak for themselves. Comparing the months of January 2009 (before Aptimize was installed) and May 2009, Geekzone achieved:

• 35.10% increase in average time on site

• 13.63% increase in number of pages per visit

• 3.7 percent reduction in bounce rate

Importantly, too, given the imperative of local advertising support, Geekzone had a 34.76% increase in New Zealand visitors to the site.

In addition to this customer response, the enhanced caching ability means Geekzone can confidently add richer content without fear of declining performance.

“Anyone looking at these figures would have to be happy – and to know that we’ve got additional future-proofing as well is a real bonus,” Mauricio Freitas says.