Ranking Studies: How it Works In order to provide a ground-up look at the performance of sites in an industry, Keynote implements two unique methodologies to gather a comprehensive and broad set of performance metrics on each site. Customer Experience Measures. To get a complete picture of the customer experience of web sites in a study, Keynote invites a large, demographically targeted sample of participants to access the Internet from their normal setting. With the help of a virtual moderator (a small downloadable browser companion, called the Keynote Connector) — participants are asked to perform tasks and provide feedback as they use particular Web sites. Meanwhile, Keynote's proprietary technology tracks their ability to complete these tasks, captures snapshots of the Web pages they are viewing and collects their thoughts and feelings as they interact with the sites. Keynote analysts then use the behavioral, qualitative and quantitative data collected from the panelists to rank the sites according to how well they are accomplishing key business goals such as: Acquiring new customers Retaining customers Building brand affinity Creating loyal customers Increasing customer satisfaction Motivating customers to adopt online services Providing a positive customer experience Keynote analysts then perform a driver analysis to identify which specific aspects of the sites have the biggest impact on these business goals. The analysts rank the sites on their performance on each of these areas. With this analysis, Keynote is able to tell companies what specific changes they should make on their sites in order to acquire new customers, build brand affinity, drive customer loyalty, etc. Service Level Measures. To gather data on the operational excellence or service levels of sites in a study, Keynote uses its Transaction Perspective® measurement computers ("agents") to mimic the actions of a consumer using the Internet Explorer browser to perform a common transaction on the sites. The agents perform this transaction on each site once an hour between 8AM to 12AM EST for a one-month period. The agents track more than 35 performance metrics and collect over 6500 data points on each site. Keynote analysts use these data points to rank the sites in the study on each of seven key performance factors, which are critical aspects of an operationally excellent site. These factors include: High Speed Responsiveness Dial-up Responsiveness Response Time Consistency Geographic Uniformity Load Handling Availability Outages For each of these key performance factors, Keynote identifies which sites excel, which do not, and exactly what changes the sites can make to gain a competitive edge. Keynote then uses the rankings and scores for each of these key performance factors to rank the sites in terms of their *overall* reliability and responsiveness, thereby providing a high-level competitive benchmark of operational excellence.