Walmart is defining the industry standard for good mobile Web experience, according to Gomez Inc.

Mobile Marketer interviewed Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez. Here is what he said:

What is this month's data showing at a high level? What common thread, if any, runs throughout the airlines, banks, retail and search companies' mobile Web performance?
For April, the mobile Web performance leaders maintained their positions across industries and industry performance categories. 

Amazon continued to lead the pack across all mobile search performance categories, including availability, response time and consistency.

Bank of America retained its leadership ranking as the fastest mobile banking Web site. 

For mobile airlines, SouthWest continued to dominate in availability, while Continental continued to lead the response time category.

While these companies lead their industry peers in mobile Web response time, speed must remain a priority for mobile Web performance improvement. 

Recent research shows that after just three seconds, up to 40 percent of online visitors are likely to abandon your site.

Yet even Continental, who delivered the best mobile Web response time across all these industries at 3.103 seconds, still exceeded this three-second threshold.

What is unusual for this particular tracking period?
Several things are unusual for this tracking period: First, Walmart has significantly improved in the mobile retail category, delivering a blazing-fast response time of 2.023 seconds.

Although several retailers - Amazon, QVC and Newegg - delivered response times of three seconds or less, Walmart had even the closest competitor beat by almost a full half-second ? a significant amount by today?s response time standards.

This performance edge is likely to pay off for Walmart, if it can consistently maintain its fast response time.

Another unusual finding from mobile retail is that 1800Flowers experienced some significant performance drop-offs this month ? including a response time that exceeded 22 seconds - up from around five seconds in recent months - and the industry?s lowest availability and consistency rankings for the month. 

Several mobile search companies also exhibited steep performance declines, resulting in some major, erratic differences in end-users? mobile search experiences, depending on which site they used.

How will this affect banks/airlines/search companies' interactions with customers and end-users?
This month?s findings are going to impact companies? interactions with customers and end-users in several ways:

First, companies like Walmart are defining the industry standard for a ?good? Web experience and setting the tone for user expectations across all the Web sites they encounter. 

This means that no company is exempt from delivering a Walmart-level mobile Web experience, even if they are much smaller by comparison.

Second, research has shown that a single poor Web experience can result in a string of negative actions taken by end-users, including leaving for a competitor?s site, being less likely to return to a site, having a less positive perception of the company and/or discussing it with family, friends and peers, or online on social networks.

For this reason, companies need to focus on consistent delivery of excellent end-user experiences. 

Online consumers are fickle, and make no bones about it ? one poor experience is all it takes to drive them away, no matter how strong your performance may have been in the past.

Any recommendations from Gomez based on the data?
Know who your industry leaders are at any given point in time and compare your performance to theirs, because they are the ones shaping your end-users? expectations today.

While strong performers tend to remain strong performers, there?s always the likelihood of someone pulling way ahead, like Walmart.

Never underestimate how significant even slight performance optimizations can be, and don?t rest until you achieve them. Recent research from Google underscores how critical even fractions of a second can be when it comes to maximizing online revenue-generating pot