For the month of February, Gomez Inc. found that in order to maximize success in the mobile Web world, businesses need to maintain exceptional speed and reliability for all key user segments around the world.

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) is running throughout the airlines, banks, retail and search companies mobile Web performance?
For the month of February, mobile banking was the only benchmark category where Gomez?s 2009 ?Best of the Web? winner (Bank of America) emerged as the top performer. 

To us, this shows there are no ?sacred cows? and your competitors are always making strides in their endeavors to out-perform you. 

Across benchmark categories, we saw several instances where ?up-and-comers? would surge past a ?Best of the Web? winner and/or other traditional category leaders in one performance area, only to fall short in another performance area.

These mixed results undercut overall performance gains.

What is unusual for this particular tracking period?
In mobile search, Google (2009?s ?Best of Web? category winner) and Amazon continued to dominate in the performance categories of response time and consistency. 

However, this month Google?s availability dropped almost a full percentage point (98.34 in January to 97.39 in February). 

In mobile airlines, Southwest beat JetBlue (2009?s ?Best of the Web? category winner) in both availability and response time. 

Both companies were the only ones to rank above average in all three performance categories. While United and Continental also seem to be picking up some steam, these companies lagged in the response time and availability categories, respectively. 

Each shortfall placed a drag on the sites? overall performance. 

In mobile banking, Bank of America and Wells Fargo remained the overall performance leaders, although Wachovia actually beat Wells Fargo in the area of availability by the slimmest of margins. 

Finally, in mobile retail, Amazon clearly pulled ahead of the pack as the performance leader, beating out ?Best of the Web? category winner Best Buy in all three performance categories.

How will this effect banks/airlines/search companies' interactions with customers and end-users?This month, while traditionally strong performers tended to remain strong by comparison, they exhibited some surprising performance declines. 

In addition to Google?s above-mentioned availability decline, Best Buy saw their response time increase from 2.55 seconds in January to 3.7 seconds in February. 

For industry leaders such as these, the impact of performance declines on brand, customer satisfaction and revenues can be deep. 

Consider that for a major ecommerce operation, a single hour of downtime can result in losses of over a million dollars, while a one second delay in response time can reduce online conversions by 7 percent, according to Aberdeen. 

While these statistics apply to the ?traditional? PC Web, recent studies have shown a waning consumer tolerance for poor mobile Web performance.

Recommendations from Gomez (based on the data)?
To maximize success in the mobile Web world, businesses need to maintain exceptional speed and reliability for all key user segments around the world at all times. 

This means businesses must focus equally on all the performance criteria, including availability, response time and consistency. 

Excellent availability of 99 percent uptime or more means little if your response time is painfully slow and users leave your site in droves. 

Likewise, lightning-fast response time means nothing if users can?t access your site. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the user needs to be the center of your mobile Web performance optimization strategy. 

This means you need to measure the experiences of key user segments at the outer edges of the Internet and use this as a baseline for improving performance.