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Application Sequencing
3rd Parties

YOTTAA’s Patented Application Sequencing and What it Means for eCommerce

The actual patent title “SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR MANAGING LOADING PRIORITY OR SEQUENCING OF FRAGMENTS OF A WEB OBJECT,” has been rolled up into our powerful Application Sequencing approach for optimizing eCommerce sites. This article explains the importance of this patent and how it enables our customers for success.

 

What is Application Sequencing?

Application Sequencing gives eCommerce sites the ability to change the loading order of their 3rd parties so that each shopper is served a specifically optimized page. One of the challenges with 3rd party technologies and content, in general, is that it’s very rigid in how it loads. There are some knobs that you can turn like asynchronous or differ, but that won’t give shoppers the optimal loading experience they need to convert. 

Application Sequencing really defines the ability to prioritize and schedule how 3rd parties load within your application. Our team extended its capabilities beyond 3rd parties to any piece of content, whether it be images, HTML, or anything else your application is made up of to be sequenced in the schedule.  Sequencing page assets creates a smooth, fast page vs the choppy experience you get turning those manual knobs.

Solution background

When we first started Yottaa, we built frontend optimization technologies to help improve the performance of web applications, doing things like compressing files and reducing file size. It worked well, but not well enough to support the high-level user experience that our customers were creating. 

Typically, we take a pragmatic approach to building new technologies, and look at all the sites that are within our market (1000s of eCommerce sites). Then, we run tests on them, and find out what is slow across all these sites. 

The biggest performance bottleneck for applications we noticed when testing was 3rd party technologies. They were driving the largest segment of performance issues. In fact, most of our customers have over 60% of their website being pulled off of 3rd parties and 3rd party domains. It was clearly a natural location to investigate a solution for, and that is how Application Sequencing was born. 

Do you know how your 3rd parties are affecting page load? Find out with a FREE Site Performance Snapshot.

Issue background

The problem online retailers often run into is that it’s very easy to add 3rd party applications to their sites via tag managers or code snippets. But what isn’t very easy is providing the optimal location for these 3rd parties to load. 

Not every technology needs to load right away. For example, a chat application. The chat application is never the first thing shoppers engage with, so if it’s being loaded early in the waterfall before it is being used, there is a chance it’s slowing the website down for nothing. 

Of course, there is a tradeoff on when 3rd party applications should be loaded; there is a risk to reward. For example, there is no reward for synchronously loading a chat application early, because the likelihood of a shopper using it early on is low. 

Identifying how all these technologies work and when they are used and how they are used is what we do behind the scenes with our machine learning and application sequence. In fact, we also have a 3rd Party Knowledgebase capturing information on every 3rd party for every page view. This information drives machine learning to ensure sequencing is optimal on each eCommerce site. But the Application Sequencing itself is the ability to choose the load order of the 3rd parties. 

Why Application Sequencing matters for eCommerce

Application Sequencing technology is unique because you do not need to code your application for it; Application Sequencing is applied to your application. So, no matter how you instantiate your 3rd parties, whether it’s a tag manager directly in the source or via some other code snippet, our sequencing technology can capture when those 3rd party requests are being loaded and then reorder them to be better prioritized and scheduled for the end user. 

Our technology is a holistic approach to load order optimization for eCommerce applications. eCommerce brands are the perfect candidates for this technology, as they have many 3rd party technologies that are used to drive shopper behavior, track consumers, enhance the user experience, and to provide additional discounts and coupons. All of the technology that goes into building an eCommerce website is very complex, and a lot of it comes from 3rd parties. 

However, massive amounts of 3rd parties are implemented by many people in the organization; it is not necessarily engineers implementing these technologies. For example, marketing or product teams that have less of a technical background are also implementing 3rd parties. And every “simple tag” is a full application running on your site. It’s never “just a simple tag” — it is literally a full blown application, and there are a lot of complexities that go with that.

That’s why Yottaa provides the ability to understand and gain insight across all of our customers’ 3rd parties, and apply this technology across the entire eCommerce landscape.       

Pushing past the limits

Application Sequencing allows brands a lot more freedom in choosing technologies. There no longer needs to be any trade off, removing the worry of “I can’t use this 3rd party because it might slow down my website.” Application Sequencing provides the freedom for brands to grow their set of 3rd party technologies while their sites stay perfectly consistent across load, across traffic fluctuations, and across all other experiences.    

In the future, more and more 3rd party applications will be developed and eCommerce brands will continually need to adapt, exchange, try out, and A/B test different technologies, all while keeping them fast with Application Sequencing. 

Evolving for the future of eCommerce

Since the patent was first written, Application Sequencing has constantly been evolving. We continuously add new features and functionality, and adapt to what brands need, whether that involves single-page applications (SPAs), responsive web design, or progressive web design (PWA). 

Tracking the behavior of the 3rd parties is an ongoing initiative, along with providing more statistics and recommendations for our customers. Our brands themselves have the ability to use this information to better optimize their web applications in a way that they would never be able to do on their own. There are a host of ways to use Application Sequencing far beyond just our imagination, and our customers are always finding new ways and ideas on how they want to apply it.     

Want to learn more about how Application Sequencing can help your site? Contact us today!