Keynote Announces WebEffective 6.0 - Marketers and Advertisers Now Have the Ability to Collect and Analyze Online Customer Attitudes and Behavior on Web 2.0 Sites

Business Wire, Oct 16, 2007

* Version 6.0 Now Allows Web Site Marketers and Researchers to Easily Track User Interaction with Client-Side Events Including DHTML, AJAX and Flash

* New Version of Keynote's On-Demand Customer Research Product the Ideal Tool for Measuring the Effectiveness of Interactive Advertising; Unlimited Geographic Reach Provides a Usability Lab Without Walls

* Real User Performance Testing Leverages Keynote's 160,000 Member Panel; Ability to Now Capture Connection Speed, Page Load Time and Browse Time Provides Valuable Insights and Facilitates Discussion Between Marketing and IT/Web Ops

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN), the global leader in on-demand mobile and Internet test & measurement solutions for continuously improving the online experience, today announced WebEffective[TM] 6.0, it's on-demand, self-service user experience (UX) research tool. WebEffective is the market-leading, online research product used by companies to improve their Web site effectiveness and online business performance by conducting in-depth customer experience research. WebEffective 6.0 delivers a bevy of powerful new product capabilities including: comprehensive support for Web 2.0 sites; a new customizable participant user interface; and real user performance testing from any of 160,000 desktops to captures connection speed, page load time and browse time during the course of a site evaluation. WebEffective 6.0 provides Web marketers, researchers and advertisers a customer experience research and usability lab without walls.

WebEffective 6.0 is the ideal tool for testing and measuring the effectiveness of interactive advertising and marketing micro-sites built using Web 2.0 technologies. Companies investing in such sites are starting to take a closer look at their return on investment. WebEffective 6.0 provides powerful capabilities for measuring such return.

The new version of WebEffective now facilitates fast, accurate testing of end-user interaction with DHTML, AJAX and Flash, a combination of client-side technologies gaining in popularity used to create highly dynamic and interactive Web sites which mimic the rich functionality found in PC applications. The ability to capture a user's interaction with DHTML, AJAX and Flash is an important and much needed technical and industry advance. Until now, there have been no tools capable of accurately capturing and measuring the experience of users interacting with rich Internet applications (RIA), without a time-consuming instrumented approach requiring tags to be inserted manually on each piece of Web application functionality or page content wishing to be tracked.

"WebEffective provides companies insight not only into consumer behavior, but also into why they act the way they do," said Don Aoki, vice president and general manager, customer experience management at Keynote. "The truly unique thing about Keynote WebEffective is that it allows companies to answer the ever present question "why?" For example, why are customers abandoning shopping carts during the checkout process or not seeing a particular interactive ad on the page?"

Lisa Erickson-Harris, research director with Enterprise Management Associates said, "Keynote is once again pushing the envelope with the latest release of WebEffective 6.0. The company continues to focus on the most important aspect of IT--the customer experience. While innovation marches forward, as is the case with Web 2.0 technologies, the ultimate measure of technology's success is how the user experiences it." Erickson-Harris continued, "WebEffective 6.0 sheds light on the nuances of the user experience where many competitive products are more focused on high-level details of the site or low-level transaction information. While these factors are important, they often miss clues about how the user experiences various aspects of a particular Web site. WebEffective 6.0 uses technology and real users to measure aspects of the Web site and provides corporate executives with information that can be used to tune functionality in a way that is more palatable to the user."

Tracking Client Side Behavior

WebEffective 6.0 has evolved to keep pace with the changing nature of the Web. WebEffective has been extended to track user interaction with core client-side technologies - specifically DHTML, AJAX and Flash. Unlike an "instrumented" approach, tagging events manually is no longer required in order to monitor them. Consequently, WebEffective 6.0 works with any site, including competitors. With this new capability, WebEffective 6.0 will now allow researchers to trigger various actions based on client-side user behaviors (e.g. if a user scrolls more than 50% down page, display a specific question).

WebEffective 6.0 client-side events that will now be recorded are:

* Clicks: Not limited to clicking on a link, but also radio button/ checkbox selections and capture of on-page "jumps."

* Hover-overs: Whenever the user action causes the page content to change in a meaningful way.