How do you understand real customer preferences and behaviors before your competition does? A/B testing offers a proven method. It allows you to experiment with serving different versions of your content, and then gauging their relative effectiveness. However, it typically requires a trip to the origin server to make the A/B decision regarding which piece of content to serve to the end user. This typically reduces cacheability. The long backhaul also results in reduced offload and added latency to the end-user request.
Edge Compute: Use Cases
Create functions at the edge to enable a/b testing, geolocation, data protection, device personalization, https responses, traffic management and more for serverless edge computing.
- A/B Testing
- Geolocation: Redirect
- Virtual Waiting Room (Queue-it Integration)
- Data Protection and Privacy Compliance
- Dynamic Website Personalization
- Traffic Manager: Allowlist
- Device-Based Personalization
- Search Autocomplete
A/B Testing
TRAFFIC ROUTING
A/B Testing
Akamai lets you do A/B testing without sacrificing performance.
Akamai technology allows you to place this decision-making logic at the edge, which offers several benefits. These include a faster and more consistent end-user experience, fewer origin requests, and automatic scaling of compute resources.
| Event Handler | Methods |
|---|---|
| OnClientRequest | setHeader() getHeader() route() |
| OnClientResponse | setHeader() getHeader() |
Challenges:
Segment an audience and route requests to different origins or different URLs without the overhead of updating the core delivery configuration or running into existing product limitations.
Segment traffic while maintaining peak performance.
Benefits:
- Reliable data — quantifiable impact of two or more versions of the same content helps to determine which version will have the maximum impact and drive business metrics.
Increase conversion rates by determining the best content for your audience and routing users to campaign-specific content.
Useful Links:
-
Reference Architecture -
Ebook -
Blog: A/B Testing, Now with EdgeKV -
Blog: Building an A/B Test with EdgeWorkers and EdgeKV -
Demo
Geolocation: Redirect
TRAFFIC ROUTING/PERSONALIZATION
Geolocation: Redirect
Add location-based personalization to boost online experiences and conversions.
User location data allows you to improve online experiences. It increases user engagement, reduces bounce rates, and increases conversions by delivering location-specific content to visitors. However, IP-based geolocation often requires sending a separate HTTP request to a geolocation service, which can decrease page load speed and increase visitor frustration.
Akamai addresses this challenge by performing IP-based geolocation quickly at the edge. The solution executes custom JavaScript logic at the edge of the internet, which makes it possible to customize the user experience based on unique business-defined geographical regions — without requiring additional HTTP requests from the browser.
| Event Handler | Methods |
|---|---|
| OnClientRequest | respondWith() |
Challenges:
- Provide unique experience for users without the overhead of creating a code.
- Protect the origin infrastructure from a surge of traffic.
- Avoid integration problems between the third-party applications and the user’s product.
Benefits:
- Reduce bounce rates and improve conversions by delivering location-specific content to visitors.
- Reduce latency of redirects by serving from the edge.
Useful Links:
Virtual Waiting Room (Queue-it Integration)
THIRD-PARTY SERVICES
Virtual Waiting Room (Queue-it Integration)
Avoid crashes and improve customer satisfaction during peak loads with virtual queues.
Too many people visiting a website can slow page loading or in some cases cause a site to crash. Research has shown poor performance at peak times can send 78% of customers to a competitor’s site.
Queue-it creates a virtual waiting room designed to manage website overload situations. It redirects visitors to the waiting room, and as availability frees it allows visitors access in the correct order — first come, first serve.
Akamai provides a quick way to integrate Queue-it at the edge, making it easy to add this functionality without touching your back-end application servers or writing code. The edge-native code also eliminates dependency on third-party infrastructures.
| Event Handler | Methods |
|---|---|
| OnClientRequest | setVariable() |
| OnClientResponse | addHeader() |
Challenges:
- Provide unique experience for users without the overhead of writing code from scratch.
- Protect the origin infrastructure from a surge of traffic.
- Avoid integration problems between third-party applications and the user’s product.
Benefits:
- Granular traffic control across our serverless computing platform.
- Reduced dependency on third-party infrastructure because the code is edge-native.
- Integrate third parties with no changes to application code.
Useful Links:
Data Protection and Privacy Compliance
CUSTOMIZED BUSINESS LOGIC
Data Protection and Privacy Compliance
Maintain data transparency and privacy legislation compliance without sacrificing performance.
Websites often embed third-party cookies — snippets of code — in visitors’ browsers so the sites can remember information between visits. In the past, they did this transparently without asking the visitors’ permission. Now, thanks to the advent of GDPR, CCPA, and other consumer privacy laws around the globe, websites must get consent for this third-party tracking.
However, performing these consents often conflicts with the goal of delivering a high-performing digital experience. Akamai addresses this challenge by moving consent-tracking functionality to the edge.
Maintaining compliance at the edge improves offload and enables cacheability. By allowing rapid lookups, this solution also improves the user experience while helping ensure privacy compliance. It further reduces unnecessary traffic back to the origin server, reducing infrastructure complexity and costs.
Challenges:
- Ensure consensual data tracking.
- Support data protection and privacy compliance based on the IAB TCF standardization.
Benefits:
- Filter out unnecessary traffic back to origin resulting in a reduction in origin infrastructure and costs.
- Increase offload.
- Maintain compliance without compromising performance and the end-user experience.
Useful Links:
Dynamic Website Personalization
PERSONALIZATION/DYNAMIC CONTENT
Dynamic Website Personalization
Dynamically deliver the right content to the right users.
Companies have learned that delivering a personalized user experience improves customer satisfaction and boosts revenue. But the functionality to identify the user and determine which content to present typically resides at the origin. Segmenting traffic with different experiences dilutes your cache and reduces site and app performance. It also makes the content uncacheable, which results in low offload and further hits to performance.
Akamai allows you to move the decision of which content to deliver close to the user. Performing this logic at the edge not only enables highly personalized user experiences but also increases offload and enables a faster, more consistent user experience.
Challenges:
- Maintain site and app performance while delivering personalized user experiences.
- Engage and retain customers.
Benefits:
- Improve site performance by caching the objects that comprise dynamically generated HTML pages at the edge.
- Speed time to market — quickly develop and deliver consumer experiences.
- Personalized content allows you to connect with your potential customers on a more familiar and in-depth level, resulting in increased user engagement and higher conversions.
Useful Links:
Traffic Manager: Allowlist
TRAFFIC FILTERING
Traffic Manager: Allowlist
Filter out unnecessary traffic to reduce application load and provide a faster and more consistent user experience.
Preventing or responding to network security threats while managing network usage to deliver the right experience to users presents huge challenges. However, backhauling to the origin to verify allowlists and denylists results in unacceptable latency.
Akamai technology enables you to take control of your traffic — whether it is controlling segments of users, maintaining third-party integrations, or nimbly responding to an urgent threat. The Traffic Manager Allowlist solution enables redirects and constructed responses based on conditional logic that meets your specific business needs. Plus, by performing these functions at the edge, it ensures a faster and more consistent user experience.
| Event Handler | Methods |
|---|---|
| OnClientRequest | respondWith() |
Challenges:
- Increased latency for requests on the allowlist.
- Unnecessary traffic to origin for requests on the denylist.
Benefits:
- Faster and more consistent end-user experience as the filtering logic will execute at the edge — closest to the end user.
- Filter malicious traffic — as designated by policies or for specific IPs — to keep it from accessing your network.
Useful Links:
Device-Based Personalization
PERSONALIZATION
Device-Based Personalization
Offer a high-touch digital experience for end users.
Delivering content custom-tailored to the user’s device type provides a more seamless and consistent user experience. However, detecting device type and delivering content optimized for it can require backhauls to the origin server, reducing offload and increasing latency.
Akamai edge technologies examine the inbound request to identify the characteristics unique to the user and provide responses that are tailored to those characteristics. Those could include the device’s connection speed, orientation, ability to support specific content, and even additional location info. This allows businesses to serve different versions of their sites or apps cached at the edge, and optimize them for the user’s smartphone, laptop, or other device.
| Event Handler | Methods |
|---|---|
| OnClientRequest | route() |
Challenges:
- Maintain site and app performance while delivering personalized user experiences.
- Increase user engagement and deliver on key business metrics.
Benefits:
- Detect characteristics of the inbound request to identify the device and retrieve device-specific content, allowing businesses to serve different versions of their sites or apps optimized for any device.
- Optimized content for improved user experience.
Useful Links:
Search Autocomplete
SEARCH
Search Autocomplete
Optimize your website and search engine performance with autocomplete.
Suggesting relevant search terms while a user types in a search box provides an easier way for visitors to use your website. It enables users to quickly find relevant content and to suggest information about products according to your business needs. However, tuning autocomplete is not easy — search requests frequently change and typically include long-tail keywords.
Akamai speeds autocomplete with several methods. Where it is unlikely the term exists in cache, Akamai technology accelerates the path to origin. Cache and prefresh speeds autocomplete for short search terms. Akamai also enables conditional caching based on the length of the search term.
| Event Handler | Methods |
|---|---|
| OnClientRequest | respondWith() |
Challenges:
- Improve search time to maximize performance.
- Reduce long-tail keywords, which are difficult to cache.
Benefits:
- Successful queries that lead to faster results, thus reducing bounce rates.
- Delivers content faster, which provides a better overall experience and increases opportunity to convert visitors to buyers.
- Educates users about your products and services — autocomplete shows product and content categories that align with business priorities.