The Marketers Hidden Advantage

Speed – The Marketers Hidden Advantage

Why should marketers care about Page Speed?

Page speed, a measurement of how fast a visitor to your website can see your product or service, is arguably the most straightforward way to gain a competitive advantage and differentiate yourself from the competition.

If you care about:

• Bounce rate.
• Return on advertising spend.
• Sales from your social links such as Instagram or Facebook.
• Time on the website.
• Cart size.
• SEO.
• Customer experience.
• Brand perception.
• Revenue.

Then you already care about page speed - you just might not know it!

Many studies have shown that page speed directly impacts the success of all online marketing and business metrics against which you are measured.

How does Speed give Marketers Competitive Advantage?

When a consumer visits your website, they are comparing you with direct competitors and subliminally rating you against the best-in-class services they use every day.

In their study ‘Milliseconds makes Millions’, Deloitte found that 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Being aware of your website’s page speed gives marketers a competitive advantage in several ways:

1. Provides greater visibility over the conversion process, enabling identification of issues such as slow images that impede customer purchase.

   First impressions matter and your customers form an opinion about a website or landing page within the first 50 milliseconds. (source: O’Reilly- Time is Money)

2. Enables a deeper understanding of the user experience that their online brand delivers and also if it is better or worse than the competition.

   Speed is the number one contributing factor to user experience and the Deloitte study found that over 61% of customers have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better experience.

3. Highlights accountability as website owners, developers or IT and Digital departments can be made more accountable for slow loading web pages that impact on online sales performance. The effectiveness of applied performance resolutions, or website enhancements can also be observed.

Quick Wins for Marketers

One of the most critical areas of the online buying experience is the pre-checkout stage. At this point , fast page speed is imperative as consumers have been found to be highly sensitive to slowly loading web pages and numerous examples are documented of abandoned baskets during the checkout process due to poor page speed.

Ebay are a great example of this. By improving their pre-checkout page load time by 0.1 of second they achieved a 0.5% increase in Add to Cart count which resulted in a significant impact to their sales and revenue. (source: Shopping for Speed on Ebay)

Focusing on the page speed of high value web pages, such as product detail pages, `new in` and special events, have been seen to deliver higher returns.

This is because marketing activities, through expensive advertising, PPC and email campaigns, target specific landing web pages. With the investment made to attract customers, it is easy enough for them to bounce from your website and go to a competitor if the online experience is poor because the landing web page does not load quickly enough.

How much could Page Speed improve my Sales?

Fast sites are known to convert better than slow ones.

Amazon has publicly stated that every 100ms of latency (loading delay) costs them 1% of their sales.

The 1968 paper, “Response Time in Man-Computer Conversational Transactions“ by IBM Researcher Robert B. Miller, studies found that people are ,and always have been most comfortable, efficient, and productive with response times of less than 3 seconds. Furthermore recent analyses has shown that as page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability the web page visitor will leave the web page (bounce) rises by 32%.

As a marketer, if you are aware of this, then you can take action with the website authors and other stakeholders to address this.

Consider the following:

• 50,000 Instagram users click your Bio Link to view a product on your website.
• If they had to wait between 1 and 3 seconds before any content is displayed, then potentially up to 16,000 of these users could have bounced.
• If we assume an average conversion rate of 1% and an average order value of £100 equates, then the revenue opportunity lost equates to £16,000.
• Anytime beyond 3 seconds further increases the probability of bounce as shown below.

Unfortunately, if you have a slow responding website, it will be your competition who benefit from your investment to attract visitors. A study by US retailers found that when a bounce occurs because of a slow loading web page, about 46% never return.

Remember Your Customers are Humans!

Further studies have found that the human stress response to delays in page speed is greater than waiting in a checkout line at a retail store.

However, fast loading web pages results in happier customers. Happier customers engage more with the website, return more often, and have higher average order values.

Even on optimised pages, as Amazon found, minor speed improvement of just 0.1ms can potentially yield an uplift of 20% more activity.

Wrapping Up

Many businesses unknowingly have a reliance on page speed as part of the customer experience they deliver, and revenue conversion achieved.

The eminent statistician Dr Edwards Deming is attributed with coining the phrase, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”. However, without key performance metrics being captured, then businesses are blind to this important aspect of competitive advantage. Consequently, visibility is key.

Brands that give customers the kind of crisp on-site experience they expect convert more, those who don’t must be prepared to watch customers go elsewhere.

Monitoring and improvement should never stop and brands that do not optimize their website speed may struggle to achieve their full revenue potential. Web page speed and performance is like getting fit, it’s not enough to make a one-time effort, you have to keep working at it, effectively to change your lifestyle.

Contact Webspeed Index to gain insights on how your website speed impacts on your competitive advantage.