Amanda Oliver — June 21, 2017 — June 21, 2017
Just like in Jaws, there’s something lurking beneath the surface of your conversion rates and affecting your return on ad spend. It has nothing to do with your copy, creative, or offers but it’s turning your customers away in droves just the same.
What is it? Your website load time.
You’re likely thinking, “Come on Amanda, my website loads in less than 12 seconds. That can’t have THAT much of an effect on the number of conversions.”
Sorry darlin’ (I’m from the South, I get to say things like that), but you’re wrong. Taking just 11.5 seconds to load cost one of our e-commerce clients a 63% loss in revenue per session and a 20% decrease in conversions for a lead generation brand.
So now that I’ve caught your attention with the numbers, let’s dig deeper.
Girl, You Look Good When You Back That Data Up
Everyone likes it when you put your numbers where your mouth is, so here’s how we got to those figures.
To make sure we were looking at brands that would make excellent representatives, we picked an e-commerce retail client, a subscription box client, and an EDU client that cumulatively spends around $ 2.5 million in Facebook advertising each month.
We pulled the data for each of these companies for the last 30 days. We then looked at the landing pages their Facebook ads sent traffic to and found the conversion rates and revenue per session for each page’s load time.
Once we crunched all the numbers we saw the full extent of how quickly people lost patience and peaced out.
In the time it took you to watch that gif (and her sick dance moves), that’s how long you have before people ditch your landing page.
Regardless of whether it was the retail e-commerce brand, the subscription box, or the EDU company, after 7.5 seconds, the numbers took a nosedive.
For the retail e-commerce brand, the difference between 7.5 second load times and 11.5 second load times (which, if my math serves me correctly is a whopping FOUR seconds), meant a conversion rate that plummeted 60% and a revenue drop of 62%.
It didn’t get much better for the subscription box either. Looking at the same time difference (7.5 seconds vs. 11.5 seconds), they saw a 54% drop in conversion rates and a painful 52% loss in revenue.
Even lead generation doesn’t escape the load time losses. Their conversion rate took a nose dive of 20% between those same load times.
The bottom line from all of this data (and just in case I have to spell it out for you):
It doesn’t matter if you have the absolute best creative in the world, with award-winning copy, and a landing page that would make even the most stoic person jump for joy.
Oh My God, Becky, Look At Her Load Times
I’m going to assume you don’t want someone to be saying that about your landing page so let me break down the two ways you can fix this.
(1) See Exactly How Long Your Landing Pages Take To Load
Luckily, there are websites like Pingdom that allow you to test your landing pages both for speed and from different areas of the world.
The best starting place is to know exactly how poorly (or awesomely) you’re doing when it comes to your landing page load times. Find out precisely how long they take to load to see if you’re coming in under that 7.5 second threshold.
(2) Eliminate The Unnecessary
While that may sound like a line from Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” it equally applies to your landing pages.
If you’re failing to stay under the 7.5 second limit, get your developers together and see what you can get rid of to help your landing page load faster.
Your developers should be able to narrow in on exactly what may be slowing down your landing page and how best to work around it.
(And if you really want to thank those elements of your landing page before letting them go, that’s your choice. If you don’t get this, you haven’t KonMari’ed your life.)
The Point To My Use of 90s Hip Hop Quotes?
That the numbers show it doesn’t really matter what you’re selling or which leads you’re trying to get – if your landing page loads too slowly, you’ll end up losing potential conversions and wasting money.
Follow our simple two step process and your landing pages will have conversion rates that will make everyone call you Big Papi . . . or at least make your C-suite happy.
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