One of our clients recently reported a very poor conversion rate. As opposed to having issues with one or two channels, which is actually common depending on the merchant’s type of product and target demographic, the poor ROI was seen across all of the shopping engines. This typically indicates a universal feed problem or site-related issue on the merchant’s end. We began investigating by spot checking many of the client’s product links. The first thing we noticed was that each product page was taking, on average, ~5 seconds to load. This caught our attention.
In our experience in the comparison shopping space, and the e-commerce space in general, landing page load times can easily impact your marketing campaign’s performance. The average online shopper today has no patience. They want their order delivered yesterday. Even a several second load time delay on your site can prompt them to hit the back button, increasing your site’s bounce rate. What’s worse: if that visitor was coming in via a comparison shopping engine, you got charged for the click the moment they left the CSE even though they never even landed completely on your site. It doesn’t take a savvy marketer to know that’s not good for business.
This certainly isn’t a new hypothesis or a groundbreaking industry discovery. Yet, at the same time, I don’t believe that load time issues have been thoroughly tested. We don’t even know for sure if this is causing the poor performance for our client. Regardless, it is an important factor for all merchants using the comparison shopping engines to consider. While this isn’t exactly a DFO (data feed optimization) tip… we’ll file it under miscellaneous CSE tips.
Check out Bryan Eisenberg’s post “Time is Money”
Landing page optimization and load time of all pages are two very important things that almost always get overlooked. There is nothing more frustrating than a client that wants to put the cart before the horse and dump all of their budgets into their marketing rather than into developing a good site.
So many merchants lose so much money because of putting the cart before the horse.
Great post Colin, I think that everyone needs to be reminded now and again that you need to optimize your site for your cientele before you drive traffic to it!
It is tough as an Internet marketer to convince most clients to do this. Another thing is that if you went to your boss and said that we need to delay the SEO or CSE feed campaign a few weeks because we really need to have development work done on the site, they will look at you like you are crazy! CEOs will never allow you to delay a $4000 check for three weeks in order to do $1000 in development over that time.
Comment by Miguel Salcido — October 28, 2007 @ 12:19 pm
Thanks for posting Miguel… couldn’t agree more. Using your example: savvy marketers have foresight and will realize that spending $1000 in development now, even though delaying $4000 in revenue, is the best option because that delayed revenue will no longer be $4000… it will be much greater.
Comment by Colin Murphy — November 9, 2007 @ 1:06 pm