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”