Faster loading pages improve your website’s revenues and consumer engagement. Poor data collection could be costing you money says BrightTag chief executive Mike Sands.
The way data is collected on your website can have a radical impact on your bottom line. That’s because slow uploading of webpages has a major impact on how long consumers spend on your site, how much they spend and whether they are likely to return.
Uncontrolled data collection caused by too many tracking tags can be a key contributor to poor site performance. Tracking tags are the little known but critically important pieces of code used for data collection on websites. Each tag acts as the trigger for placing or activating a cookie. And each tag can take a meaningful amount of time to load on your site.
A tag can be a simple 11 pixel or image loaded with the web page or it can be in the form of JavaScript code that allows for more advanced data collection.
The problem is that tags are proliferating to the extent that a typical e-commerce website could have any where from 50-150 third-party tags deployed at any given time.
Loading all these tags and associated third-party code is bound to increase the time it takes for a page to load. And time is the one thing that site owners don’t have.
Our experience shows that taking control and restricting the number of tags on the site can lead to a 30 to 50 percent improvement in loading times. The reason is fairly simple: the site has to load up fewer bits of third-party code there’s less chance that code will misbehave.
Such an improvement can have major implications. Walmart.com found that reducing page load uptimes had a direct impact on revenue.
For every one second of improvement in load times, Walmart.com was able to generate a two percent increase in conversation rate, while every 100 microseconds of improvement grew incremental revenue by up to one percent.
A further study from Kissmetrics found that consumers are no willing to longer wait for pages to load. Forty-seven per cent expect a web page to load in two seconds or less and 40 percent will abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load.
Faster Internet connections have conditioned us to expect web pages to load faster even as we also demand more images and video content from them. A report for Forrester Research into financial websites in the US discovered that consumers remember slow sites and consciously remember not to return.
Forty eight percent of those questioned said that poor performance “impacted” or “significantly impacted” the chances they would recommend a firm’s services to a friend or family member.
In recent years website owners have developed best practice to improve performance in so many ways. Rare is the site that has images that are too large and new designs are tested to ensure upload time is optimized, for example. The same diligence now needs to be applied to data collection.
The bottom line is that too many tags and too many third parties gathering information on your site and the impact will be felt well beyond the data management team.
Mike Sands is CEO of Brighttag.
