milliseconds make millions

A study on how improvements in mobile site speed positively affect a brand's bottom line, commissioned by Google and conducted by 55 and Deloitte

Executive Summary

Even a small inmprovements on mobile speed can have a possitive effect on business results for brands.

Over a 4 week period, we analyzed mobile site data from 37 retail, travel, luxury and lead generation brands across Europe and the US. Results showed that a mere 0.1s change in load time can influence every step of the user journey, ultimately increase conversion rates. Conversion grew by 8% for retail sites and by 10% for travel sites on average.

With a 0.1 improvements in site speed, we observe that retail consumers spent almost 10% more, while lead generation and luxury consumers engaged more, with page views increasing by 7% and 8% resepectively.

The rise of customer expectations and increasing use of smartphones are amplifying the need for mobile speed.

The competitive gap will widen between brands who provide great mobile experience adnn those who don't.

To stay ahead, brands need to make site speed a priority across the organization. They should adopt a mobile first mind-set; introducing the right process and allocating resources to constantly monitor and optimize their site speed.

The study findings are intended to provide new evidence that speed does matter and help brands to prioritize it as key performance metric.

Click here to read the study: Milliseconds and Millions

Related article: How speeding up your mobile site can improve your bottom line

The state of online retail performance

Key Insights:

• While almost half of all consumers browse via their phones, only 1 in 5 complete transactions on mobile (page 5)
• Optimal load times for peak conversations ranged from 1.8 to 2.7 seconds across device types (page6)
• Just a 100-miliseconds delay in load time hurt conversation rates by up to 7% (page7)
• Bounce rates were highest among mobile shoppers and lowest among those using tablets (page9)
• Optimal load times for lowest bounce rates ranged from 700ms to 1.2s across all device types (page10)
• A two seconds delay in load time hurt bounce rates by up to 103% (page10)
• Pages with the lowest bounce rates had start render times ranging from 0.9 to 1.5 seconds (page12)
• A two seconds delay correlated with up to a 51% decrease in session length (page14)

Click here to read the study: The state of online retail performance

Why every marketer's mobile website needs a "speed budget"

Summary

The bottom line is, if you're spending a lot of time and energy by getting people to your mobile site, it makes sense to offer the fastest experience possible. You'll risk losing your customer if you don't.

Mobile is great a helping people cut through the clutter. but that requires creating experiences that are just for mobile. While there are similarities between desktop and mobile, creating a mobile-responsive site for both platforms should only be a temporary fix. It's critical to build for each platform so you're providing the experience people expect, regardless of the platform on which they seek your information.

Click here to read the article: Why every marketer's mobile website needs a "speed budget".