#5 Change How You View Analytics

It only takes 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your site that determines whether they’ll stay or click to a competitor. That means page performance and friction is costing you lost revenue.

Amazon found that every 100 milliseconds in added page load time cost them 1% in sales, and it quickly become one of the most cited page speed data points.

Contrary to popular opinion, optimum speed is unique and varies by site and page, and more importantly, by the type of user on your site. The only way to know is by correlating speed to revenue, which you can do with a conversion rate curve.

For example, brands that attract a 35+ year old audience can oftentimes have a slower site than a brand that attracts Gen Z Also, their purpose on the site also changes the journey, for example if someone is shopping for clothing and accessories versus a large electronic purchase. So, the user type difference changes the conversion rate curve and what “optimal” site speed means.

When you look at a standard analytics engine, like Google, Adobe, or your record of choice, they’ll absolutely give you a conversion rate on a page.

Maybe it’s 2.5% or 3%, whatever the case may be, and if you’re meeting your KPI goals, then that’s exceptional. But, what about if you’re expecting a 4% conversion rate and instead you get 3%?

Traditional analytics tools don’t direct you where to go to see what happened or what to do about it. So, oftentimes teams start shot gunning at the wall trying to figure out what needs to be done to attain lost revenue or even identify how much revenue was lost.

Change How You View Analytics #5

For example, say 1.5 million visitors came to a site, the conversion rate curve will show you that when a page loaded in 2.5 seconds, 5% of visitors converted to revenue in that exact session.

But when that same page loads in 4.5 seconds, conversion drops to 3.58%. So, we’ve lost 27.5% of our customers in just 2 extra seconds because of user experience friction. If you can identify the pages where this happens and move that subset of users from the right to the left, they’ll convert at a higher rate and spend more money.

You can use conversion rate curves to understand the reliance your users have on site performance. Is your conversion rate curve very steep? That means your users crave a fast experience, and when it’s slow, their experience is terrible. Or is it flat? If so, that means you’ve achieved perceived performance, which is the ultimate goal of an eCommerce experience.

Ask your analytics team for the conversion rate curves on your critical pages so you can laser-focus your development resources to prioritize optimizing the pages that’ll bring you more revenue, which is going to mean less revenue going to your competitors.