We’ve seen that it’s critically important to wade through the vast troves of data available about your website, cutting through to essential (and actionable) metrics and stats. But that’s not to say that small changes to your website can’t have massive effects on your business. I can’t for the life of me remember where I read this–and nearly an hour of Googling failed to turn anything up–but Google experimented for a while with displaying twenty results on the first page of a search. They quickly scrapped that number, sticking with the familiar ten results, after discovering that the extra half-a-second that it took to load an additional ten results discouraged people from searching. And the drop-off was significant. (Here’s where I wish I could quote you the exact figures; if anyone is familiar with the article I’m referring to, please send it along.) Fractions of a second matter on the internet.
I was reminded of this story by Marketing Pilgrim’s recent article on the importance of display ads. Let’s see why, right here:
Eyeblaster released a study yesterday showing that “display ads stimulate search by increasing the speed at which people searching enter the purchase funnel,” reports MediaPost. The study examined over 1300 search and display campaigns over a 15 month period.
They found that early one in five people who convert after using search had seen at least one display ad before searching. Eyeblaster concluded that display advertising increases the reach of campaigns, pushing more consumers to search. Those consumers then move through the purchasing funnel faster.
And this wasn’t just in a single industry: Eyeblaster looked at more than 200 advertisers in over 20 verticals. 72% of conversions resulted from display advertising, while 23% of the conversions were a direct result of the search channel and 5% were the result of display ads that were followed by a search.
Eyeblaster Principal Analyst Ariel Geifman says that display can thus be used to enhance search and reach a greater audience. “Since search is down the funnel, you need more prospects in the intent-to-purchase phase,” he says. He also notes that display scales more easily than search.
If you think the big online players aren’t tracking things like this, you are sadly mistaken. This is from an enlightening interview conducted by The Rumpus with an anonymous Facebook employee (NSFW language):
For example, when we want to introduce new features, like when we streamlined the browsing of photo albums, you know, where you can click ‘next’ above the photo, and the page stays the same except you get the next photo? We did tests on that, and actually found out it increased the number of page views by 77%, essentially because we were reducing 77% of the page load, and therefore it was loading faster, and thus generating more clicks. We not only reduced our bandwidth, and how much we have to pay for our Internet, but we made the site faster and increased the clicks-per-minute, which is what we’re truly interested in.
I’m by no means an expert in these types of web design, but, fortunately, you can find helpful suggestions for making the web faster courtesy of Google, which, it should be clear, knows what it’s talking about.
While this post has been focused on making your website more user friendly and your search ads more effective, the same concepts are no less applicable in other, less digital arenas. The willingness to make adjustments for customers, the ability to remember consumer preferences, the simplification of each step of the process–these are all small things that make a big difference.
What are the small things that you’re doing to make your business better?
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