Optimizing Website Speed can Increase Consumer Traffic

So  you’ve worked hard to cast your hooks into the social web and you’ve optimized your site for search engines.  The result should be a growth in website traffic, which is your long-term goal.  And rightly so, for in the online marketplace, website traffic is virtual currency and you should attempt to build and maintain as high a level as is sustainable.  But, have you stopped to consider the role user connection speed plays in your efforts to build traffic?

Speed is, it turns out, a key factor in retaining incoming traffic.  The internet has made consumers impatient and the longer they have to wait to see your content, the less likely they’ll stick around to view it.  An analysis conducted by Google VP Marissa Mayer brings this point to fruition:

Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results [from ten] to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.

Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?

After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.

To underscore the point, an increase in the site’s load time of half a second resulted in a 20% decrease in the site’s traffic.  So with the importance of speed now on our minds, please allow me to suggest a few actions you can take to minimize what we might refer to as “impatient traffic loss,” which includes benchmarking your site and optimizing your webserver and online media.

Grow Your Small Business During a Recession

I don’t need to tell you that this is a tough economic environment and that relief appears to be a ways away.  Indeed, the Market Oracle is calling this the worst recession since World War II.  There’s no doubt that many businesses are going to get hit pretty hard before things get better.  So given these tough times, what can businesses to do to stay afloat or even get ahead?

Loyalty programs: The bottom line

Many companies create loyalty programs designed to inspire repeat transactions. Airline miles, credit card points, even coffee shop cards have been devised in an attempt to capitalize on a simple aspect of consumer behavior: once invested in the program, they’ll keep coming back to reap the reward (who would turn down a free cup of coffee?). We’ve written previously about the work by Yuping Liu which demonstrates how loyalty programs can, in the long run, yield significantly increased repeat purchases. However, it’s worth taking a step back and asking a fundamental question: is customer loyalty, as assumed by these loyalty programs, simply the sum of the transactions made with a company?

Social News Primer

Perhaps one of the more interesting aspects of the Web 2.0 revolution has been the development of community driven content. At social news sites, for example, members of an online community submit weblinks to the social news site, at which point the rest of the community votes for or against the content. This results in a massive filtering of content: those weblinks that a sizable fraction of the community finds interesting are given higher rankings than those of little or no interest.

Social news sites are among the largest and fastest growing on the internet and it seems that every week a new community is developed. Among the most popular are Digg, Reddit, Newsvine and the newcomer Mixx. Certainly some are more popular than others - Digg has the largest community - and each community tends to have a personality, favoring very particular content (which is one of the reasons I hang out at Reddit). From the standpoint of doing business online, it is important to be familiar with these sites and how they operate: as we have written about previously, if your site is highly ranked at a social news community, you can expect to capture a super-spike of web traffic (often referred to as the Digg-effect). So just how do these communities work?

Growing Customer Loyalty

Satisfied customers are the best customers. In addition to returning to your business to make repeat purchases, satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your business to others. They’re also less likely to purchase from your competitors. Long-term success can be obtained by growing a loyal customer base – take care of your customers and they’ll take care of you.

This isn’t a trivial issue. Building customer loyalty is an investment of time and resources and can be a difficult thing to do. Loyalty is, after all, a trust issue. But research by Yuping Liu (Journal of Marketing) suggests that loyalty programs have significant return on investment in the long run. One great way to build customer loyalty, according to Liu, is to offer rewards to customers after repeated purchases.

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