Most people are aware of the benefits of website performance on their website and business in general.

To recap, here are some key figures:

• 0.5 second page slowdown = 20% drop in revenue at google
• Every 100ms delay costs 1% of sales at Amazon
• 46% page speed improvement “= 30% revenue increase at JAG (A Section customer)

Its clear that improved page speed increases revenue and is a good thing for any business. A trickier topic is: How should this be funded and who owns it within your business?“Website performance is often considered an “IT Problem” and hence it’s assumed that this should be owned and managed through your IT resources. I would like to present an alternate model for looking at website performance that integrates it into the marketing channel mix.

We will see how allocating a portion of your marketing spend on performance can greatly improve the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

To start here is a view of a common marketing channel mix:

Each channel is going to have a different cost and deliver different returns on investment. We would like to introduce website performance as another option in your marketing mix which can be used as a part of your marketing spend.

Using this option increases the effectiveness of all channels and enables balancing of the cost of performance improvements between different sources. You can then experiment with which channel’s fund the improvements and discover a better overall marketing mix.

Why does this work?

• Investing in performance enhances the effectiveness of every channel you are using. This provides you with another option to experiment with regarding marketing ROI. For example Online Advertising may be more expensive than Email Marketing but delivers better leads that convert to customers more often (or higher paying customers). By spending a portion of your Email Marketing budget on website performance you make any money spent on Online Advertising (and all other channels including Email Marketing) more effective.
• Taking 1% (for example) from your Email Marketing budget and allocating it to website performance will not correlate to a 1% drop in email marketing ROI. The 1% allocated to performance results in much greater effectiveness of all email marketing campaigns.
• The spend on performance per month is generally a fraction of the overall marketing budget and hence is a huge multiplier for all marketing efforts
• The flow on effects of the performance spend benefit your business in other ways:

1. SEO - Site speed is factor in organic search results

2. Faster website = Happier customers. This improves engagement, reduces support/customer service requirements and improves your brand image

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Sources:

http://glinden.blogspot.com.au/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html

https://sites.google.com/site/glinden/Home/StanfordDataMining.2006-11-28.ppt?attredirects=0

https://www.section.io/customers/

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