Is Your Slow Website Jacking Up Your Advertising Costs?

High Click-through-Rates + Low Landing Page Views = Site too Slow.

Allison Spooner|Strategy, Web Development

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Is your slow website jacking up your digital advertising costs?

In other words, are you paying more for online advertising because your website is slow?

The answer? Probably. Let’s look at why.

Your Metrics

If you’re doing any kind of advertising online, there are really two metrics you should be watching:

Links Clicks & Page Views
Conversion Rates

Conversion Rates

Let’s start with conversion rates.

You probably already know you should be watching these and you probably already are. These tell you how many people have completed a specific goal on your website; downloads, calls, purchases, etc.

Now there are lots of people that talk about low conversion rates. If you have a low conversion rate, it can mean that you’ve got:

A poor landing page design
A poor or unclear offer
A bad user experience, including PageSpeed
An inaccurate target audience
A mix of all of these

There are a ton of reasons why you could have low conversion rates and, generally speaking, low conversion rates require digging deep to figure out what’s causing them and what you need to do to fix the problem.

Link Clicks & Page Views

However, the ratio between link clicks and page views is much much clearer and much less discussed.

Let’s look at an example from one of our own campaigns to see what this looks like.

This particular campaign got quite a bit of reach.

11,000 people reached
53,000 impressions
636 people clicked on this particular ad for a cost of 69 cents per click

Not bad.

Not so good is the fact that while we got 636 clicks, we only got half as many landing page views? 343 landing page views.

If you dig a little deeper, you can see our cost per landing page was also nearly two times higher. So we paid 70 cents for somebody to click on the ad, but we paid $1.28 for them to actually get to the page and view the landing page.

Now, why this discrepancy?

One answer? Page speed.

Page Speed

The page that we were sending traffic to was way too slow.

And so when you see this kind of discrepancy, you see a lot of clicks but not that many views, it means that people were interested in the offer, but not willing to wait to learn more.

Now, as a Pro Tip, there’s always going to be a gap between the link clicks and pageviews. For instance, people might click on the link accidentally. But if that rate starts to jump up beyond 10 or 15%, it’s time to test that page’s speed because that discrepancy between lots of people clicking on the ad, but not viewing the page means that the page is probably loading slowly.

Testing Your Page Speed

If you’re not sure where to test your page, here are a few, free places to start.

You can use these sites, put in your page’s URL, and run the test to see how that particular page is doing. You can run the test on any landing page that you’re driving any paid traffic to and get specific insights on how to make that page faster. Then, you should start to see more consistency between link clicks and landing page views.

(But what you don’t get is a report that tells you what to fix in order to improve, or help making those improvements)

After you’ve run those tests, forward them to your web developer so they can start working on improvements.

Fixing Page Speed Issues

It’s worth noting that fixing PageSpeed issues can get pretty complicated and pretty expensive especially if there’s outdated software involved. There will probably be fees associated with updating the site in order to make it faster. In some cases, especially if you’ve got an old website with an old or fat theme (a theme that’s got a lot of stuff on it) you may need to rebuild the site from scratch.

Or you may need to invest in getting a landing page builder like Leadpages, Unbounce, Click Funnels, or some other tool for paid advertisements and use that independently of your normal website.

You might also want to pause any ads while you’re improving your page speed otherwise you’re going to continue to overpay for the traffic that you do get to your landing page.

Once your page speed is up, resume your ads and watch your ROI start to increase.

Page Speed Comprehensive Report

If you want a complete analysis of your website’s page speed, we offer a comprehensive page speed report for $199 that will:

Run every page on your website through Google’s page speed test
Provide a detailed plan for improving your website’s page speed that you can take to your developer
Provide you with a formal quote on what it would take for us to improve your website and page speed

So if you are seeing lots of people clicking your ads, but not as many people viewing your landing page, test your page speed. Your page is probably loading too slowly, causing you to pay more than you to in order to get traffic to your site and, in return, diluting your return on investment. Just because that page is slow.

And if you have better things to do with your time than web design or you have a developer who’s gone AWOL or takes too long to get back at you, check out our Unlimited Web Design Plan starting at just $199 a month.

We’d love to learn more about what you’re working on and see if we can help you. Thanks. Have a great day.