Why site performance tracking needs to be part of your web analytics toolbox

When talking to clients or at conferences, I always say that an effective web strategy for measuring and optimising website performance is made up of four key components:

  • Good market intelligence
  • Sophisticated visitor behaviour analysis
  • Excellent user profiling
  • Effective site performance tracking

Sometimes the last one of these in the list raises some eyebrows. Site performance tracking – isn’t that a “techy thing”?

Indeed it may be but a number of pieces of research published all confirm that site speed still matters. A piece of research done recently by Akamai was picked up by the BBC. The research showed that site speed had a major impact on people’s perceptions of commerce sites and their propensity to return. Apparently 75% in the survey said that they wouldn’t return to a website that took longer than 4 seconds to load. When I started off in the online world six years ago, the mantra was 8 seconds to download or less than 80Kb page weight. So this research suggests that people are a lot less tolerant now – about half as much in fact.

I think that people thought that as broadband penetration grew here in the UK that the issue of site speed would go away. As connections got faster, content could get richer. I think that as broadband penetration has grown, people have realised that when things happen slowly online, it’s not their connection that’s the problem, it’s the site. This can have a major impact on people’s perception of the brand. Forrester research a couple of years ago showed that slow sites are considered to be less interesting, less believable and less secure. That’s a bit of a problem if you are trying to sell somebody something.

Remember also that although just over 50% of all home connections in the UK are now broadband that means nearly 50% of them are not.

When talking about this issue, I often draw an analogy with the early days of advertising detergent washing powder. In those days brand advertising would often use slogans such as “washes whiter than white”. That was because, 40 years ago, not all washing powders actually washed your clothes very well and so the product quality was a major determinant in brand choice. Nowadays, all detergents wash your clothes to a sufficient level of quality, so the emphasis in brand choice has shifted from functional factors to emotional factors.

But when it comes to the online experience, not all websites “wash your clothes whiter than white”. Product quality is still an issue and if you’re in the business of measuring and optimising the online experience then you need to have the capability to track the performance of the website in terms of it’s ability to deliver it’s content and services to visitors in an appropriate time.

There are plenty of companies out there that provide this service such as Gomez, Keynote and Site Confidence here in the UK. You may already find that you have this type of capability in-house but it’s lurking in the IT department somewhere.

In the same way that product testing is an ongoing discipline in the world of fast moving consumer goods, I believe that site performance tracking needs to be a major component of your website measurement platform. Site performance data may help explain other metrics like repeat visitor rates, numbers of pages viewed and process abandonment rates. It’s time to put some of these key metrics on the dashboard if they aren’t already there.

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