WARNING! TECHNICAL ARTICLE

Introduction

In this article, you’ll learn details on how to analyze your pages.

September 2023: Leadshook V2 is already available as a standalone DT fully separated from a V1 DT.

Background

A common question, we get is how to improve Google Page Speed score. My conversions are down so must be because of Page Speed. Unfortunately, campaign and conversion optimisation is not as simple as just looking at page speed. Page speeds end up being an easy target, because it’s easy to find (type in your url and pops out a bunch of metrics).

You must have a credible framework to analyse your campaigns and just having the world’s fastest page won’t save your campaign. Offer, hooks, pre-framing, traffic variance all contribute to conversions. There are so many variables with co-dependency is why conversion optimization is so difficult.

We have fixed a lot of funnels without ever addressing page speeds – creating desire or offering an emotional payoff literally buys you time. This is NOT an excuse to not bother with page speeds because faster page speeds have benefits. Consider other elements of conversion optimization as well.

A framework for campaign performance analysis is out of scope for this article.

Page Speed Is a Relative Measure

Someone who is using a mobile on a 3G connection will experience the same ‘slowness’ for every website they are visiting. (Unless the website has multiple versions for slower speed connections).

This is not an excuse to tolerate slow loading pages. It’s a harsh reality that while some users are accessing your website on a 5G connection while others are connecting on 3G.

There is a cost to building the same page in multiple configurations to address for various connection speeds and devices (desktop, tablets and mobiles).

Lastly, remember your website visitors are experiencing similar speeds not just for your website but also all other websites they are visiting. If your webpage has a lot of dynamic elements then it will experience some page speed impact – there is a cost in terms of page speeds for pages with interactive and dynamic content. This enhances user experience which improves conversions while at the same time taxing page speeds….

Remember there is tradeoff between speed and user experience – adding page element like animations will tax your page speed. It’s all about testing and tradeoffs.

ACTION STEP : Consider Page Speeds of Your Competitors

Here are page speeds of a number of randomly selected landing pages from paid ads and their performance under varying degrees of connection.

We’ve picked landing pages from highly competitive niches, Debt Consolidation and Life Insurance and here are Google PageSpeed Insights. At this time (Nov 2020), almost all of the landing pages in highly competitive niches have these numbers. These pages are dynamic and interactive.

Checkout amazon.com’s fully loaded time, which is 11.4. seconds…

Amazon’s page is quite long and perhaps even dynamic where it actually never ends (i.e. page keeps loading new content as scroll down).

So what really matters in terms of user experience is the the visual and interactive part of the the viewpoint – that’s the part that is visible on the screen.

How to Measure Page Speeds

1. Tools

https://gtmetrix.com/

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

https://www.webpagetest.org/

2. Using Page Speed Tools

3. Mobile Testing

4. Page Speed Metrics

5. Perform These 2 Important Comparison Tests…

How to Perform a Comparison Test Using GtMetrix

STEP 1: Perform 1 Test – be sure to change the speed, browser and location settings.

STEP 2: Press the Compare button and follow these steps…

TEST #1: Page Consistency: Run the same test multiple times to see variance in performance. Enter the same webpage url multiple times.

TEST #2. Comparison Against Competitors: Looking at absolute numbers can be misleading. So it’s important to see how your page is performing against the rest of the market.

6. Analyzing Embedded Decision Trees