Pagespeed and why it‘s costing you a lot of money EP 015

Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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Transcript

Greg Marshall 0:00 All right, so we just, you know, talk before we put the hit record by a lot about a topic that I think is is more important than most businesses, I believe think, which is, when you're running ads or your marketing, no matter what you're doing, you're sending them to some level of a website. Yeah. But no one's ever really thinking about well, when they get to the website. Yeah, it should be a good experience. So one of the questions that I was asking before we hit record was, what is what's the most important thing when it comes to user experience? And tell me a little bit about why we should be paying attention to this?

Blake Beus 0:44 Yeah. Well, I mean, we literally talked about this for over an hour I hitting the record button, we should we should hit record earlier. But yeah, a lot of a lot of people don't think about page speed. I mean, I mean, they think about it a little bit, but they don't think about it. In the terms that having a slower Page Speed actually cost you money, especially if you're running ads, or you're putting efforts into to to writing content for SEO purposes or whatever. PageSpeed is an extremely important thing.

Greg Marshall 1:16 And let me ask you this, it says you said, yeah, if you're running ads, yeah, because this is something that I think, would really be helpful to know. Let's do a comparison. Okay, so let's say one website, loads significantly faster than another, right? Yeah. And that, but every other variable is the same. They're both running the same exact ads, with the same wording everything creatives, the offer, everything's the same except one page is loading significantly faster. What would you predict is the difference in revenue between one versus the other, if everything else was the same, except one was way faster than the other?

Blake Beus 2:01 I mean, I've seen, I've seen some campaigns and things that I've worked on, see a 20 to 50% lift in conversions, just by increasing the Page Speed, which, which is kind of this positive feedback loop if you want to think about right, so. So I'm Sam running, running some ads. One of the indicators that Google or Facebook is looking for is how many conversions that ad is getting, by getting more conversions than Google and Facebook will say to themselves, algorithmically, hey, that's a good app, it's working for people and people seem to really like it. Let's give more high quality traffic to that ad. And it makes you more competitive over other ads, or whatever. So like I said, 30 50%. And if your page speed is really, really, really slow, you're you're just not going to get any conversions, because people are going to think your site is broken, which effectively it is if your page is slow. And so you know, as far as how big of a lift we're going to get if we speed up a page, it could be massive, if you're not getting any conversions, because it's that slow. Got it.

Greg Marshall 3:11 So and even if you are getting conversions, if it's a really slow website, you can get a 50% lift. So if you're getting let's say you're getting 10 conversions, for every 1000 people that go to your site, then if you can get a 50% lift, and you will get what 15 Yeah, so if if you're getting five more conversions, and let's say your average order value is you know, 50 bucks, you would be getting an additional $250 That you're essentially missing out on Yeah, because your site is slower. Absolutely. And if that's every day, yeah, then that starts to compound. So then you're talking about 1000s of the house dollars per month.

Blake Beus 3:53 And like I said, it's a it's a positive feedback loop. Because then Google, even if it's just search engine optimization, or SEO, or whatever, Google and Facebook, or they know, you've got their tracking codes on their site, they know what's going on. And they say, Well, this site's doing really well. There's the the page pages are loading fast, people seem to really enjoy the content and they're converting, so let's make that let's bump them up in the search engine list. Let's let's put them you know, from from ninth place to second place, and then you get more high quality traffic, right because from the top three results down the the drop off of click through rates in search engines is huge. Yes, massive. And it's the same thing with ads. If you're if you're running search ads on Google, you know, you're you're above those top three results if if you're competing properly against the other people. Many people want to compete with budget, but they need to realize that another currency they can compete with is PageSpeed. You can actually be in the number one spot and be paying less for that traffic and less per click than the number two spot if your page is running fast.

Greg Marshall 4:56 So one of the things we did some analysis on a couple pages before we hit the Record mode. We, you know, there was some valuable things that you mentioned, it looks like to me, correct me if I'm wrong looks like the biggest thing that slows the website speed down, is the size of the picture? Or having video?

Blake Beus 5:18 Yes, yeah, there's the top three, I would say the size of the picture, video. And tracking scripts like Facebook, pixel, Google tracking scripts, or whatever. And so you, there's always this trade off, right? Like, you need to have the tools in place you need for marketing. But it's, it's like you said earlier, if we wanted a page that would have a fastest page load speed, perfect scores across the board, we would have a page with, you know, maybe a sentence of text and nothing else on there. And we will get perfect scores on all these tracking tools. But you're not going to convert with that, you've got to have this push and pull. You need things like tracking scripts and stuff. But you need to not go nuts with the tracking scripts. A lot of people especially if your site's been around for a long time, you're tracking scripts, you could have all of these old scripts from way back when when you try to marketing strategy and installed this script. And maybe it's maybe something like ad roll memory. That was that was dead. Yeah, longtime they're still around, but but you might have this ad roll script on your page, you're not doing anything with it, just pull that off, right? image sizes, you can reduce the image sizes and, and a lot of times people will snap a picture with their phone and upload it to the site and not realize that your phone these high quality cameras on your phone, they take pictures that are 13 megabytes large, which is huge for a webpage. And you just don't don't need that. So you need to compress them down or resize them or crop them down to the right size. And then as far as, as video goes, if you're a technical person, you can actually write some code so that after the whole page loads, then you load the video. Or you've probably seen some people, when you go to their site, they have a video, you click on it takes a second, then the video loads, and then you got to click on it again, actually hit play. Yes, that's a speedy strategy out there delaying the load of the video until you actually show interest. And so there's these strategies. But the easiest one for most people that are non technical is images. Got it, look at your image sizes. Use use use the tool to compress it squish dot app, squish that as a web web app that I use a lot for my clients super easy to compress images and things that way

Greg Marshall 7:31 exclu style app? And what about like, you know, we also talked about the Google is correct and run Google amp? Yo, is there any reason to try to utilize this as part of a strategy? And in my mind, I'm thinking, Could an e commerce Store? You know, I've got a lot of e commerce Store clients. Could they use something like this? And I remember you said there's a trade off of like, you can't track as well, using pixels. But if you use Google ads or Google Analytics, explain that a little bit. Yeah. So

Blake Beus 8:06 um, let me give people a little bit of a rundown on what amp is. So So Google amp is a service that Google offers for free. And what it does is it scrapes your page, makes a optimized version of it, and then hosts it on Google's actual servers. And then when you search to it from Google, you know, webs the search engine, it will load that version of your page instead of your site, because it will load way, way, way faster. But as part of optimizing it, they, they will sometimes strip out scripts, unless you write them in a way to tell Google amp, hey, we need this. We need this JavaScript in there. So oftentimes, I mean, when it first launched, the Facebook pixel didn't work. I think that's been fixed. And they feel that over Google Analytics will work because it's a Google property. But some of you've written any custom scripts or things like that, they may not load because you're loading this optimized version. So there is a little bit of a trade off there. The but the pages load insanely fast. And you do rise up in search engine results if you do turn on amp. So there's there's this kind of give and take there. If you're if you're running some, some custom code to split test something on your page, or you have some custom interactivity on your site or something like that, that may not work on Google Apps. So you just got to know

Greg Marshall 9:35 what about Okay, so let me ask you this, because this is something that what if you don't really, what if you don't care as much from the pixel inside. You just want to be able to make sure you're ranking better and that people have a better user experience. Granted that you're tracking all your other metrics on the back end, right? then would it be beneficial to use it?

Blake Beus 10:03 Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like anything you can test it out. Got it? You can turn it on and try it.

Greg Marshall 10:10 So you can't turn it on. And ah, yeah. Okay, so I wasn't sure I didn't know if he had like, completely go all in like making an app. So now

Blake Beus 10:21 you can turn it off. But yeah, you can test it out and see, right? Well, one of the things a lot of people have run into is, this is seems like less of a model now than it used to be. But it still is a model. But where people have a blog that we get lots and lots and lots of hits, and one of the ways they would monetize that blog is they would have ads on the blog, right, and they will get paid by people clicking on those ads. If you expand beyond Google Display Network, which honestly for a content creator in this way, doesn't pay out that great and you expand all of these other ad networks that exist out there that you've probably never heard of. Yep, that pay out better. Those ads may not run got it

Unknown Speaker 11:05 for for you actually experienced that. Yeah. Yeah. And so you,

Blake Beus 11:09 you have to know, the ins and outs. And you have to understand and so if your business model relies on that type of monetization strategy, amps not not going to work for you got it. Got it.

Greg Marshall 11:23 Right. And that's maybe why initially, the company I was working with those client, they were running into the issue where they're trying to use the new app. But the ads, the ads at the top, didn't work. Yeah. And they're using another not Google Display Network, but another ad network to monetize it. And so with, so what about this does it have? Can you still use Google Analytics and Google and yeah, absolutely. So that Google fire shoot

Unknown Speaker 11:52 themselves with the flow? Okay.

Greg Marshall 11:54 And, you know, really that question, is, there's two reasons why I'm asking that question. It's like, in my mind, I have it as what can an E commerce client use? And then what can a service based business use? Right? And so far, it sounds like a service based business could really benefit from using app if it does help you speed things up? Yeah,

Blake Beus 12:18 definitely. And I mean, you really just, you and I talked about this all the time, you need to think about your monetization model. If if you have a service that pays out big Yeah, right, then you can be a lot more loosey goosey, and not have your stuff all together. Because if every time you get a client that is $50,000 revenue, then it doesn't matter. If you aren't optimized, and you have to spend $1,000 to get that client, it doesn't matter because you still made $49,000 As your ad spend, right. But if you're doing something like e commerce or whatever, then your margins are a lot tighter, because your product costs you have shipping costs and everything like that. But with E commerce, I mean, Google, Google and Facebook, they both love ecommerce companies. And Google has Google Shopping. Facebook has its its shopping platform as well, we can both you can import products into both of those and everything. So, and I don't have experience with this specifically myself. But I highly doubt using amp for an E commerce site is going to have any negative impacts. I would bet that they've got that figured out by now, amps been around for five or six years now. So it's not new.

Greg Marshall 13:27 It's not new news. Just it's just another way because in my mind, I think from a strategy standpoint, most people that are trying to be found to be found at Google. Yeah. So it makes the most sense to use all of their products. Yep. Because they're probably going to reward you. I know, they probably wouldn't say that. But they're probably gonna reward you for using everything they own. Right? Yeah.

Blake Beus 13:50 Yeah, I think, in my opinion, you're totally right. But also you shouldn't have all your eggs in one basket, right? Yep. And Google's Google is actually pretty good about, you know, if you have all your eggs in their basket, they they're pretty good enough. accidentally or intentionally screwing you over Facebook on the other hand, yeah, I mean, I would I would if you're using all their products using Google Shopping, you're using Google amp you're using analytics. You're using Google ads. There's definitely some synergy there. But I would also have products listed in other places got you maybe list your your ecommerce products in in you know Amazon or Newegg where people don't know you can list product, your own products on Newegg. You can list them on eBay, you can list them, you know, on Facebook, all of these different places and I would have presence, you know, as many places as is feasible. Yep. Because there's obviously some complexities when you have coxless got it all places.

Greg Marshall 14:49 So and it sounds like for the biggest thing that you want is to pay attention to the speed. Right the speed is probably the key He outside of like laying your side? Yeah, the speed is really what's going to impact the user experience. Yeah, if you, because I'm

Blake Beus 15:11 technical, and you, you probably approach this problem differently, because you come at it from an advertising marketing side. But whenever I'm helping a client with ads, and we see a significant dip in performance, my first thought is, did the PageSpeed get affected somehow? Yeah, it's someone upload a massive image. Yes, accidentally, and drive our PageSpeed down. And that's the first thing I always look at. You probably I mean, I'm curious, what do you look at? When you see a dip in performance? What's the first thing you look at?

Greg Marshall 15:38 I mean, because I've been around you for so long. It really is that, isn't it? Yeah. It really is, like, Oh, something must have changed on here. First, is it speed? And then second? Did we change the words on the offer, right, because this happens often with clients will be actually running ads, and then they'll change what the landing page says, without letting me know. And then all of a sudden, it'll be like, the page converting to 3% 2.5 or whatever. And then all of a sudden is at point five, eight. And you're like, what just happened? It just like, completely dip, then I'll say the first thing is, did you change anything on the page? Did you add anything just to track them? So yeah, I mean, because like I said, because I've been around you? I think about the speed. Yeah. But probably before that, it would be did you change anything on that wire? Right? What have you had to have changed the experience on the phone? Yeah. So that's, that's my thought. But I just never really, I think the regular business owner is not thinking about know any of this. So I think we just assume all websites are equal like it no matter where you build it, no matter what you put on there, they all operate exactly the same. And then when we take a deeper dive into clients, websites, we always find, oh, this link is broken. No, this is not loading fast. There's typically issues that are hurting them. And one thing that I do know as an advertiser, and this is why I started to pay attention to it more. When I would run ads, I've seen clients almost do that experiment I treasure where they're targeting the same audiences. Ad Copies almost exactly the same. The Crazy Ones Exactly. But one person's ad costs is literally 567 times more than the others. Yeah. And it's because of the load speed. Yeah. It's at least that was my assumption, because that was the only thing different Yeah, about what was going on.

Blake Beus 17:43 Yeah, it's, it's a big deal. And honestly, it's one of those things that you can forget about, right? You can hear this podcast and think, Okay, I'm gonna keep an eye on this. And then six months down the road, you get you're busy with other things, and you didn't realize it's, it's, it's like that mate, you need to have that constant maintenance, constant touch ups, like changing the oil in your in your car, right? You need to maybe throw something in your calendar, once, once a quarter or something like that, if not more, for my clients, I look at it once a week, usually, and just to do some quick tests, but throw for reminder to just look at it, check on those things and make sure that nothing happens because websites are these living, breathing, growing, things are constantly changing, and they need to be maintained. But But first, yeah, but for some reason why people think well, let's set it and forget why I made the website, I built the website. And that comes across in how people pay for websites, too. Oftentimes, they're like, well, I need a website built. So who's gonna build me a website for the give me the best value, you know, the best website for the lowest cost, lowest cost? And then once it's done, they pay for it and think, okay, my website's done, tick that markup. But it's that's not how that's not how they work. They constantly need to be updated. You constantly just swap out content. And it's easy to let websites get stale at night, that happens to me on my own website.

Greg Marshall 18:56 I know, I know, for sure it's happened to me. And because getting more educated about this, I don't think I would have even bothered to look into learning about this. Until I noticed that some ad accounts were getting dinged for this. Yeah, I was like, wow, that. So this means more now than just like, Yeah, well, if it's slow, who cares? My Products good enough to those waiting for? But it's like, you know, Facebook and Google are going to charge you more. Yeah, for a bad experience, which now that gets my attention.

Blake Beus 19:27 Cost you actual money? Yeah, actual money. So I mean, I think we can dive into some of the specifics. Like what so so you're on board, you want your website to be fast, and what can you do to help identify it? So let me give you two different tools you can you can dive into the first one is called Google PageSpeed Insights, just do a Google search for that. And it will it will pull up a tool you can put in a URL you can put in for a specific page, and it will go through and give you two different scores based on the mobile experience. And based on the desktop experience. Now your desktop experience will almost always be higher, but it'll be useful. From zero to 100. Any, you want to try to do your best to make your score as high as possible, while still having the things on your page that you need? What's an acceptable business? Right?

Greg Marshall 20:11 Well acceptable? Like, I know there's a trade off, what would you say? 70?

Blake Beus 20:17 I would say 70 Is is, you're in the top, maybe 5%, you have a 70, on mobile or better.

Greg Marshall 20:27 So there'll be at least a number to kind of shoot for that. Yeah. Is it impossible to get 100? Yeah. So it is possible? I don't even I would think there would be no way you can get 100. So it is possible, it is possible,

Blake Beus 20:39 it is possible. And how you do that is you have a page that's mobile responsive, you have a page that is mostly text, all the images on your page are very optimized. You maybe have Google Analytics, and that's it. No other tracking codes. And you don't have any videos. Got it? Yeah, I mean, you could you could, you could get up the end. And you probably need to be on a fast server. So you could do all of those things. But if you're hosting somewhere that you don't own the server, you still might not get 100, because then you might need to, you know, do that extra layer. And for me, that's what I know how to do. But most people don't know how to do that. So it's reasonable that you don't worry about Yeah,

Greg Marshall 21:18 you know, one thing that I'm learning, and I'm sorry, did you have a second? Yes, yes, I'm sorry, GT metrics.

Blake Beus 21:23 And you can just go to GT metrics with an X at the end.com. And you can put your URL in there, they'll give you different speeds or whatever. But they'll also tell you if you have large images, if you have a lot of scripts on your page, and you can just kind of tick those things off the list and keep testing to try to get your grade up.

Greg Marshall 21:45 Got it. And you know, one thing that I've learned from because I consider myself a learn, I'd like to learn from people who know things that I don't know, right, yeah. And one thing that I'm learning from, you know, working in the E commerce space, which I did not start off, and by the way, and then spending more time with you, there's two growth strategies that people do not think about. So an example would be in the marketing space, increasing lifetime value of a customer, you know, trying to lower your cost per acquisition, repeat buyers, all that those are growth strategies and of itself. But then when you talk about there's two strategies that I think almost no one talks about, right, which is website speed. Is it gross? Right? It is, right? Yeah. And the second one that almost no one talks about is inventory. Meaning if you can get the inventory cheaper, faster and more readily available, you could beat your competition, with just those two sides alone, better inventory and faster website. And those are two things that I would never in a million years guess could be a competitive advantage. Yeah, that really, you can speed up the growth of your business by focusing on the counterintuitive. Hmm.

Blake Beus 23:05 That's a good point. I'm glad you um, you know, I'm glad you brought that up. Because it is true. There's these girls strategies that happen behind the scenes just making you more operationally efficient. Yep. And and, you know, with inventory that makes sense. One of my clients runs a software that helps people list, ecommerce on Amazon, Newegg, all of these different places, right. And that's where I kind of started learning about a little, a little bit of this stuff. But you know, having that additional operational efficiency isn't something that people think about, but it does make you more competitive. Yep. And is the growth strategy in and of itself?

Greg Marshall 23:41 Yeah. And I think that's, it's, it's remarkable, because I was thinking about that, recently, where I just thought, you know, there's so much talk about what you call, you know, the top and top line front end optimizations. And there's very little being talked about, like, some of the companies there's there's one company in general that Alize t shirt companies follow that they're always trying to figure out, how are they making as much money as are making? And the more I started looking into it, the more I realize is because it's not the front end strategy. Yeah. Right. They have a competitive advantage. I'm not gonna say it because people were there. But they have a competitive advantage on the operational side. Yeah, that allows them to do what they do. The other stores can't Yeah, and they're not going to share that. But they're going to tell you, the you're going to try to follow them, but you're following them only partially. Yeah. When it comes to the strategy, and you're not seeing the bot, which everything they're doing is legit. It's a super good strategy. Yeah. But it's just one of those things where it's a strategy just like speeding up your website, and inventory that you don't think of off the top of your head that that could be a growth strategy to take your business to the next level. So all this stuff, you know, on the back end, operationally, I think there should be a heavier emphasis on the website stuff. And so all these tips that you're given, I think, if you're serious about growing your business, and you want to take things to the next level, you should be following all these tips that Blake is sharing. Because this could be the difference between you getting the business or your competition. And if you're in a competitive space, this you really have to pay attention just because it is, you know, it's almost like the Olympics, right? The people who are winning are not 510 seconds faster. The second third place, they're they're like, a 10th of a second faster, and sometimes less than that. Yeah. So it's like, it's that little bit that allows you to win. So if you're in a highly competitive industry, these are things that you haven't pay attention to.

Blake Beus 25:56 Yeah, absolutely. And it's, I mean, this just goes back to what we talked about time and time and time again, but it's, it's holistic marketing, basically, looking at the whole, the whole of everything, the all inclusive part, your your messaging, your ad strategy, your site speed, all of these things, looking at all of those channels, and making sure everything's lined up or, you know, properly aligned in that. And honestly, it's, it's hard. It's not, it's not easy. There's a reason, like people reach out to you and mean, Greg, because it's, if you're a business owner, or whatever, you're executing all of these other strategies, delivering for your existing clients, making sure they're happy. But now you've got to learn how to make websites faster. Yeah, right. Like that's not, that's not in the realm and that's fine. That's part of delegation and outsourcing or whatever. Border strategy, it's part of the strategy is part of your competitiveness.

Greg Marshall 26:45 So you have to constantly adapt. And what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, or today. And that's kind of the beauty of all is you have to just constantly looking for ways to get better. And at least for me, I tend to get bored easy, which is why this is a great energy for me, because I know they're never gonna make it easy for me.

Blake Beus 27:11 Well, well, Greg, let's let's, let's wrap this up. How can people reach out to you? Oh, great,

Greg Marshall 27:16 Marshall. CO and if you want to book a strategy session, just go on there and it's your information. And what about you?

Blake Beus 27:23 Just Blake peace calm and you can just reach out to me there, see what my current offers are there.

Greg Marshall 27:30 So while this is a very useful pockets, I think I think people will get a lot of value from it. So I guess, until next time, we'll talk to you guys later.

Blake Beus 27:39 Okay, we'll catch you later. Bye.