Customers crave speed on the Web, and they reward organizations that make things fast and simple.
Why is Google successful? Because it delivers better and faster results than its competitors. Google truly understands the customer’s need for speed. “At Google, we’ve gathered hard data to reinforce our intuition that “speed matters” on the Internet,” Jake Brutlag of Google wrote once. “We’ve always viewed speed as a competitive advantage.”
Google did an experiment whereby they slowed down the delivery of search results. They found that increasing a page’s loading time by less than half a second has a measurably negative impact on searchers. Basically, the people who were exposed to the experiment over a period of time did fewer and fewer searches.
“Google has kept a promise it made,” Matt McGee of Search Engine Land wrote. “Site speed is now a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm.” Google claims that there is abundant research that proves that customers love fast sites, so those are the sites Google rewards. So, everything else being equal, the sites with big, fancy meaningless graphics and complicated code will rank lower in Google search results than fast, lean, simple sites.
Have you noticed that those atrocious Flash intros have practically disappeared from the Web? The only place you’re likely to find a Flash intro these days is on an advertising agency website. Why did they disappear? Because customers absolutely detested them.
Practically every single piece of evidence that was gathered on customer behavior on the Web since 1994 can be summarized as follows: The customer is highly, highly impatient. They scan a page like they scan a signpost as they’re driving down a motorway. They hardly even read full sentences.
Talking with someone who creates a lot of support videos for a major website, we asked him to tell us the most important thing he had learned about making such videos. “Start immediately,” he said. No swirling logos or moody music intros. Just get straight to the point of what the help video is about from the very first second.”
marketingexperiments.com states that a new customer will give you at most seven seconds to clarify why your website is the best and fastest way for them to complete their task. “We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our homepage as quickly as possible,” Google states.
It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? Get them off your website as quickly as possible having done what they came to your website to do. It’s truly the opposite philosophy to sticky websites or sticky marketing (which is what most traditional marketing is about). In this modern age, who wants to be stuck?
Time is the most valuable resource, and it will only become more and more precious. Those who relentlessly focus on saving the customer time will have a truly future-proof strategy. Those who waste their customers’ time with disruptive marketing and advertising, confusing menus and links and smiley people images will ultimately end up as road kill on the information superhighway.