Four Things Marketers Should Ask IT About Their Website’s Performance

Slow Loading Tags

Slow Loading Tags

According to a recent article in NY times Impatient Web-Users Flee Slow Loading Sites, 400 milliseconds is too long. Thirty-seven percent of consumers find performance issues when visiting a website unacceptable, and 86% of users will leave a site after having bad experiences, according to another study from Compuware.

When it comes to tracking what consumer’s are doing on websites, marketers need to use many third-party tags from web analytics, email, search, ad servers, online testing, behavioral targeting, social media, and more. These systems get very complex and often use Javascript which can slow pages down, making it harder to track conversions especially when the user experience has been compromised. See this Compuware Load Testing Infographic to view key findings from their survey and learn exactly how slow tags, that result in poor page performance, negatively impacts your bottom line. In fact we proved in our recent study that, “Just One Second Delay In Page-Load Can Cause 7% Loss In Customer Conversions.”

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Just One Second Delay In Page-Load Can Cause 7% Loss In Customer Conversions

A marketer’s ability to have their company’s website’s pages load quickly has direct impact on sales and ultimately on the bottom line. Page load times can impact the overall customer experience, as well as SEO as page speed determines your ranking when users search in a browser. According to the Aberdeen Group, a 1-second delay in page-load time equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and 7% loss in conversions. And that sounds bad for business.

We partnered with the UK’s leading glasses e-tailor Glasses Direct to study page speed and conversion behavior. Our study enabled us to build a case for the true correlation between page speed and dollar values. Our findings substantiated the Aberdeen findings, where increases in page-load time significantly impacted conversion rates, dropping by 7%.

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How To Protect Your Site in the Era of Tag Bloat

We announced last week our exclusive partnership with Digital Fulcrum which now allows any tag to run through our tag management system asynchronously. Adam Figuiera discusses in this guest blog post the issues of 3rd party tags and what to consider.

Guest post by Adam Figuiera, Product Marketing Manager, Monetate 

Adam Figueira

The web is awash in tags. From analytics to ad serving, website testing to channel optimization, marketers use an ever-increasing number of third-party solutions for improving and measuring the customer’s website experience–and to make the process for doing so easier.
But can too much of a good thing actually be bad? Indeed it can, and one might accurately term the last five years as the Era of Tag Bloat. However, the marketer’s challenges extend beyond just the number of tags necessary for running a modern website.

Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, website JavaScript tags can have split personalities–enhancing a marketer’s knowledge and the visitor’s experience when everything performs properly, but showing their evil side when things don’t go as planned. Continue reading

TagMan Joins Forces With Digital Fulcrum To Accelerate Page Load

TagMan rehouses all of your site's third-party tags into one independent tag management system, loading only the necessary third-party tags when a customer visits your site ensuring faster page load times and better tracking of conversions.

TagMan’s Tag Management System already accelerated page-load times by optimizing its clients’ third-party tags with its its patent pending smart tag loading functionality, which serves tags asynchronously enabling them to load independently of the page content rather than blocking it. Now by combining forces with Digital Fulcrum we are able to offer brand marketers even faster page-load times along with a superior online experience for customers by extending this solution further to allowing synchronous tags to be executed asynchronously without modifying any code, which now enables TagMan to be used asynchronously with any third-party tag.

Learn more about the TagMan and Digital Fulcrum partnership in this announcement, “TagMan and Digital Fulcrum Join Forces To Optimize Performance of Legacy 3rd Party Tags.”

And be sure to download our recent white paper, “Smart Loading Tags To Accelerate Your Website’s Performance,” which focuses on research in synchronous tag acceleration – assessing opportunities for optimizing page-load times through tag acceleration methods, which can result in lower abandonment rates and a better user experience for customers online.

Tag Management Done Poorly Can Create Performance Issues

Many marketers don’t realize just how much impact a few 3rd-party scripts have on their website’s page loading and performance and how that can affect the bottom line in terms of conversions, not to mention user experience. Research indicates that it can be significant.

In fact, a study by the Aberdeen group, reveals that a 1-second delay in page loading can correlate to a 7% loss in conversions. That’s a serious problem.

And while tag management is a solution, tag management done poorly can create, rather than solve, performance issues. In essence, tag management done badly can lead to poor acceleration issues. In a recent study, “Smart Loading Tags to Accelerate Your Website’s Performance,” we looked at page-load times with different tag management solutions to illustrate this point. Continue reading

Q&A: Andy Kahl On Third-Party Tags, Page Load, Latency, And Site Performance

TagMan recently caught up with Andy Kahl Product Manager at Evidon, Ghostery’s parent company, to talk about their recent study: Biggest Lagger: The Top Ten Elements that Slow Your Internet Down (US), in which they tracked their GhostRank Panel volunteers to monitor the Internet and most third-party content. Out of nearly 800 companies they watch, they found the top 10 that lag the web browsing experience the most in the U.S.

Biggest Lagger: The Top Ten Elements that Slow Your Internet Down (US) Continue reading

Tag management helps Glasses Direct take on a gloomy-looking 2012

Rob Silsbury, Marketing Director, Glasses DirectRob Silsbury, marketing director of online glasses retailer Glasses Direct is under no illusions as to the state of the retail environment in 2012.

Speaking at TagMan’s most recent client get together TagMeet 2, Silsbury said: “It’s going to be a pig of a year.” And none of the other retailers in the room looked ready to disagree.

So what does Glasses Direct plan to do about it? Given its focus is online, then drive its online channels hard. Efficiency is the overriding mission. But, that doesn’t mean the company isn’t prepared to invest to get as lean as possible. Silsbury has a couple of things in mind: Continue reading

Holland America Line Improves Site Performance With Tag Management

Holland America now using Tag ManagementWe recently announced that our tag management platform has been chosen by more global travel and hospitality brands, including Holland America Line, a recognized world leader in premium cruising for nearly 140 years (see press release).

Holland America Line has seen significant improvements by implementing TagMan’s Tag management system with Smart Tag Loading. Continue reading

Getting Social e-Commerce Ready With Tag Management

As Cyber Monday approaches, a lot of e-tailers are  contemplating the ROI of social commerce. While full service social commerce, such as setting up a store on Facebook might be a viable move for big players, like Procter & Gamble with its Pampers store on the social site, for smaller businesses the major play lies in adding social plugins, such as “Like” or “Share,” to their e-commerce sites.

The truth is, consumers aren’t visiting social networks to do their shopping. A recent simplyZesty article reported that Forrester found that the conversion rate for Facebook stores was equal to that of standard e-commerce stores, at between 2-4%, while also attracting Continue reading

The Value Of Search and Social Retargeting With Smart Tag Management

The landscape of advertising and targeting is changing rapidly. Targeting and personalization are becoming more and more critical to how we target audiences online.

Our VP of Product Marketing, Maggie Neuwald recently participated in a webinar “The Future of Data and Media in 2012″ with Chango, the leader in search retargeting, and m6d (Media6Degrees), a marketing technology company that Continue reading