1073: Ghostery - How AdTech And Ad Trackers Slow Down Websites - a podcast by Neil C. Hughes

Did you know that every website has 15 seconds to keep the attention of its audience? As humans, our attention span is now less than that of goldfish at 8 seconds and your visitors will form an opinion about your site in 5 seconds. Finally, if your website fails to load within 3 seconds, users will leave and never return again?

What’s even more eye-opening is how much seemingly minute increments of additional load time actually impact the outcome. A mere 100s of difference can cause conversion rate to drop by 2.4%. A page loading 1 second slower can see their conversion rates plummet 21.8%, and a page loading 2 seconds slower could find 36.5% of their conversions lost.

If you want users to stay on your page, then statistics hurt even more – with a 2-second delay causing a 62.1% average increase in bounce rate. Meanwhile, many retailers are filling their websites with trackers that are increasing load times and creating negative experiences for their visitors.

These are a few areas that I wanted to explore on this daily tech podcast. Today I have invited Jeremy Tillman back onto the podcast from Ad Tracker experts Ghostery who recently released their 2019 Retail Tracker Tax Report. Ghostery revealed insights to analyze the specific tracker stack of 12 retailers’ websites to expose the hidden cost of certain trackers.

Ghostery found that many retail websites in this study suffered from frivolous trackers that were found to negatively impact customer experiences. Some of the worst-performing websites belonged to Everlane, Footlocker and Urban Outfitters, which all had the biggest discrepancies between default load time (load time with all trackers in place) and load time with trackers blocked – with a difference between load times of 6 seconds, 5 seconds and 5 seconds, respectively.

Although these three retailers did not have relatively high numbers of trackers on their websites among those analyzed, the trackers they did have were attacking performance. Jeremy reveals other findings from the report and much more.

 

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