Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/11/marissa-mayer-at-web-20.html

by quoderat • 17 years ago

106 41 17 years ago

glinden.blogspot.com

markup• 17 years ago

It's pretty much a non-news -- I think everyone is aware of this -- but backing it up with actual tests and data is great. Thanks for sharing the post

teej3• 17 years ago

We had a discussion about this before, where I shared some rough stats from an application I used to run. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=415809

sounddust• 17 years ago

I agree that everyone was probably aware that speed is important, but I always thought that as long as pages loaded in less than 1 or 2 seconds, then it wouldn't make much of a difference to most users. This post changes my point of view; I think I'm going to work harder to reduce page load times as much as possible instead of stopping at something that "seems fast"

cedsav2• 17 years ago

Sorry to bring back the table vs. css layout debate, but since Google use tables for some parts of their layout, can we assume that this is because it renders faster (and therefore makes more money for them)?

electromagnetic• 17 years ago

I can understand this. Walmart is the most painful website to browse on the internet, because you go on usually looking for something or the price of something and it takes what feels like an eternity to get anywhere.

pclark• 17 years ago

you should try using GoDaddy.com

pg• 17 years ago

I heard Google also found that increasing speed increased users' perception of the quality of the search results. The reason was that when the site was faster, users did more searches. Naturally they found more stuff. But they attributed the gain to Google's cleverness rather than the extra work they'd done themselves.

prakash3• 17 years ago

I have spoken to tons of folks on websites they think are fast, websites they would benchmark against -- in the majority of cases perception of fast loading website triumphs an apples-to-apples comparison of time taken to download & render a page. Perception plays a huge role when it comes to wining the mind games in the users head regd. page download times.

gruseom3• 17 years ago

Can you give examples of how to make loading perceived as faster? All I know is progress indicators.

gruseom3• 17 years ago

There may be a psychological effect too. I've noticed that once people think of a piece of software as fast, they're more likely to think of it as good in other respects, even unrelated ones.

bd• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

LostInTheWoods• 17 years ago

Couldn't one come to another conclusion here? In fact several other conclusions. For one, since users were getting more results on the page they didn't need to go to a second results page, thus causing the drop-off in traffic.

If you're going to come to some grand "Aha!" moment, you should define your experiment. Were these the same users? on the same day? searching for the same stuff? What browsers were they using? Did they have their windows maximized? What was their screen size? ... and so on.

quoderat• 17 years ago

Though I've never been able to find the results and complete study methodology online (can anyone?), Mayer is a CS grad from Stanford, as well as head of the UI team at Google. I'm guessing she and her group know what they are doing.

I'd be more than willing to bet that they controlled for these variables you mention, else the test would be useless. Sure, it's right to be skeptical, but they do this for a living.

Given Google's stake in having accurate data, they probably bothered to do it correctly.

(And I am not usually a defender of Google.)

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

Sure, but not necessarily to report it to the press correctly.

cedsav2• 17 years ago

"After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable."

I guess that means they controlled for the other variables.

dhimes• 17 years ago

I'm getting more questions as I start to think about this. They get revenue from ads, not searches. Did they vary the number of ads displayed? Did people look at the first page of 10, not find what they saw, then check the ads, find what they saw (which may be a page two organic result), and click the ad?

If that is what is happening, then I can see why Google would lose. That is, their main conclusion would be that people tend to check organic results first. If that's true then if a company that has to pay to be page 1 is organically moved there by increasing the number of results displayed, then G loses.

They check this by seeing if revenue goes up when they limit the results to 5 ads.

agotterer• 17 years ago

How does it not make more sense that traffic dropped because the average user only wants to see 30 results and saw them all on a single page instead of navigating to three separate pages. Revenue dropped because they showed 1/3 the amount of adwords. Did I miss something here?

prakash3• 17 years ago

Maybe PG should try this in kicking his HN habit, introduce throttling features that will increase the time taken to render HN rather than focusing on optimizations, I know it would help a lot of other folks as well ;-)

kirubakaran3• 17 years ago

I hope he doesn't make the site suck for everyone just to "help" the users who seem to need baby-sitters. Suburbs suck for the same reason. I know you are joking but I am really tired of all the Nanny State type stuff.

"Oh I am just doing this for your own good. You will thank me later." is one of the most evil attitudes that I know. I am not able to express clearly why I think so and why I feel so strongly[#] about it. May be it is coz I find it patronizing. Also I find it extremely unhackerly.

[#] My mind is screaming obscenities and I am feeling pretty angry.

whatusername3• 17 years ago

even for kids? Or only for adults?

Also - there is something to be said for wisdom.

ardell• 17 years ago

Another well-illustrated example of the fact that users don't know what they want, you have to A/B Test it out of them.

zach• 17 years ago

Too true. I like the optometrist who made me read tiny letters again and again instead of asking "better like this... or like this?" Because even I can't tell the difference at first sight.

harpastum• 17 years ago

I think the magnitude of impact might be due to the search engine market. Results of different search engines are usually indistinguishable (to most web users), so the most important factors become design and speed. In other markets the balance may be different.

I'm not saying that speed isn't important for everyone, but having that killer feature, even if it slows down your site, might be what sets you apart from your competitors.

lallysingh• 17 years ago

So, where does this fit into net neutrality? ISPs can certainly sell QoS services to customers.

For some applications, this is important (e.g. gaming). For others, it could be a nice competitive advantage. But then with more & more of the ATM frames dedicated to QoS, that'll leave more contention (thusly, higher latency & drop) for the rest.

I'm just worried about who's going to use these facts for what ends.

danohuiginn• 17 years ago

so, why not load the first few results quickly, then fill in the rest later through ajax? It'll take more than .5 seconds to eyeball the first ten results.

Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic

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