JON DIORIO: So thank you all for coming.
My name is John Diorio.
I'm Group Product Manager for Google Ads.
And I am a self-professed mobile user experience snob in part
because I have an incredibly short attention span,
and so I can't really wait for pages to load, but more
importantly, because it pains me to see
the number of advertisers who put all their effort
into refining their targeting and optimizing their creatives
when their website takes 18 to 20 seconds to load,
thereby killing any chance of conversion.
The mobile revolution isn't new, but the deep impact
it has on us as consumers in our behavior
is only now becoming readily apparent.
And speed is a real critical factor in all of this.
Let's just take a look at what's going on
in the local wine industry.
In the US, mobile searches for same day wine shipping
are up 150% in the last year.
People looking for last minute winery tours, up 140%.
And wine stores open right now, up 185%.
We've become an instant gratification consumer,
and speed is critical to all of this.
Speed matters a lot.
And this shouldn't really come as a surprise to anybody.
If you consider the fact that an entire generation has now
been raised on lightning fast mobile applications,
in essence you're not only competing with other brands,
but you're now also competing with the fastest
digital experience a consumer has ever had.
And when you consider that mobile websites have
over twice the reach of native applications,
shouldn't those websites be at least as fast
as those applications?
A recent study by Verne Dale actually
shows that 90% of decision makers
agree that the customer experience is
vital to their business success.
Many of them saying that it's just
as important as brand loyalty.
And in my experience over the last several years,
the biggest hindrance to the mobile user experience
has been speed.
So let's take a look at a few numbers.
A one second delay in page load time
can hurt conversion rates by up to 20%.
And just over half of visits say they'll
abandon if a page takes longer than three seconds to load.
But here's the kicker in all this,
the average mobile page loads in 15 seconds.
Yet despite these numbers, people still
spend all of their time refining targeting and optimizing
creatives.
So let's assume that everyone in this room is above average.
That means that your pages load in anywhere
from 1 to 15 seconds.
When you consider that last number, about half
of visits abandoning after three seconds, that
means a lot of you have a great opportunity,
it means a lot of us are leaving a lot of money on the table.
And as marketing leaders, we can't afford to do that.
And that's why we at Google take the mobile experience
so seriously.
As a company, not just the ads division, but as
the entire company, we spend a lot of time thinking
about how do we make the mobile web
a much faster, less frictionless experience for everybody.
That's why the organic search team as of Monday,
has started factoring page load times
into their organic ranking algorithm.
And if you didn't already know, landing page speed
has a direct impact on your advertising ROI.
And it's pretty straightforward, landing page speed
affects the user's landing page experience.
And landing page experience, as you probably well know,
is a very big factor in our pricing and ranking algorithms.
So if you have chronically slow pages,
you really need to pause for a minute
and take all this into consideration.
Now, I'm obsessed with the mobile user experience
as I told you.
Therefore, my team is.
We've spoken with countless digital advertisers.
And one thing that we can't avoid in those conversations
is how hard it is for you to really understand your speed.
There are tons of tools out there
that will tell you tons of metrics about how
your pages and your site loads.
But these weren't built for marketers.
These were built for developers.
So honestly, if you come and you tell me,
well, my page loads in 6,500 milliseconds,
is that good on 4G?
I don't know, because there's a ton of context as marketers
that we need to know behind this number that we don't have.
What are the average devices people are using?
What's the geography you're targeting?
What type of network connections can these guys have?
And that's why the developer tools
don't help us translate page load time into advertising ROI.
That's why I want to discuss a couple of tools
with you guys that should hopefully help along the way.
The first is something we launched in February
at Mobile World Congress.
And it's called our Speed Scorecard.
It's a handy website.
Just go to g.co/winningonmobile.
And using actual Chrome user data,
we can tell you how fast different sites compare
with each other.
So you could put in Macy's.
You could put in Nordstrom's.
You can go head to head and see how
they compete with each other.
This should help you move your development
teams and your marketing management
towards understanding your relative competitive standing
with regard to speed and start getting everybody
on board with the fact that you may have an issue that
needs to be dealt with.
And one thing to really consider is not
the absolute number, but your place with your competition.
Because having a fast site isn't enough
if all of your competitors are faster than yours.
OK, so now that we've got people thinking of how
your speed relates to your competitors,
the next question is, what is the dollar implication of this?
That's why we also released the Lift Calculator, the Impact
Calculator.
This is a tool you can play with.
You simply tell us some conversion and some visit data.
And as you adjust the speed of your site,
you can better understand what that
may mean in terms of incremental revenue for your business,
or money left on the table.
All right, now, once you've got the organization bought
into improving speed, you're going
to have to dig into where the problems are,
where the bodies are buried.
That's why we introduce the Landing Page tab.
And we introduced this intentionally right next
to creatives and keywords, because it is just
as important as those concepts.
From this page, you can see your ad performance
by landing page URL.
But you can also see critical things
like whether your AMP pages are properly formatted.
You can get a sense of whether Google considers those pages
to be mobile friendly.
And if you watched the keynote yesterday morning,
you now get a mobile speed score.
This is a 1 to 10 number that helps
you understand in simple context, am I fast
or am I slow?
10 is fast.
1 is slow.
This uses a number of different signals.
It uses actual user data, not synthesized crawl data,
to help you understand which pages may be holding back
your mobile ad performance.
I beg all of you to go and check this out.
If your a high traffic sites, or if the majority of your clicks
are going to pages that are scoring a six or lower,
that is probably having an impact on your overall ROI.
Now once you've figured out which pages are the issue, then
the question is, well, how do I fix this?
And that's not an easy thing.
And honestly, it's something that
should be left to your web development team,
because usually it's death by 1,000 cuts-- slow databases,
bad JavaScript placement.
However, there is one silver bullet that we recommend.
It's an open source project called Accelerated Mobile Pages
or AMP.
AMP pages are designed by their very nature
to load extremely fast often in under one second.
We found that AMP pages load 85% faster
than standard mobile pages.
That's why over 6 billion AMP pages
have been created to date on over 55 million domains
around the world with big brands such as Johnson
& Johnson and eBay on board and using them.
French organic retailer Greenweez
had a great experience using AMP alongside their digital
advertising strategy.
They saw an 80% increase in mobile conversion rates
and a 66% decrease in CPAs.
Again, the faster you make the experience,
the more pleasurable you make the experience, the more people
click, the more people buy, and the better your ads perform.
So based on the success of the Greenweez case and many others,
we've actually launched native support in AdWords
for AMP pages.
So now you can direct all of your paid
traffic to these pages and get that one second load experience
that up until about six months ago
was reserved only for organic clicks.
If you haven't checked this out, I highly recommend you do.
It's probably the easiest and fastest
way to get your site down to a one second load time.
If you're interested, simply go check out ampproject.org
or go talk to your web development
team, who hopefully is already aware of this technology.
Now, AMP pages make your pages load a lot faster.
But still getting to those pages still takes
a fair amount of time.
And it has to do with the legacy way the internet operates.
So before today-- well, actually including today,
when you click on an ad, there's a really good chance
that your browser is going to one server and another server
and another server and another server just
to get to the landing page, which
means your user is sitting there waiting one, two, three, four
seconds before the browser actually
ever even reaches their page.
Well, that's why we want to fundamentally change
the way ad serving works.
When the user clicks, they should be taken directly
to the landing page.
And all of that good and critical measurement tracking,
that should all be handled on the side.
That's why we've introduced parallel tracking to do this.
Parallel tracking leverages new browser technology
that simply says the user always goes to the landing page
immediately.
Thereby, shaving off a half to many seconds on your page load
time.
And the good news is this is just
an opt-in feature in AdWords.
So if you use a third party tracking provider, or many,
please give them a call, find out
if they're compatible yet with parallel tracking.
And if they are, talk to them about when you can turn it on.
One last thing I should mention is
that parallel tracking is going to become compulsory
on October 30 of 2018.
We're already working with many, if not all of the third party
providers that you use.
So I would urge you don't delay in looking
into this technology.
Better that you speed up your pages now, give your users
that better experience, and hopefully realize
the boost in your return on ad spend.
Again, at the end of the day, we, as digital marketers,
cannot afford to leave money on the table.
We cannot afford to waste time tweaking our ads when
our website doesn't convert.
Therefore, as you leave Google Marketing Live,
I'd like to challenge you to a few things.
When you go back to the office, see how your speed ranks up
against your competitors.
Figure out which pages may be holding you back using
the mobile speed score column.
And talk with your web development team
about what you can do to speed that experience up
for your users and to increase your ROI overall.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it.
I believe I have to get off stage,
but I'll be right down here to answer any questions
that you guys have.
And have a great rest of the time at the conference.
Thank you.