effect of page speed on ad revenue

Question

I'm thinking of slowing my pageloads a bit, and want to know how much ad revenue will decrease due to the slowness.

For ads on a revenue-per-impression (CPM) basis, I have to worry about

• decreased initial traffic ("landings", if you will) and
• an increase in the number of people who leave.

The second one — those who leave — has been covered. But is there a good, recent study on the decrease in landings? (One thing that affects landings is the fact that Google shows a slower-loading page lower among search results, though general site reputation also depends on page speed and affects landings.)

And as to ads on revenue-per-click (CPC) basis: Are there any data on the decrease in clicks when pages are slower-loading? (E.g., on whether those fewer people who stick around on a slower site are those who click more (or less), and to what extent.)

Answer 1

I don't have any data that directly correlates page speed with click thrus. However, this article shows how important page speed is in a variety of other areas and may be useful to you:

• Amazon: 100 ms delay caused a drop in revenue.
• Google: 400 ms delay caused a 0.59% decrease in search requests per user.
• Yahoo!: 400 ms delay caused a 5-9% decrease in traffic.
• Bing: 2 seconds delay caused a 4.3% drop in revenue per user.
• Mozilla made their download page 2.2 seconds faster and was rewarded with an increase of 15.4% in downloads.
• Google Maps reduced the file volume by 30% and observed a 30% increase in map requests.
• Netflix, which uses Appdynamics to monitor their performance, enabled gzip on the server; simply by this single action pages became 13-25% faster and saved 50% of traffic volume!
• Shopzilla succeeded in reducing the loading time from 7 down to 2 seconds, whereby the conversion rate increased by 7-12, they observed a 25% increase in page requests, they were able to retire 50% of their servers, thus saving energy costs.
• AOL observed the number of page views on several websites. While the fastest users requested 7-8 pages, the slowest only viewed 3-4.
• Edmunds got down from over 10 seconds to less than 2, adding 17% page views and increasing revenue by 3%.