Microsoft Advertising Knows: Speed Matters

Speed tends to matter in business. Speed to decision making. Speed to insight. Speed of transaction. There are so many ways that speed matters.

In today’s world, consumers expect things to be fast—and that includes webpage load time. 

Did you know that:

• 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less
• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
• A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions
• If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year

It’s even been reported that “Amazon’s calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year.”

Yes, speed matters. And Microsoft Advertising knows this.

Parallel tracking: A simple fix for a complex problem

We’ve all been there. We click a link and watch the URL bar go through a bunch of redirects as we sit in front of a blank page. Do we wait? Do we leave? With marketers spending significant budgets across the globe in online advertising, it’s troublesome to think that some of those purchased clicks might never turn into real traffic as impatient users click back on their browsers.

Microsoft Advertising knows that this can be an issue and is focused on setting parallel tracking as the default. As explained in a Microsoft Advertising blog post:

“In traditional sequential tracking, when an ad click occurs, the consumer is taken through a series of redirects before landing on the final URL. With parallel tracking, the consumer is taken directly to your final URL while all the click-measurement processing is done in the background. That means a much faster page load time.”

With the objective of giving searchers a better user experience, Microsoft Advertising made an announcement that parallel tracking will be mandatory for all accounts created after May 31, 2020, and for accounts created before that, it will be mandatory after January 15th, 2021

This transition is not only beneficial for searchers but also for advertisers. Parallel tracking is expected to reduce page load times after click, increasing the number of conversions for ad campaigns, and resulting in fewer lost visits. According to Microsoft Advertising’s measurements, “even milliseconds of delay can result in leads being lost due to consumers dropping off before advertiser’s websites can load after an ad click.”

Skai’s Technical Account Management team is coordinating reviews with clients for parallel tracking compliance to help them get ready for any transition changes they need to do on their side.

Page load speed is just one of the thousand things search marketers need to think about

Marketing is hard—and search marketing is even harder. Do you have the right platform partner in place to help you maximize your paid search budgets?

When was the last time you checked out Skai’s suite of marketing technologies? It helps advertisers to drive performance, stay productive, and stay sharp with campaign insights to enable data-driven decision-making.

Contact us today or set up a quick and easy demo to see the innovative features Skai Search has to offer.

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