Load time is killing your B2B campaigns: here's how to fix it

A frequent piece of advice for our clients is the need for streamlined, mobile-first landing pages, particularly when it comes to lead generation campaigns – now new research from Google reinforces this point.

Google has analysed the traffic driven by 900,000 mobile ads, to fully understand how load time impacts user behaviour.

For 70% of the pages Google analysed, it took nearly seven seconds for the visual content above the fold to display on the screen. This is a major issue, as the research also found that 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Load time has a massive impact on lead generation campaigns. If you lose half of your potential visitors due to excessive load time, you are losing half of your potential conversions: halving the performance of your campaign, and doubling your cost of acquisition.

This isn’t a marginal gain story, its about a huge 50% plus chunk of your budget simply being wasted. This is the difference between a campaign succeeding or being a flop.

B2B marketers must fix this by placing mobile users at the heart of their lead generation strategies – starting with a relentless approach to landing page file size.

A 1.49MB landing page may seem acceptable, but takes seven seconds to load using a fast 3G connection: marketers must ensure their landing pages load faster than that.

Two next steps that Google recommends to improve mobile experience:

1. Create Progressive Web Apps that are reliable (loading instantly, even in uncertain network conditions), fast (responding to user interactions with silky smooth animations), and engaging (feeling like a natural app on a user's device).
2. Use Lighthouse, an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web apps.

If you plan to put these suggestions into practice, make sure to get in touch. We have a series of case studies that illustrate the benefits of a mobile-first approach to lead generation, and we would love to talk you through them.

You may also be interested in our six essential B2B marketing trends for 2017. Click below to download the report.