The need for mobile speed: How mobile latency impacts publisher revenue

Today, people have high expectations for mobile experiences. Simply loading on a mobile device is no longer enough. To keep people engaged, mobile sites must be fast and relevant.

Unfortunately, based on our analysis of 10,000+ mobile web domains, we found that most mobile sites don’t meet this bar: The average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections.¹ That’s about as long as it takes to sing the entire alphabet song!²

Slow loading sites frustrate users and negatively impact publishers. In our new study, “The Need for Mobile Speed”, we found that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.³

Additionally, sites that load in 5 seconds vs 19 seconds observed:

• 25% higher ad viewability⁴
  
• 70% longer average sessions⁵
  
• 35% lower bounce rates⁶
  

The study also explored the relationship between page speed and revenue. While there are several factors that impact revenue, our model projects that publishers whose mobile sites load in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than those whose sites load in 19 seconds. ⁷

To learn more about what we found — and for some actionable tips on how you can improve your mobile site’s performance, check out our report below.

Sources:

¹Webpagetest.org, Sampled 11.8K global mWeb homepage domains loaded using a fast 3G connection timing first view only (no cached resources), February 2016
²NPR, “Keep Flu At Bay With A Song”, April 2009
³Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.7K, Global, March 2016
⁴DoubleClick for Publishers, Google Active View ad viewability for 10.7K mWeb homepage domains with >70% measurable ad viewability, Global, February 2016
⁵Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=3.5K, Global, March 2016
⁶Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=2.8K, Global, March 2016
⁷Google Data, Aggregated, anonymized Google Analytics and DoubleClick AdExchange data from a sample of mWeb sites opted into sharing benchmark data, n=4.5K, Global, June 2015 - May 2016