How much does page speed affect revenue in a B2B sales cycle?

Tl;dr: a B2B company used Click360 to analyze page load times and was able to prove that even 1/8th of a second could be the difference between winning a sale and losing it.

They say time is money. And nowhere is that more apparent than on website load times. For a long time, marketers and developers have instinctively understood that page load times affect sales in an ecommerce site. But less data has been available for B2B websites, and often times they were not able to prove ROI to justify efforts to improve load times.

We sought to use Click360 to answer the question: how does page speed affect revenue in a complex sales cycle?

Fortunately, it’s combination of clickstream data and CRM data make getting an end-to-end view of the B2B sales-cycle simple. And we were able to get a simple answer in a matter of minutes.

For this analysis, we considered three categories:

  1. Views by leads that are not connected to an opportunity
  2. Views by leads that are connected to Closed – Lost opportunities
  3. Views by leads that are connected to Closed – Won opportunities

The simplest analysis showed that visitors from the opportunities the Click360’s customer won were, on average, about 10% faster than those they lost and around 60% faster than those that filled out a form but did not become a lead:

 MeanStd. Dev.25%       Median75%        
No Opp.2.26 seconds4.43 seconds0.62 seconds1.26 seconds2.33 seconds
Closed – Lost1.58 seconds2.63 seconds0.53 seconds0.94 seconds1.76 seconds
Closed – Won1.43 seconds2.34 seconds0.45 seconds0.85 seconds1.64 seconds

Although there were a host of other variables to control for the more thorough analysis (many of which were specific to the company), our simple analysis still showed very strong statistical evidence (P < 0.0001) to reject the null hypothesis for Closed – Won/Closed – Lost:

Difference-0.150
Standard error0.014
95% CI-0.1782 to -0.1218
t-statistic-10.437
DF119998
Significance levelP < 0.0001

(Sample size >60,000)

The conclusion, even though we could benefit from further analysis for the company, was that the low p-value and across-the-board better numbers for better categories suggest that faster page speeds–even 1/8th of a second–could be the difference between winning a sale and losing it.

The best part was that, using the data to prove the relationship between faster page load times and increased sales, the customer was able to justify additional efforts to make their website load faster.

Do you know how page speed time affects your company’s revenue? That’s just one of many answers we can answer with Click360. Give us a try or take a free demo today.

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