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Has anyone been able to reproduce this "Google Research" that is so often quoted? They have numbers related to conversion too. I know I'm sounding doubtful but

Has anyone been able to reproduce this "Google Research" that is so often quoted? They have numbers related to conversion too. I know I'm sounding doubtful but bringing response time down a second or so isn't a magic potion for more money pouring in the door. Not that anyone should ignore performance. It's irresponsible to ignore perf. I just know from experience, when buying something on Black Friday at Amazon, if the page doesn't respond in 2 seconds... you probably are going to wait a bit longer.

Groxx 4y ago
Google's results consistently don't hold up for high-intent visitors, yeah. A .gov site isn't (overly) concerned about bounce rate - people have no other location to bounce to, they will consistently wait out latency to do what they need to do. It does still help of course, just at tiny fractions of the impact that Google saw.
fleddr 4y ago
The Google Research that is often quoted might have been well intended, but is grossly overstated and misused. The thing with bounce rate is that you don't know WHY the user bounced nor did you know their intent. Typically analytics aren't even loaded yet. Sure enough I believe there to be a correlation forming as you dramatically increase page response time, but you still cannot attribute a high bounce rate to performance alone, which the often quoted line does imply. Case in point, most of Google's properties don't even come close to their own performance guidelines.
- nobleach 4y ago
  At the time that those metrics were being thrown around, Google was knee-deep in pushing AMP. They visited us at Overstock several times to cajole us into using it with cries of, "will you please consider your users in less fortunate countries on less than stellar networks". That's fair I guess. We reduced our bundle size to 185k. They still tried to convince us to use AMP. We travelled out to Sunnyvale for a hackathon at the Googleplex, they were pushing AMP all over the place. AirBnB were the only folks willing to stand up and flat out say, "because AMP is terrible". (side story - I realize)
branko_d 4y ago
The IBM researched this in the late ‘70es and reached broadly the same conclusion. They were talking about “productivity” instead of “bounce rate” back then, but the basic biology of attention span and working memory is the same. He and Richard P. Kelisky, Director of Computing Systems for IBM's Research Division, wrote about their observations in 1979, "...each second of system response degradation leads to a similar degradation added to the user's time for the following [command]. This phenomenon seems to be related to an individual's attention span. The traditional model of a person thinking after each system response appears to be inaccurate. Instead, people seem to have a sequence of actions in mind, contained in a short-term mental memory buffer. Increases in SRT [system response time] seem to disrupt the thought processes, and this may result in having to rethink the sequence of actions to be continued." “The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time” https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rap...

Groxx 4y ago

Google's results consistently don't hold up for high-intent visitors, yeah. A .gov site isn't (overly) concerned about bounce rate - people have no other location to bounce to, they will consistently wait out latency to do what they need to do. It does still help of course, just at tiny fractions of the impact that Google saw.

fleddr 4y ago

The Google Research that is often quoted might have been well intended, but is grossly overstated and misused. The thing with bounce rate is that you don't know WHY the user bounced nor did you know their intent. Typically analytics aren't even loaded yet. Sure enough I believe there to be a correlation forming as you dramatically increase page response time, but you still cannot attribute a high bounce rate to performance alone, which the often quoted line does imply. Case in point, most of Google's properties don't even come close to their own performance guidelines.

nobleach 4y ago
At the time that those metrics were being thrown around, Google was knee-deep in pushing AMP. They visited us at Overstock several times to cajole us into using it with cries of, "will you please consider your users in less fortunate countries on less than stellar networks". That's fair I guess. We reduced our bundle size to 185k. They still tried to convince us to use AMP. We travelled out to Sunnyvale for a hackathon at the Googleplex, they were pushing AMP all over the place. AirBnB were the only folks willing to stand up and flat out say, "because AMP is terrible". (side story - I realize)

branko_d 4y ago

The IBM researched this in the late ‘70es and reached broadly the same conclusion. They were talking about “productivity” instead of “bounce rate” back then, but the basic biology of attention span and working memory is the same. He and Richard P. Kelisky, Director of Computing Systems for IBM's Research Division, wrote about their observations in 1979, "...each second of system response degradation leads to a similar degradation added to the user's time for the following [command]. This phenomenon seems to be related to an individual's attention span. The traditional model of a person thinking after each system response appears to be inaccurate. Instead, people seem to have a sequence of actions in mind, contained in a short-term mental memory buffer. Increases in SRT [system response time] seem to disrupt the thought processes, and this may result in having to rethink the sequence of actions to be continued." “The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time” https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rap...