Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

According to Global Millennia Marketing, out of a sample of 885 web shoppers, 31% cited speed of page download as a reason for abandoning a sales page. There were 14 other reasons and this one came in at number 9, so it’s not a top priority to address in identifying why people abandon a page. The survey related to shopping carts so it’s not an exact answer to your question.

The relationship between abandonment and page download is further complicated by the demographics of the visitor. Young visitors will give a site less time to download before abandoning it than older ones. Surfers browsing for information give up sooner than people searching for specific information. Would-be purchasers are more tolerant of download times, with people in the 18-30 age groups being less tolerant than those 35 and above.

There are some studies in the public domain, but most have to be paid for. Zunch has published some figures, but they are not exactly what you are looking for:

57% of a sample (8000 users) reported that download speed was a factor in returning to a site, but 67% found ease of use a first priority. (These are multiple choice questions, so they don’t add up to 100%)

The average web user (66% of the sample under a normal distribution) would click to another site if a page took more than 8 seconds to download.

On smaller, less statistically meaningful samples, abandonment rates were found to drop from 30% on a sample page to 7% by reducing the download speed by just 1 second. They leave the reader to infer that is 1 second off a 9 second download.

Beyond these subjective figures, I’ve not found any published data; say in the form of a table of abandonment % versus download time. That’s probably because there are so many variables in the equation - if you are daft enough to try to formulate one. To give you an idea of just how involved it gets and what the confidence factors are like, have a look at the IBM site (IBM coined the phrase 8 seconds + / - 2 is all that you have) See:

https://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/4250.html

You can probably extrapolate some useful data from this.

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions