Page 92 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

92 CHAPTER 5 IMPLICATIONS OF THE MESSY MIDDLE

So, what might these barriers look like in practice?

Poor site speed, particularly on mobile.

Inconsistent or unclear messaging, particularly between
ad copy and landing page.

Inadequate information, such as missing product details.

User experience issues, such as unclear navigation,
pop-ups, and limited payment options.

The cost of getting these basic user experience considerations wrong can be
considerable. In a study looking at the importance of mobile speed, we saw
that while 95% of users said they would return to a site they perceived as being
fast, only 62% said they would revisit a site they perceived as slow. In another
22
study, we saw that a 0.1 second improvement in mobile site speed increased
conversion rates by 8.4% for retail sites, and 10.1% for travel sites. Lowering
23
the drag that factors such as speed and design have on interactions with your
brand increases cognitive ease, making shoppers less likely to be motivated to
dive back into another cycle of exploration and evaluation.

The importance of measurement

While the evidence in our research was based on a simulated
environment, the only way to understand the difference that these
changes can make to your business is to test them in the wild. And
given the difficulty of attributing subtle causal effects to relatively blunt

metrics like sales and revenue, we believe that constructing robust,
controlled experiments is necessary to understand the impact of behavioural
biases on your bottom line.

22 Think With Google (2017). The need for speed: Evaluating the perception and reality of speed on the mobile web. Google. https://www.
thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/advertising-channels/mobile/need-speed-evaluating-perception-and-reality-speed-mobile-web,
23 Think With Google (2020). How speeding up your mobile site can improve your bottom line. Google. https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/
marketing-resources/experience-design/mobile-page-speed-data/