Page Value is a metric within Google Analytics that isn’t used very often by marketing teams. It can be powerful when you begin to analyze your site content for what is working and what isn’t.
Page Value is derived from Google Analytics’ Goal Values and Ecommerce reports. It tells you which specific pages of your site offer the most value. For instance, a product page for an Ecommerce site will usually have a higher page value than a resource page.
The same goes for a landing page for a lead generation site when compared to the homepage of the same site. Landing pages usually drive more page value when we look at a Goal setup for capturing lead completions than a high level homepage.
You can understand more about Goal Value by reading our Google Analytics Goal Setup post.
One of the best ways you can use Page Value is to analyze it against the Average Page Load Time metric.
Want to know how to check this out? See the steps below:
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- Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings
- Change the settings to “Data” view rather than “Comparison” view.
- Normally, I use this view to look at different product pages a user will view before deciding to move on to a form or cart page. This way, I can see the impact site load time has on these pages. Put simply, Site Load time impacts Page Value. You can do this by adding a regex in the search box that filters for only product pages. In my case, I’m going to use “vacation\-rental” as the filter since this is how my client’s site is set up.Go to the Page Timings report in Google Analytics:
- Next, export the data to Excel or Google Sheets.
- Once you have the data, add a column to differentiate whether the page is loading fast or slow. Use the average page load time for the whole site. In our case, this site’s average load time is 4 seconds… a little slow. So, we want to differentiate the pages by those that load faster than 4 seconds and those that load slower than 4 seconds. We can do this by using the following formula:
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- Enter this formula in the cell (J2): “=IF(E2 > 4, “Below 4 Sec”,”Above 4 Sec”)”
- Copy the cell formula down Column J
(Note: This is in Excel and it is basing the IF statement on the Avg. Page load time Column E. You should change this formula to fit your correct column.)
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- Now, with Column J added (differentiating the page load times), we can build a pivot table to see the difference in Page Value (Column I in Excel).We lose about $5 for every user that views a page that loads slower than average. Multiply that by the number of page views these pages get and you have a big impact in overall potential revenue.
- Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings
Common Ways to Improve Avg. Page Load Time
For Ecommerce sites, one way to improve site speed is to reduce your images’ file size. Large, non-optimized images can take a long time to load. Additionally, too many on-page services (things that require JavaScript) can be slowing things down. It’s a good idea to go through your source code once in a while and make sure you remove any old JavaScript tags that you’re not using any longer.
A good tool that is helpful in measuring site speed and gives you actionable items is the new: Test My Site Tool by Google. This handy tool will alert you to different things you can do to improve the loading time of your webpage. It will suggest tips on how to:
- Compress images
- Compress resources with GZIP
- Minify resources
- Leverage browser caching
- Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript
- Handle page redirects
You’ll find that instituting these techniques will help improve page loading time across your website. If you’re serious about increasing your Ecommerce sales, you should have a developer tackle these as soon as possible.
Summary
This is just one quick tip in understanding how Page Value can show you where to optimize your site and how Average Page Load Time could be affecting your return on investment. Be sure you use this Page Value and Average Page Load Time analysis to prioritize which pages need the most attention first.
We’ll be coming up with more of these quick tip posts in the future. For all your analytics and CRO needs, please give us a call (321-202-1319) or send a message for us to help you get the most value out of your site.
You are spot on that Page Value is very valuable but is not often used by marketing teams. Once you have Page Value setup it can be used to determine all kinds of attributes that best contribute to business value, like you did with page time.
I think the challenge for most marketing teams is how to custom setup the goals and goal values on their site. For WordPress there is a plugin that helps automate this the goal setup and valuing process: https://wordpress.org/plugins/intelligence.
That’s pretty awesome, I’m going to have to check that out.
Interesting article. I have a question regarding the use of page timings. Why use page timings as a component of page value? I would think that a pages role in a conversion funnel would be a better indicator of page value. Best Regards
Hi Philip,
Thank you for the note! Utilizing page timing and page value as corresponding metrics to each other just add another way of viewing how much page time is attributing to the value you are gaining from your site. There are definitely other ways of looking at the pages in a path through funnel conversions, but for those who wonder about the value of increasing page load performance for their site, this offers a good ROI buffer.
Thanks!
Mike
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