A few months ago, Steve, our lead web developer at V12 Marketing, was exploring CloudFlare’s app directory for ways to new releases and found an application called Edgemesh.
Edgemesh offered to “enhance any browser, on any device, anywhere in the world — with intelligent, automated, next-generation client-side caching via a managed Service Worker.”
TLDR: Edgemesh delivered! We found a 200% increase in Average Session Duration, 149.06% increase in Conversion Rate for website visitors that were in Edgemesh Accelerated Sessions. Additionally, Bounce Rate for these users plummeted by 97.75%.
This is exactly what we were looking for. As mentioned in the video above, site speed is incredibly important. And it has only become more important as mobile devices eclipse desktop traffic. Web users expect pages to load faster than ever, and if they don’t, they bounce.
Our businesses work so hard to create content, schedule and share it, drive traffic with paid advertising and pay-per-click campaigns, and create sticky landing pages with the hopes of capturing their visitors’ contact information or make a sale. But even after all this, a slow loading site, can end it right there. The user leaves. So what can we do? Services like Edgemesh can help.
We know that even the slightest boost in page speed can make a significant impact on conversion rate. So we decided to give Edgemesh a try, here’s the what we found.
Data Set 🔢
Overview: As seen above, total users to visit the website was 3,280 and Edgemesh Accelerated Users was a 37.41% portion of those users. This is plenty of data to get an accurate understanding of average performance.
User Behavior 📊
Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page.
A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds. A high bounce rate can be an indicator to a whole bunch of issues, from a slow website load, to poor quality content/imagery, to irrelevant ad targeting, and more. An average bounce rate is around 50%. Which sounds high to most people, and it is. But it doesn’t need to be this way.
Web analytics showing a 50% bounce rate means that half of the visitors to a website, just leave, immediately. In this case, the website studied, has an exorbitantly low bounce rate to start, but Edgemesh Acceleration lowered bounce rate from 6.39% to 0.15%, or by 97.75%, or 43 times lower! This is staggering.
Pages Per Session: The average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
Pages per session is also a moving target for website owners. Depending on the type of website, pages per session can carry a varying degree of importance. For a news publisher, like our friends at the Concord Sentinel, pages per session means ad revenue, and typically is much higher, similar to an e-commerce website with tons of products.
In this case with Edgemesh Accelerated Users, Pages Per Session increased from an average of 3.03, to 5.05. This means users served web-pages in sessions with Edgemesh’s technology, visited 2.02 more pages. Maybe one or two of those pages were contact pages? 🤔
Average Session Duration: The average time length of a session.
Average session duration is another important web traffic metric for analyzing user performance. Again, in the case of average time spent on the website, Edgemesh showed a monumental increase in performance. The average visit was 1 minute and 11 seconds, whereas with Edgemesh visitors, their time on the website doubled, at 2 minutes and 22 seconds.
Conversions 💰
Conversion Rate: The percentage of visits that resulted in a conversion to the goal.
Every one wants a high conversion rate. It means more leads, or more sales, and more revenue. An even the smallest boost in conversion rate can mean big impact in ROI. This can be quickly illustrated in our Ad Spend Calculator.
Edgemesh Accelerated Users saw a massive increase in conversion rate. Users not served accelerated sessions converted on an appointment form at an average of 1.06/100, whereas those lucky users that got to enjoy Edgemesh visits, submitted lengthy appointment forms at an average of 2.64/100 users. That’s a 149.14% increase in Conversion Rate for Edgemesh visitors. These figures are enough to make or break an ad campaign! 🤯
Goal Value Per Visitor: The average value of visits divided by those that resulted in a conversion to the goal.
If we assume that each converted goal, or form submission, has an average value of $500 (this figure was provided by the case study’s website owner) – then we can allocate a value of the two data sets $21,500 for all users and $18,000 for Edgemesh users.
Then, if we divide those numbers by all users, that comes out to $6.55 per user on average for all users, and $14.66 per user on average for Edgemesh users, representing a 123.82% gain in Average Value Per Visitor for Edgemesh users.
We can compile this further by taking digital advertising costs and calculating Cost Per User, and subtracting it from the figure above to get a rough estimate of average return-on-investment per user. Obviously, this can get abstracted when adding softer project costs for efforts like content creation, but it’s a great metric to track.
And, if we wanted to only segment this data by traffic channels like Paid Search and Display, we could, getting even more accurate cost/revenue per user data, and even drill deeper into which pages/ads/targets performed best. Check out the chart below, comparing Non-Edgemesh Users vs Edgemesh Users and the corresponding Goal Value per month.
The Bottom Line:
The numbers don’t lie. Edgemesh delivered astounding results here. We plan on recommending Edgemesh for all of client websites, even those without page speed issues. And we’re looking forward to seeing how this technology can provide value in different use cases, such as e-commerce, publishing, and more.
Next Steps:
Do you want to try Edgemesh’s technology out on our your own website? We can help you get setup, monitor traffic over time, and make ongoing optimizations to increase conversion rates, just like in this case study. Even if you’re not using CloudFlare, we can use Edgemesh’s WordPress plugin. And, if you’re not on WordPress, we can leverage Edgemesh in just about any environment. Just send us a message and get a free consultation for your business!
About V12 Marketing: V12 Marketing is a full-service marketing agency in Concord, New Hampshire that helps businesses of any size, in any industry, meet goals and maximize their marketing efforts.
About Edgemesh: Edgemesh uses real customer experience data to intelligently optimize your site in real time. Edgemesh’s Real User Metrics client not only captures performance metrics, but uses this information to build automated intelligent optimization strategies. [Source: Edgemesh.com]
About CloudFlare: Cloudflare secures and ensures the reliability of your external-facing resources such as websites, APIs, and applications. It protects your internal resources such as behind-the-firewall applications, teams, and devices. And it is your platform for developing globally-scalable applications. [Source: CloudFlare.com]
