Category: Articles

Page load speed affects different factors. Many search engines, when ranking sites, have begun to take into account the page load speed. The faster your site loads, the more visitors you can get from search engines and, consequently, earn more money.

In the previous article related to website speed optimisation, we concluded that it is essential to have a thorough website analysis to identify the exact reasons that affect performance. Here we will cover some general tips and guidance to improve your site’s performance.

So, what can you do to increase the speed of your website?

Optimising server response speed: changing hosting/server

Very often, it’s crucial to pay attention to the very base of your website – its hosting/server. One of the tell-tale signs of poor performance is the server’s response time on your website exceeding the recommended maximum.

If the server in your location is inefficient, shared hosting will be, too, generally. To fix that, you might want to switch to VPS. If your website is “heavy”, – take a dedicated server. If your online platform is more on the simple side – change the hosting to a local provider.

Here are some additional suggestions that might genuinely make a difference:

1. Reduce the number of requests to the server. Use Google Chrome’s Network Panel to find out how many requests your website needs to load a page, and which files (especially images) are the heaviest. Then you have to decide which images to compress and which ones to erase to reduce the number of requests.

2. Turn on server-level caching and configure client-side caching

Optimising content loading

Regarding the optimisation of content loading, let us restate what we said in the previous article: there should be a balance between the quality of your content and its loading speed. Don’t sacrifice quality over speed: try to keep your images clear and detailed for the customers’ convenience.

Here are a few simple things you might consider following:

1. Use Screaming Frog or Page Speed Insights to check the weight of the images on your website

2. Try to compress the images to about 200-400 kB (or at least not use images above 1 MB), and then check the quality

3. Connect your website to LazyLoad

4. Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for images on your website. Pay attention to what kind of CDN you’re using: a nonoptimal CDN can have an adverse effect and slow down the loading speed, which is something we want to avoid.

5. Change the file extensions to WebP, a compressed image format with higher image quality than JPEG, GIF, and PNG for the same size.

Optimising content rendering

When it comes to content rendering, it’s essential to tell apart the necessary and unnecessary processes on the website. A few things you can do:

1. Use LazyLoad for the site to not render the parts of the page outside the user’s visibility. The program will split the content and load it into chunks

2. Hide the elements that are not needed in the mobile version of the site

3. Set up asynchronous loading. Transfer scripts to asynchronous: everything from the head to the footer

Regarding the rendering speed indicated on the Page Speed Insights tool – it is a great tool, no wonder it’s popular, but it might not always have the depth needed to identify all the issues. Therefore, we suggest it only as a free, good entry-level tool.

Additional rules

There are also some additional rules to follow to speed up your website that don’t have anything to do with the server, the content loading, and rendering:

1. Use a 304 Not Modified response code to indicate that the search engine can use the cached content.

2. Get rid of things that might slow your website down unnecessary web fonts, redundant CSS and JS

3. Disable unnecessary plugins and modules that create additional load on the server. This might often be true for WordPress sites.

4. Optimise your use of DOM (Document Object Model)

5. Optimise your databases: most of the brakes are associated with them

These are some general rules to keep in mind when working on optimising your website speed. However, even though the things we suggest are widely applicable and might take your website several steps ahead, there can be hundreds of different reasons why your website is slow. Many additional website features can always give an immense boost to your online platform’s performance. 

Here at LION Digital, we are driven by growth and innovation and have a voracious hunger for success. We provide premium eCommerce marketing services to successful Australian eCommerce companies. Our team of experts will tackle any problem you might be having with your website and deliver the best possible outcome. Drop us a message today and let our team of experts set you on the road to success. 

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Australian online shopping dipped 10% year-on-year (YOY), which is unsurprising considering the pandemic restrictions in place at the same time last year. However, if we compare to May 2019, online shopping is up 47.5% YOY.

April saw the first significant spike in online growth. Food & Liquor items and Home & Garden purchases more than doubled compared to 2019 and were the only categories that saw a triple-digit increase twice in 2020.

All significant categories saw a decline when compared to May 2020. According to Australia Post, we expect purchase volumes to remain steady through June 2021, as we’ll measure against easing retail conditions akin to those seen in 2020. 

Here we share with you data from Australia Post, the results are worth attention as they reinforce the change of the reasons for online shopping among consumers.

Digital and eCommerce are relatively new forms of marketing. They use contemporary terms, often confusing language and several three and four-letter acronyms. We’ll focus on a couple of the most important for tracking overall performance ROI (Return on Investment ) and ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). 

What is ROI/ROAS? Why is it important to measure both?

What is ROI?

ROI or Return On Investment is the revenue (or return) generated divided by the investment. ROI can be calculated across the entirety of digital or by individual activities/channels with granularity the beauty of digital marketing. 

REVENUE / INVESTMENT = ROI

Ultimately, it’s a calculation of how much you’re generating for every dollar you spend. 

Let’s look at an example: If you invest $5,000 and generate a $25,000 return, your Return On Investment is 5 times, or $5 for every dollar invested.

What is ROAS?

ROAS, or Return On Ad Spend, is also a measure of the Revenue (or return) generated divided by the Investment; however, in this case, it’s an investment into advertising, in digital most commonly that’s Google or Facebook.

REVENUE / AD SPEND = ROAS

Let’s look at an example of ROAS: If you invest $5,000 into Advertising and generate a $25,000 return, your Return On Ad Spend is 5 times, or $5 for every dollar invested.

Why is it important to measure both ROI & ROAS?

You’re probably sitting there thinking it’s the same thing. It’s not. The difference between ROI and ROAS is that ROAS calculates how much you’re generating for every dollar spent on advertising. Now it’s important to remember that you’re most likely paying a service fee, a retainer (or a staff member) to manage the advertising. 

So let’s revisit the example: $5,000 Advertising Spend, plus $5,000 management retainer to generate $25,000 in Revenue.

ROAS = $25,000 / $5,000 = 5

I.e. your Return On Ad Spend is $5 for every dollar spent.

ROI = $25,000 / $10,000 = 2.5

Return On Investment (that’s the total investment) is 2.5.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC) is prevalent in measuring Return On Ad Spend. However, it’s critically important also to measure the Return On Investment. Remember that Return On Investment is the total invested while ROAS is only a measure of advertising spending.

Article by

Christopher Inch – Head of Strategy

Chris is a specialist in eCommerce with over 14 years of experience in Digital & eCommerce Strategy.

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As online shopping continues to grow, it’s becoming more and more essential to ensure your web store’s performance is at its highest. 

Web page load speed is a crucial element to the success of your website, as not only is page speed a Google ranking factor baked into Google’s core algorithms, but it also contributes quite highly to user experience. 

With the hustle and bustle of everyday life, today’s consumer has very little patience, so as soon as a user visits your website, your brand is being judged. Poor user experience can lead to a frustrated consumer, leading to higher bounce rates (visit with no interaction) and a direct effect on the site’s ability to convert. 

With that being said, there is an abundance of tools out there designed to help you establish the issues with your website’s performance. We would personally recommend Google PageSpeed Insights; it’s an easy-to-use free tool available to any serious online business owner.

Get Your Website Into Top Gear

Website load times can be affected by a plethora of different issues that ultimately aggregate and cause a bad user experience and lower visibility in Google. As a topline introduction, we have outlined 3 below:

Server response time

Server response time is the time that it takes the server to respond to the user’s query. As soon as a user visits your website, it starts the chain of page downloads, building the page as the user sees it. With cheap server setups being the main cause, the time it takes for the server to respond can take a lot longer than needed, already putting the site at a huge disadvantage. With this, if you aggregate the server delay with inefficient high data elements to download, you can create a poor performing site. 

To avoid this, monitor the server response speed of your website using any server response tool, for example, Google PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Speed Test or GTmetrix. 

Unsure about what would be deemed an adequate time? Drop us an email, and we’d be happy to give you direction and advice. 

Content load speed

Content load speed is affected by the requests to and from the server to download all the on-page elements. A common trend that we see is with images, typically uploaded to the website as they are in all their glory but unfortunately happens to be a huge drain on the web page’s performance. 

Having good high-quality images is important, but you do need to strike a balance between a good quality image for the user and download efficiency. We would recommend, in order to save image data, uploading images that are the correct size for the page, saving them for ‘web’ using tools such as Photoshop and using compression software aiming to get each image down to around 200-400 KB. 

The content loading speed is affected not only by the weight of the content itself, but also by the location of the hosting or servers. For example, if someone from Australia wants to visit a website hosted in the US, the content loading speed for this person would be pretty slow as it has far more space to travel to reach the end user’s computer. If the server needs to stay in another country for example, then we would recommend making the use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which can greatly improve the download speed of the pages as well as improving the site’s security and reliability. 

​Rendered page speed

Websites usually consist of different content: images, texts, videos,  scripts and so on. When visitors load the website, all content appears the way the webmaster intended it. This is what is known as a rendered page. Resources such as Javascript and CSS that are unnecessary to fully render the page can directly delay the page to its full contentful paint, meaning it expands the time it takes to fully download a webpage. Inlining CSS/Javascript or removing CSS/Javascript entirely, such as unused fonts and style, can greatly improve the download of a page.

Web page performance is important now more than ever

We’ve covered some top-level issues to watch out for, but we’ve only really scratched the surface. Web page speed is very dependent on each website, the platform and its ability to download resources quickly and efficiently. 

Free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights are great at diagnosing causes of slow page performance, but it can be difficult to interpret that data and practically use it to fix the site without a good working knowledge of website development. But saying that, why not give these tools a go, it’s an absolute must, and it’s really worth taking that first step, especially as Google is continually pushing the boundaries of what websites should be capable of.

In our next article, we will talk about Google’s Core Web Vitals and share some super handy tips to bring your website up to scratch to stay ahead of the curve. 

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Coming up to the end of the financial year it’s a great time to analyse the past 12 months’ performance, to look for new growth opportunities, and identify any problem areas.

When conducting an annual performance review we like to look at overall performance across five key metrics (per channel).

Why these metrics? 

The recipe for generating revenue online is simple:

Increase any one metric by 10% and you make 10% more revenue.

First, we recommend conducting a Channel Analysis. 

A channel analysis is a simple table that enables us to measure performance year-on-year over each channel. The key here is to compare the percentage of users driven to a channel versus the percentage of revenue generated. 

It should be relatively similar, any vast differences may indicate a problem. 

For example, High Sessions but Low Revenue would indicate Low-Quality Traffic, a Conversion Problem, or a potential Tracking Issue.

Channel Performance Average Month (Past 12)

By extracting data by channel and month on month it can be presented visually over time in a variety of ways making it easier to analyse, absorb or identify complex information and data sets.

2.Identify other important eCommerce metrics & benchmarketing versus competitors.

Other Important eCommerce Metrics we analyse are:

New Vs Repeat Visitors / Revenue

An indication of how qualified traffic to the website is. 

For example: Attracting 10% more New Visitors should see Repeat Visitors grow by 10%, any less may indicate unqualified traffic or a problem with visitor retention.

Repeat Purchase Rate

Also an indication of how qualified traffic is, but in addition also provides insight into customer loyalty and/or performance of “post-sale” marketing activities, useful in understanding Customer Lifetime Value.

Days / Sessions to Purchase

Very simply, a measure of either how many sessions or days it takes from the first visit to purchase. This is useful for identifying potential re-engagement opportunities across Email, Social, or Display Remarketing.

Path to Purchase

Customers don’t purchase in a single visit, they often visit multiple times across a variety of channels. This is useful for identifying opportunities to re-engage or allocating budgets more efficiently. Particularly to channels that may be part of the conversion process but are not directly attributed revenue via a standard attribution model (e.g. a first or last click).

Channel Efficiency

Total Revenue generated online divided by Spend per Channel. This measure allows for channels to be analysed on a like-for-like basis, with channels that are more efficient having a greater score. For example, Email will have a lower spend, thus be more efficient at generating than channels like Paid Search for instance. This is extremely useful in allocating budgets and identifying channel performance on a like-for-like basis.

Overall analysing Annual Performance is critically important to eCommerce success, it allows an executive to identify opportunities, problems, accurately allocate resources, and plan for success. We create analytics experience on a different level, here at LION Digital called LION View. Once a client, you can have your personal DASHBOARD, that will collect all the data for you and make your EOFY easier. This completely customisable, all-in-one and simple-to-use platform will give you an overview of eCommerce channels and metrics, Keywords rankings, Google Search Console data, our 90 day activity plan and your marketing calendar all in one convenient location. Click here to find out more.

How do you know if you’re making the most out of your email marketing?

Are 20-30% of your overall sales come from this channel? Is your returning customer rate increasing? Do you know who your VIP customers are and what they’re spending so you can reward them?

Like a lot of marketers and business owners, you might be more focused on new customer acquisition through Facebook and Google. While these channels are amazing at acquiring new customers for a price, how do you encourage repeat purchases without eating away your margins on other channels? Email is the answer. 

Email is one of the most accessible channels to communicate with your customers, as the experience is not dependent on the device, operating system, or the latest iOS or Google update.

The Smile.io blog also echoes another fact about returning customers: after their 1st purchase, they are 27% more likely to return, after a 3rd, 54% more likely. Repeat customers also spend a LOT more than first-time customers. How do you get them back? Email is the answer. 

No one likes those companies that email you every 5-seconds! If you want to avoid this, advanced segmentation and automation is the answer. Klavyio is the platform that all the top eCommerce marketers use. Better segmentation = better relationships with your customers = more money in your pocket. We will do your research for you to see if making the switch to Klaviyo is the right move for your team (if you haven’t already).

Klaviyo’s advanced automation creates an experience for each customer, depending on the stage of the journey. There are endless possibilities here. Welcome series for awareness, browse, and cart abandonment for remarketing, replenishment reminders, referrals for repeat purchases. 

Curious about your email benchmarks? Read this report to see how you stack up against other companies in your niche. 

Are you making the most out of email? Are you looking for ways to increase customer retention and engagement? Book a call to see if ramping up your email marketing channel will be the right fit for your store.

SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is the practice of using paid strategies to increase search visibility. SEM is a digital advertising model in which advertisers pay each time a user clicks on one of their online ads. Essentially this is a great tool to help a website increase traffic, conversion rates, and sales for an eCommerce store. But many eCommerce companies wonder how much they should spend on their SEM, and some even wonder whether they should invest in SEM at all. 

How would you describe your SEM results? Are they just “OK”? If yes, then it’s time to start changing your strategy to make the most of your marketing budget!

LION Digital is the agency that took the process of SEM to a new level that demonstrates proven results. We took the industry-standard model and revolutionised this new approach to work seamlessly and effectively for both – our clients and our business. While most agencies tend to focus on charging their clients based on spending every month regardless of the results, LION charges based on SEM performance. In fact, setting ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) and revenue KPIs helps us motivate our team members to achieve the most outstanding results possible in a much shorter period of time than any other agency. We lead SMEs to grow and scale their business even in the face of adversity and rapid change, adjusting the existing strategies and models to work best for our clients.

Focusing on our clients’ success and providing premium eCommerce services alongside a first-class customer experience is our top priority. Our fees relate directly to the success we generate for clients meaning we invoice based on ROAS rather than a set, inflexible sum every period. 

Besides revolutionising the model of SEM, LION also adopts a holistic service approach to provide the best outcomes possible for the clients. Our holistic approach is focused on creating mutual wins among multiple clients’ channels, creating overall success instead of narrowing services down to just one channel. We make sure to consider all areas of the client’s business by analysing and assessing all available channels.

Our process of SEM is easy and effective:

• Our holistic approach that doesn’t shoot down SEO &/or other channels but instead looks to create mutual wins for the client’s multiple channels, creating overall sustainable success.
• We identify clients’ current positions, goals and needs based on their industry and past results. 
• Laying out a 3-6-12 month roadmap to maximise the retail calendar and get the most out of every $ of ad spend.
• We optimise and adjust course day-to-day with fortnightly strategy meetings.
• Your dedicated account manager & channel specialist will learn your business from the inside-out to align with niches & demographics that are most likely to convert.

Let’s take a look at our processes a little closer.

We are dedicated to the holistic approach in our SEM performance, adopting the mindset of focusing on all channels and processes instead of focusing on specific components or areas. Creating mutual wins for the client is the top priority for our team. We move forward, understanding that our success directly depends on the success our clients achieve as a result of our overall performance. LION always finds ways to market and target success as a result and not only on achieving satisfactory statistics.

Once we onboard a new client, our priority is to look through all the currently available data and conduct market research to identify the client’s current positions across multiple online channels. As a result of this process, we will find areas that can be improved and optimised to achieve better results.

Setting goals and objectives with the client based on industry and current results is critical as each business is different, and clients have their own understanding of what they want. Our position is to identify the common ground and achieve the necessary results within a particular time period.

The next step helps us and the client understand what kind of strategy we will adopt for the next 3-6-12 months to maximise the ROAS. Our team develops your roadmap to closely follow the retail calendar and make the most of upcoming events, investing only in advertising necessary to achieve the desired and set goals. Our results following this step have been outstanding so far, and we do not plan on stopping here. For example, we generated a growth of 1900% ROAS in under four months for one client while also improving their website traffic and customer satisfaction.

The SEM strategy roadmap we set at the beginning of a campaign is flexible to account for changes throughout its course. Having fortnightly meetings to discuss our progress and the further course of action allows us to assess, identify and adjust where necessary to achieve optimal performance. The online data is not a constant, and we regularly collaborate with our clients, using their industry knowledge and our digital expertise to formulate the most efficient campaign. We provide detailed monthly reports on account progress with commentary to understand where we should be going next and what our focus should be on for the next time period. The response to this style of meetings has been very positive and has helped us significantly improve possible outcomes.

Our overall SEM performance is based on an inclusive approach to consider all areas of online business. LION has a dedicated specialist for each online channel to focus on our clients and learn their business from the perspective of being an extension of their internal team. The account manager will conduct specialised research within a particular niche and identify demographics that are likely to fluctuate in order to make necessary adjustments to the digital marketing and SEM strategies. We provide more attention and expertise, offering a wide range of premium eCommerce services within particular channels.

Our performance-based SEM Model helps us achieve the numbers most other digital marketing agencies aspire to. We’ve generated $7,107,036.30 in Google Ads Revenue, 51,366 online transactions, and $1,058,071.09 in managed ad spend in the last 365 days across our existing clients. Results we’re proud to have generated for our clients.

LION Digital’s new performance-based SEM Model is a unique and revolutionary strategy based on collaborative actions that will ultimately lead toward one and only one goal – SUCCESS. We thoroughly investigate digital opportunities to gain mutual wins and help our clients thrive within their dedicated market and niche. Alongside our LION Dashboard, this SEM model is a powerful tool to generate necessary data to make the most informed and cost-effective campaign decisions.

If you would like to learn more about our new SEM model and experience the outstanding results we achieve, reach out to our team and book your introductory meeting with us. Let’s join forces to understand what increased level of revenue is possible for your business to generate!

Article by

Leonidas Comino – Founder & CEO

Leo is a, Deloitte award winning and Forbes published digital business builder with over a decade of success in the industry working with market-leading brands.

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No doubt, online was a critical channel for Australian shoppers for the festive season in 2020. And now, online shopper engagement is still presenting a strong opportunity for retailers as we head into 2021.

Here we share with you data from Australia Post, the results are worth attention as they reinforce the importance of digital marketing in this new landscape.

Do you find your digital marketing not transparent enough? Have you ever wondered how your agency or internal run campaign is really performing? Are they on track to achieve the desired goals by the end of the week? Month? Quarter? Or are they reporting inaccurate data which is a common occurrence in our industry?

At LION Digital, we have the solution to this problem. LION Digital has developed an intuitive reporting dashboard for our clients, which provides a unique and simple-to-use platform where you can find everything you need to know at the click of a button. The data includes Google Analytics, monthly agency reporting, Google Console and keyword rankings all in one convenient place without logging into multiple systems.

LION Dashboard is purpose-built to have a detailed commentary on the data and give you statistical insights to all clients. With this platform, clients will be able to oversee the full progress and ongoing performance of our specialists towards the set of goals and requirements. The Commentary section provides regular and detailed monthly reports in the Client Dashboard, top-ranking movements, and deliverables – completed this month and planned for the next one.

The Traffic Report page provides data insight according to customisable date ranges, channel and device segmentation outside the organic channel. The Performance section offers detrimental for the website data about page views, bounce rates, exit percentage, session durations and more, giving an overall overview for further analysis and strategic recommendations for your company. Moreover, clients will be able to understand which pages and products are in higher demand, adjusting their services to the right target audiences.

LION Dashboard also provides an eCommerce Report that shows financial analysis including client’s revenue, transactions, average order value and eCommerce conversion rates. Top Products list contains available on the website items and the revenue earned through the sales during the set time period. This offers detailed real-time customer analytics to further improve digital marketing strategies and overall website optimisation.

Google Search Console is a segment offering website’s search overview, including a range of statistics such as clicks, impressions, average position and searches queries, according to the chosen dates, devices and countries. 

The Search Engine Ranking section provides an insight into organic ranking data with full inclusion of necessary statistics.

LION Dashboard is a completely customisable platform to help our SEO clients gain proper business intelligence and make informed digital decisions based on solid data and recommendations. With our dashboard, all our customers will be able to improve their website optimisation, target the right customers with the right products and access their real-time data.

LION Digital values its customers’ requests and desires and allocates the best specialists towards different projects to achieve their goals, while gaining mutual trust and support. We ensure that each of our channels is led by the best specialists in the digital marketing industry and top experts, who provide their professional insights and support to every client, taking care of all the deliverables throughout the project. Our premium services go beyond SEO optimisations as we also cover such channels as SEM, SMM, Email Marketing, Social Audits, WEB, PPC, Analytics, providing our clients a holistic perspective over their marketing and channel performance.

If you think your business isn’t getting enough recognition and organic traffic online, our team will make sure to change your opinion about digital marketing strategies you currently follow.

Don’t be a scaredy cat, partner with us to take a LION’s share of the market and achieve the status you and your company deserve! Reach out to us to have a chat!