Whether it’s performance optimization, data collection, privacy engineering, or marketing campaign design, the better you understand how the web browser works the better you can tackle the challenges associated with these different aspects of digital marketing.
The web browser is one of those applications you don’t really think about too much when using it. The user interfaces are so cleverly designed that the only thing you really need to know is where to type the website address you want to visit.
When you navigate to a page, it just … appears. When you click a button, you are subscribed to a newsletter. When you scroll down a product list, more items appear. When you click a link, you are navigated to a new page.
It seems so simple.
But under the hood, the web browser is anything but.
Everything you see on a web page needs to be painted and rendered by the browser engine. Elements need to be made interactive, buttons need to be colored, images need to be loaded, and it all needs to be responsive to different devices and screen sizes.
Even beyond this presentation layer, there’s a lot of work being done to show you the web page itself.
As a technical marketer, you need to understand how the web browser can be best utilized and even exploited to serve different use cases in digital marketing.
Consider this…
Your online store website is struggling with performance issues.
It takes seconds to load an individual product page, and this is far too long for your impatient users. A second is an eternity on the internet, and you know that users who are forced to wait will eventually just leave your site and go to a (faster) competitor store.
You’ve been tasked to look into this performance problem.
When you test the product page, you notice a couple of things:
- You have a very fast internet connection but still the product images take a long time to load.
- You’d expect the browser to “remember” the pages that you frequently visit and load them faster, but each time you load the product page it takes roughly the same (long) time to render.
- Some of the critical components, such as the Add To Cart button, only become visible and interactive after the images have been loaded.
You could task your site developers with a simple instruction: “Make the images load faster”.
But what if the load time isn’t the problem? Would loading the images from a faster server or reducing their size solve the issues with delayed availability of critical calls-to-action like the Add To Cart button?
The web browser is the ultimate multi-tool
The more you understand about the mechanisms of the World Wide Web, the better you can proactively tackle problems with your websites and your marketing efforts.
The web browser has utility for pretty much any digital marketing discipline. For example:
- Technical search engine optimization: does the page load fast? Is it responsive to different device types? How well do search engines understand the dynamic content rendered on the page?
- Web analytics: how can metadata be “scraped” from the visible page? How are analytics scripts loaded so that they don’t block the rest of the page load? Does the browser have time to send an event if the user clicks a link that navigates them to some other page?
- A/B testing: does the test variation load with a delay, resulting in a “flicker” of the original content it replaces? Are client-side redirect tests reliable?
- Digital advertising: are redirects stripping away ad identifiers from the URL? Are those identifiers stored in cookies so that they can be referenced on other pages than just the landing page?
You don’t need to understand how the sausage is made. But you do need to be savvy enough to respect the complicated processes that take place when the browser needs to fetch content from a web server.
Being able to diagnose problems through your own investigations goes a long way into making sure that your web developers can save time by tackling the problem at hand.