Online Ad Problem Yielding More Slow Websites

February 23, 2017 by Chris Lange

Over the years advertisers have been looking for new ways to reach consumers. First it started with radio and then television, now we are seeing ads practically everywhere online. But have advertisers gotten too greedy? A recent report from Ad Lightning would suggest that a surplus of ads has yielded more quality issues on the webpages that support them.

The firm noted in the report that programmatic display advertising has caused a surge in ad quality issues that significantly delay the presentation of ad-supported web pages. Anyone who browses the internet knows how annoying a slow website is, especially when this brought on by too many ads.

Ultimately these Website latency issues have caused a drop off in audience reach and engagement, which in turn diminish publisher revenues and ROI. In order to maximize ROI, web publishers need to effectively balance ad revenue and audience experience.

The report further detailed:

Ad quality issues have become so common that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has established industry guidelines, that, when followed, would greatly reduce the volume of ad quality issues (and their end effect). However, as this report illustrates, there is currently a very large gap between industry guidelines and industry reality.

Ad Lightning identified 5 issues that have been contributing to the decline in quality:

  • Oversized Ads: Ads that exceed industry file size guidelines.
  • Over-Requested Ads: Ad requests made to networks too many times.
  • Processor-Intensive Ads: Ads that use too much CPU time and power.
  • SSL Non-Compliance: Ads that are not using https protocols.
  • Intrusive Ad Formats: Ads delivered in non-compliant or unsupported formats.

Consumers experience these issues in ways that reflect on the publisher much more than the advertiser. The data from the study shows that, on average, advertising doubles the amount of time it takes to load a webpage.

Even recently, Google has reported that the average load time for mobile sites has now slowed to 19 seconds (over 3G connections). A Google study that found that mobile sites that loaded in 5 seconds earned up to 2x more ad revenue than sites that load at the industry average speed of 19 seconds.

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