ADOTAS – “I have never heard a complaint that an ad loaded too fast,” quipped Bryant Mason, principal test manager for Microsoft Advertising, at a panel of the IAB 2009 Ad Operations Summit.
Speed may kill on the highway, but it thrills on the net. In recognition of that, the IAB’s Ad Load Performance Scoring Group previewed a prototype it has been developing for profiling and scanning ads to predict their real-world download times before insertion.
Ad are scored independently from other factors that may affect load times such as ad networks or platforms. The goal is to flag problems early on in the ad lifecycle. In addition, such data could be become a useful analytic to correlate with business performance, click-through rates and abandonment.
As Eric Goldsmith, operations architect for web performance at AOL Advertising, noted, data proves that when pages load faster, users see more ads; at the same time, when ads load faster, pages also boot up quicker. However, the proliferation of broadband and high-speed Internet has made actual ad size less of a factor in load time; the number of objects and components within an ad is the more crucial aspect.
Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have been using internal page-load optimization tools to study to develop methods for measuring ad load times. In particular, Pramod Khincha, senior manager of systems and tools for Yahoo!, has derived pertinent research from YSlow, which evaluates web pages with straightforward letter grades.
The clearest lesson is that too many components can stunt load times’ Ads should have no more than four components, Khincha said. Compression also worked as key optimizing factor as well as reducing the size of cookies. Redirects are a no-no, and aggressive caching proved to be very handy.
While ads should generally comply with IAB best practices, there is no qualitative measurement for determining how an ad will affect a page’s load time (though there are solutions for sale). This IAB-hosted solution would also aim to create common vernacular for pubs and agencies to specify requirements.
“If we can measure the load times of ads, we can improve them,” Mason summarized. “If we ignore them, they’ll become a problem.”