High Performance Ads

Is it Possible?
Panel Discussion
 What this is (and isn’t)
 We’re here to discuss ad performance

 In our context, performance == load time

 Web page load time, and the impact of ads

 Advertisers define performance differently:

 Click Through Rate (CTR), Return on Investment (ROI), etc.
 Panelists
 Sameer Ajmani, Google
Leading an effort at Google to make the Web faster by making ads load
faster.

 Artur Bergman, Wikia

Has been battling poor ad performance for years.

 Richard Bush, ADTECH (AOL)

Leads teams that implement ad servers.

 Bryant Mason, Microsoft

Builds advertising platforms that handle billions of requests each day.

 Tony Ralph, Yahoo!

Performs monitoring and analysis of ad quality and performance.

 Moderator – Eric Goldsmith, AOL

Performance analyst, with proclivity for ad performance.
 Format

 Start with some prepared questions

 To get us started
 Provide context and framework
 and a few illustrative visuals

 Then we’ll open it up to the audience…

 Advertising Ecosystem
 There are typically several key parties involved in ad
creation and delivery

 Advertiser – wants to advertise a product

 Agency – creates the ad components for Advertiser
 Vendor – hosts and serves ad components for Agency
 Publisher – provides the pages on which ads appear
 nth-Party Ad Serving
 Many Publishers maintain a list of approved ad Vendors

 Sometimes Vendors serve ads via another Vendor

 Known as a 3rd-party Ad Server to the Publisher
 Most Publishers only allow approved 3rd-parties, in order to
control quality

 Sometimes the 3rd-party vendors use other vendors…

 Creating 4th-party, or even 5th-party scenarios

 Many publishers don’t allow 4th-party Ad Serving

 Questions

 I hear web developers complain that ads are the main

thing slowing down their pages. Is that a valid
complaint?
 Ad Impact Example
DNS Initial Connect First Byte Content
seconds
0.00 0.25 0.50 0.75 1.00 1.25 1.50 1.75 2.00 2.25 2.50 2.75 3.00 3.25 3.50
Base
Base Page
Page
application/x-javascript
text/css
text/css
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
Redirection
image/gif
image/gif
image/png
image/gif
image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
UNKNOWN
image/gif
image/gif
image/jpeg
image/gif
image/jpeg
application/x-javascript
image/jpeg
UNKNOWN
image/jpeg
image/gif
image/jpeg
application/x-javascript
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
application/x-javascript
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/gif
image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/jpeg
image/gif
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
image/gif
application/x-javascript
image/gif
application/x-javascript Ads
application/x-shockwave-flash
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
image/gif
image/gif
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
application/x-javascript
image/gif
application/x-javascript

East Coast

West Coast
 Questions cont’d

 What is it about ads that make them slow?

 Selecting and Rendering an Ad
Browser downloads page content from publisher web server
DHTML includes reference to calls to functions for rendering ads

Ad Network First-party
Client-side Library Ad Server

First-party Ad Content
Downloaded from Image server
or CDN

First-party
Ad Server

Third-party Ad Server

Third-party Ad Content
or
Fourth-party Ad Server
 Questions cont’d

 Do you have any examples of slow ads?

 Ad vendor (3rd Party) 1st host, 1st conn

Ad network setup (4th Party) 2nd host, 2nd conn

Ad network tag 2nd host, 3rd conn

Ad network tracking pixel1 2nd host, 4th conn
Ad network iframe 2nd host, 5th conn
Ad network more tracking pixel2 2nd host, 6th conn
3rd Party counting 3rd host , 7th conn

Ad network targeting 4th host , 8th conn

Ad vendor (5th Party) 5th host, 9th conn

Ad vendor (6th Party) 6th host, 10th conn

5th Party instrumentation 7th host, 11th conn

Metrics Co. 1 8th host, 12th conn

Metrics Co. 2 9th host, 13th conn

…more from Metrics Co. 2 10th host 14th conn

6th party ad image 11th host 15th conn

 Questions cont’d

 Why is it hard to make ads fast?

 Questions cont’d

 Why has it gotten to this point?

 Questions cont’d

 What's being done about it?

 Adhere to Best Practices
 Ad agencies should produce creatives that
 Comply with IAB guidelines
 Are optimized for minimal round-trips

 Ad vendors should adhere to various best practices, including

 Enforcing appropriate creative acceptance policies related to ad performance (file
size, etc.)
 Geo-distributing ad selection servers
 Supporting performance optimizations for ad selection calls, such as keep-alives and
compression
 Using CDNs for static content

 Publishers should
 Consider ad integration when optimizing their own site performance
 Initiate ad calls as early as possible in the page download sequence
 Make ad calls asynchronously to other page content
 Questions cont’d

 What can individual web sites do to avoid having ads

slow down their pages?
 Questions cont’d

 Questions from the audience?

 Additional Resources

 IAB Ad Load Performance Best Practices

www.iab.net/media/file/IAB_Ad_Load_Perfomance_BP_FINAL.pdf

 IAB Best Practices for Asynchronous Ads

www.iab.net/media/file/rich_media_ajax_best_practices.pdf
(includes info on loading ads asynchronously in Ad Friendly IFRAMEs)
Thank you