Depending on your hosting bandwidth and site setup, it is possible for ads to negatively impact site speed. Every site is a unique cocktail of platforms, plugins, and data, so additional speed optimizations are done on a site-by-site basis.
Why ad code may impact site speed:
Monumetric ads are optimized as best as possible to yield the highest performance. The primary difficulty with page speed and programmatic ad code comes from the aspects of the industry that are out of a network’s control.
Results from a speed test will tell you information about the time ads take to load on your site, but won’t tell you why that time is important to your ad performance. The time your ads take to load allows more advertisers to bid bringing you higher revenue bids, and therefore, making you more money. The current industry technology uses header bidding via the browser to get the highest revenue for each ad, which may cause a perceived latency when detected by site speed test tools.
When an auction takes place, it takes time to receive bids from each provider; then once a winning bid is selected, the creative is rendered. However, the creative can include all sorts of external resources or require any number of redirects to reach the needed files to display the ad. Every advertiser controls how a campaign renders on a site and does not give Monumetric access to further optimize how it loads. This explains why you may see many page requests in your site speed results. The results draw attention to the load of the header bidding process without citing that the content on the page was independently rendered before the requests were made.
What can be done?
Although we can’t expedite or alter much of that process, we strive to make everything as optimal as possible. Without the complement of web development optimizations from our publishers’ side, there is a limit to how much we can achieve with code adjustments alone.
The article, Actions to Help With Site Speed , will review the additional adjustments Monumetric can make as well as recommend areas to address with your web developer. Also, make sure our head code isn’t cached. This leads to unpredictable performance since our code isn’t designed to run cached. The head code is designed to run first and then the tags. Ensuring that no part of the code is cached will remove any unnecessary delays in loading the ads.
Keep in mind that your SEO ranking is based on numerous factors, and site speed is only a small one of them. We have seen that publishers who do their best to optimize web pages with proper resources while simultaneously posting consistent, quality content grow their sites more steadily than publishers who put content creation on the back burner.
For the next site speed test you review, we hope the portion of ad-related results can now be understood with better context. As always, reach out to us if you have any further questions!