Facebook Pushes Advertisers to Speed Up Their Mobile Sites
August 31 2016 - 4:23PM
Dow Jones News
By Jack Marshall
Facebook wants advertisers to speed up their mobile websites and
plans to limit where and when ads appear across its service if they
point users to slow-loading sites.
Advertisers might soon find their ads aren't delivered to mobile
users with slow internet connections, for example, if their
websites load slowly when users tap on those ads.
"Our goal is to give people the best ad experience possible on
mobile. By considering website performance and a person's network
connection, we can improve that experience and help drive the
outcomes advertisers are looking for," a Facebook spokesman
said.
In a post published to its Business News page on Wednesday,
Facebook outlined a number of ways advertisers could technically
improve their websites for better load times. It suggested
improving their sites for mobile by minimizing landing page
redirects, using less code and compressing files.
"Many businesses haven't optimized their website for mobile yet
and still have very slow loading times. This can lead to negative
experiences for people, and problems for businesses such as site
abandonment, missed business objectives and inaccurate
measurement," the post said.
As much as 40% of website visitors abandon a site once there has
been a loading delay of 3 seconds, Facebook said, citing a report
by technology research company Aberdeen Group.
For its part, Facebook said it would begin "prefetching"
advertisers' websites to help speed up their loading times even
further.
This will essentially involve Facebook's app pre-loading a
version of an advertiser's site before a user even taps on an ad,
which Facebook said can shorten mobile site load time by up to 29%,
improving the experience and decreasing the risk of the consumer
leaving the page and moving on to something else.
The social network has already been "prefetching" content posted
to its service from publishers' websites, a Facebook spokesman
said. It's now extending that functionality to advertising.
Advertisers won't need to opt-in to have their sites preloaded
by Facebook, nor will they have the option to opt-out. Facebook
will determine which content it will preload, based on how likely
it believes users are to tap on different ads.
Facebook also pointed to "mobile-optimized" publishing solutions
it offers, as an alternative to advertisers driving users off
Facebook to their own websites. It offers an ad product called
Canvas, for example, which enables advertisers to publish detailed
advertising content directly to the social network itself.
Meanwhile, Facebook offers a similar feature for publishers in
Instant Articles, whereby they can post their content directly to
Facebook's systems and have it load faster for users as a
result.
Facebook's online ad rival Google has similarly been pushing
marketers and publishers to speed up their mobile websites. The
company uses page load speed as a signal to rank websites on its
search engine results pages, for example, and it launched a project
called Accelerated Mobile Pages in October.
As part of that initiative Google also announced its AMP for Ads
project, which is designed to help marketers and their agencies
build faster ads with a set of collaborative industry technology
standards.
Write to Jack Marshall at Jack.Marshall@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 31, 2016 16:08 ET (20:08 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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