With so much focus on site monetisation, as well as engaging and enticing consumers with aesthetics in digital advertising, the arguably more boring aspect of page-load speed is often neglected. Caleb Sotelo (pictured below), director of labs, OpenX explains to ExchangeWire that speed is as important as aesthetics when it comes to consumer engagement; and it is directly linked to your bottom line, so it is risky to ignore it.

ExchangeWire: What challenges is the digital ad industry facing when it comes to speed?

Caleb Sotelo: In an age where consumers expect everything to be readily available and easily accessible, ensuring a seamless connection, and eliminating latency, is critical to the ongoing operations of the entire online advertising ecosystem. Latency in advertising is starting to contribute to a decline in user-approved advertising – which, in turn, has led to a rise in the adoption of ad blockers.

For publishers, this trend portends a potential crisis. The speed of a page load is a strong indicator of health; and if a user can't interact with a page because it loads slowly, or an ad takes too long to render, money is lost. Advertisers are equally aware that the technical quality of a creative can also have serious implications for viewability and user engagement.

So, why is speed top of mind now? The explosion of different options for publishers, and the advent of client-side monetisation technologies like header bidding, are contending for the same computational resources in users’ browsers, or apps, often creating an undesirable bottleneck effect that increases the overall load time. The immediate challenge is how publishers can address this concern while still balancing their monetisation goals.

For publishers, how does speed equate to revenue? Has speed become more of an issue as of late?

The speed of a page is a great predictor of discrepancy and user engagement, each of which are both tied directly to revenue. Every millisecond counts online. So, if a user is unable to interact with a page because it loads too slowly, or an ad takes several seconds too long to render, that's money lost. Period.

Caleb Sotelo, Director of Labs, OpenX

Speed has become more of an issue lately because of highly parallel solutions like header bidding and the shift to mobile, where resources like CPU, bandwidth, and memory are limited. Historically, all players who provide ad tags, advertisers and tech partners, designed their technology to be self-sufficient and work independently. Tags know how to monitor their own impression counting, viewability, pixel dropping, etc.; but emerging technologies are complicating that environment.

Standalone tags being used today have not evolved to be streamlined, or co-operate with each other in the setting of modern yield-optimisation technologies, like daisy chaining, header bidding, containers, or within the mobile context. Technology companies recognise the added technical complexity of these new monetisation solutions and have already started creating ways to overcome emerging challenges.

For advertisers, how does speed impact their campaigns? What can advertisers do to help solve the issue of latency?

Advertisers play a significant role in the quest to ensuring an optimal user experience by reducing latency, even if a publisher page is setup correctly for a fast page load. Ads may deliver quickly, but take too long to load and, therefore, never become visible to the user. Often this is not reflected directly in discrepancy numbers, but will show up in viewability metrics and real campaign effectiveness. Advertisers that do not consider the weight of their ad could be negatively impacting the results of their campaigns.

Advertisers can contribute to a more efficient ad process by implementing changes in their campaign strategies, such as slimming down their creatives by compressing scripts and image files using CDNs, and working directly with DSPs and exchanges to minimise measurement. Technology partners that run exchanges, SSPs, and header bidding technology must also communicate these implications to the buy side and enable faster ads.

We are helping to address this exact problem by taking direct feedback from publishers and expanding the definition of ad quality to include 'technical ad quality', e.g. metrics about the delivered ad such as time taken, number of requests, CPU and memory utilisation, and file size. We are working to share these metrics with the publisher so they are informed about advertiser behaviours, and provide feedback to the advertisers or DSPs themselves.

How should a publisher be thinking about speed and their sites? What are the elements they should consider?

A publisher can address latency via 1) page design and 2) by choosing partners who have the best performing technologies and buy-side relationships.

Page design is directly under publishers’ control. There are many elements to consider in order to ensure an optimal user experience. Features that publishers should prioritise to enhance the speed of their pages include using a CDN, loading only the necessary page elements, simplifying page layout, and combining and compressing static resources.

Partner relationships are equally as important as page design for a publisher looking to maintain the best experience across their properties. When a publisher selects a tech partner with whom to work, they are often giving complete control of sections of their pages to a third party. In a worst case scenario, a partner could cripple a publisher’s website to the point that it is completely inaccessible. Tech partners are responsible for using best practices in their code that won’t result in a bad experience for the publisher’s users.

How do yield optimisation technologies, like header bidding, affect speed and latency?

By allowing buyers to see 100% of a publisher’s inventory and compete on a dynamic basis for every impression, rather than at a static price, header bidding extends the benefits of programmatic advertising to its fullest potential. Publishers have integrated with multiple different header-bidding partners to further increase competition and maximise yield. However, managing all of the highly complex required integrations creates room for error as well as a need for increased oversight to keep a publisher’s page running smoothly.

Yield optimisation technologies, like header bidding, have undeniably positive impacts on a publisher’s revenue, but the downside is the increased potential to slow down a publisher’s page if these integrations are not managed properly.

With header bidding specifically, competition between exchanges takes place on the user's computer or phone – meaning that all of the bidding activity happens directly in the browser and uses up valuable bandwidth. Browsers, whether accessed on desktop or web, allow a finite number of simultaneous connections to web servers, and devices have only a limited amount of computing power and memory. Web browsers were never designed to manage the level of technical demand placed upon them by modern yield optimisation technologies, and so the evolution of latency fixes will likely occur outside the browser/app environments.

Thus the publishers, in order to take advantage of as many new monetisation options as possible, overstuff their headers; and, ultimately, can cause more harm than good. The short solution is not quantity but quality – balancing different attributes, speed among them, to ensure the right balance between the best user experience, the best bid, and the time it takes to ensure both of those goals are met. Publishers should also favour partners who have a true feel for the publisher’s problems, and who work towards solutions that will benefit the industry as a whole, e.g. server-side header bidding.

Can header bidding be made faster to accommodate the extra page load?

Moving the inter-exchange competition created by header bidding to the server can eliminate added latency. With publishers using multiple header bidding partners and turning to existing container solutions — which all happen to be client/browser-side — to help manage their technology, they simply add to the page load and create the potential for more latency. A server-side container solution removes header bidding from the browser’s page load sequencing allowing drastically faster ad response times, while also minimising the impact on page load and user experience.

Server-side solutions revolutionise the container concept transferring all the activity from the user’s browser to the container’s servers, solving for the intrinsic deficiencies of a client-side solution, while also leveraging industry-recognised OpenRTB protocols. In order to make this a reality, technology partners need to create a trustworthy server-side solution that preserves transparency across all partners involved in the bidding process.

Proven technology, minimising activity on the user’s browser, leveraging widely adopted industry standards, increased publisher controls and insight, and transparency, will power the next generation of header bidding to eliminate latency and further help publishers accomplish their objective of maximising yield while enhancing their relationship with users.

What are the recommended steps a publisher should take to ensure they’re making the right decisions when it comes to speed and preserving the user experience on their properties?

Get technical. Speed is a complex problem rooted in technology, and there is no magic bullet for success, so don't be afraid to get your hands dirty. Start by choosing technical partners that have expert knowledge about how front-end web technologies work and learn from open source projects like AMP.

Publishers should seek to align with the best technical solutions in the industry, rather than investing in this kind of specialised resource in-house. It is the job of programmatic partners to provide the support and solutions required to optimise yield and help publishers ensure an optimal user experience. Tech partners who can provide access to support and technical teams with a history of innovation and engineering will be one of a publisher's biggest assets when navigating through the second decade of programmatic.