16-Nov-2009

Ad Load Performance Scoring Working Group Update

Eric GoldsmithTony Ralph, Pramod Khincha,

Bryant Mason, Mark Masterson,Sameer Ajmani

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Motivation

• Does speed matter?

• Causal connection between page load-time and user behavior– Public data from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Amazon, etc.

– Non-public data from even more ;-)

• When pages load faster, users:– Browse more

– Search more

– View more

– Buy more

– DO MORE

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Motivation cont’d

• Faster Pages Users Do More See More Ads

• Faster Ads Faster Pages … See More Ads

• How to make ads faster?– Qualitative

• Follow Best Practiceswww.iab.net/media/file/IAB_Ad_Load_Perfomance_BP_FINAL.pdf

• Audit Compliance (tool)

• Best practices important, but don't guarantee fast ads

– Quantitative• Measure load time (tool)

• Identify / resolve performance issues

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Ad Load Performance ScoringALPS

• ALPS Working Group goals– Establish standards for measuring ad load performance

• Test individual ads in isolation

• Qualitative Measure - compliance with Best Practices

• Quantitative Measure - score ads to predict actual ad download time

– Provide common language for ad speed, to help specify• Agency / Vendor delivery performance

• Publisher speed expectations / requirements

– Extend existing Ad Specs to incorporate load performance• http://www.iab.net/iab_products_and_industry_services/508676/508767/Rich_Media

– Allow independent testing• Hosted service provided by IAB

• Open to all members

Qualitative - Best Practices Scoring

• YSlow– Tool used internally at Y! and by many publishers to improve web page

performance

– Measures best practices compliance and generates easy to understand letter grades [A-F]

– Help in creating better user experiences by improving quality earlier in the cycle

– Studies have shown that following these rules can improve performance by 25% - 50%

• YSlow for Ads– Develop specialized rule set to score against Ad Load Best Practices

– Rules, thresholds & scoring details will be published• Can be implemented in any tool

Best Practices Highlights

• How to speed it up?– Reduce content!! Rule of thumb – No more than 4 components a page– Not Found Error – One of your ad components is missing which renders

the ad useless– Too many serving domains per ad – DNS Lookups are expensive –

restrict to 2 domains per ad– Avoid redirects – Not optimal to use redirects for counting. – Cache aggressively -

• Easy Optimizations – Slim it down– Compress as much as possible – Easy setting on serving side– Reduce cookie size– Use a CDN when you can– Minify JS/CSS– Avoid duplicate JS/CSS - – Optimize Images

Best Practices cont’d

• Advanced Techniques – Best user experience – Avoid nesting IFRAMEs

– Do not scale images in HTML

– In-lining vs. caching of JS/CSS

– Counting beacons no more than 1

• Ad Ruleset Demo using AdTool

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Quantitative - Load Performance Scoring

• Microsoft is a developing a prototype to profile and score Ad download performance– Tool is based on Visual Round Trip Analyzer

– The “score” is the count of network packets in the critical path of the Ad response

– The algorithm quantifies Ad performance independent of end user’s network connectivity and geographic location

• Prototype can predict real-world Ad download times– Given the score and the location of a target user, the tool can estimate

actual Ad download times by accounting for various underlying network interactions

– The network modeling code was developed by Microsoft Research and is based on published studies

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Load Performance Scoring cont’d

• The scoring algorithm is platform independent– Analysis is performed on captures of network traffic

– Scoring could be built into existing Ad preview tools and Creative Acceptance processes

• The resulting score is also independent of the Ad Network– Scoring can be done before the Ad has been submitted and published

• This approach complements existing measurements conducted by Publishers and in Ad Networks—but will flag performance issues earlier in the Ad lifecycle

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Load Performance Scoring Example

Ad Load Performance Score Result

Total number of packets 8

Predicted Download Times Time in ms

Domestic end users 270

Nearby international end users 798

Remote international end users 1589

Ad Load Performance Score Result

Total number of packets 24

Predicted Download Times Time in ms

Domestic end users 598

Nearby international end users 1770

Remote international end users 3527

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The View from the Summit

• Expected benefits of the ALPScore™

– Correlate Ad download times with Business performance metrics, such as CSAT, abandonment, and CTR

– Highlight opportunities for optimization of Ad download times during content development

– Provide comparison of download performance of new Ads with similar Ad products

– Produce estimates of Ad download times for new markets

– Act as an additional standard for Creative Acceptance

– Provide an additional criteria for selecting Ads at runtime

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Next Steps

• Finish development of features needed for both scoring tools

• Run a small-scale study in a controlled lab environment

• Refine scoring based on feedback and test results

• Perform a larger-scale study with Ads from multiple vendors and Ad Networks

• Conduct research to correlate Business metrics, CSAT, and AdSat with the Ad Load Performance Score

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Questions?