5 Performance Rules Every Ad Serving Company Must Follow

Yesterday I was a victim of SPoF or Single Point of Failure. When shopping for a new web cam, an unresponsive ad tag blocked my page from loading and interrupted my browsing.

Ads are on everyone’s mind with the Super Bowl coming up this Sunday. Inspired by football, and yesterday’s experience, I thought now would be a perfect time to drop a short reminder of the 5 Performance Rules that every ad serving company must follow.

1. Don’t block content, rely on “ASYNC tags”. Make sure your tags load async and they do not block the load of other requests on the page – or key events like “DomContentLoaded” and “onload”. Don’t just recommend placing the tag just before closing “body” tag if it’s not ASYNC – users will still see the hourglass and the webpage might not function properly.

2. Rely on a global infrastructure that covers your clients’ needs (self-built or CDN). Your clients place your tags on their pages and have visitors from various geographical locations. Ensure your service is reachable and close to these locations by relying on CDNs for static libraries and a distributed DNS system.

3. Design to function on all browser and devices. Handle all browsers and versions properly (it may not have the functionality, but it should not break it or cause JavaScript errors). Stay up-to-date with new technology.

4. Don’t be a resource hog. Ensure your content does not hog bandwidth, CPU, Memory, or other resources. Remember, you are not the only tag in the page and not the primary content the end-user is visiting the page for.

5. Provide and enforce meaningful SLAs. As a service provider, you must have SLAs in place. Make sure they are actively monitored through synthetic test and are enforced so that everyone in your organization is aware of the consequences of “failure”.