Catalano on Digital

Today my long time favorite daily read, slashdot, posted an article about Gmail business email hosting being down for over a day. For a hosted email company that is not even close to being acceptable. I immediately thought that it would be great for Mailtrust, a division of Rackspace and a client of Modea to have a comment moderated up the chain promoting their competitor product. They did one better. Directly beneath the article text was an ad stating: “The answer to your email problems.” That is perfect ad placement.

Have you ever considered the user impact of displaying ads on your websites? I’m not talking about the distraction of seizure-inducing Flash ads. This post is about the impact on page load times that result from incorporating ads from even the largest ad networks.

This morning I surfed over to the Technorati Top Blogs page to see if my blog made the list. I don’t know because the page never loaded. Yeah, that’s right, Firefox kept on chugging away as if my bandwidth connection was reduced to a trickle. The only thing I could see on the page was a Verizon ad served up by DoubleClick. This is Ironic considering I am surfing at home using Verizon!

In the status bar you will see the frustrating words: “Transferring data from m1.2mdn.net…” Just to be 100% certain that it was in fact DoubleClick, I opened the performance monitoring tool Firebug. You will see DoubleClick is indeed the cause. If you are spending tens of thousands per month on hosting and content delivery networks, make sure you design your HTML pages to render before the transmission with your ad network is complete!

So the next time you find yourself excessively waiting for a page to load, look down at the status bar and take note. You will likely find the ad network to be the culprit.

At the risk of making this blog seem as though it is centered on Facebook, I do have one more nugget to share. Recently Facebook introduced Social Ads in an effort to “increase relevance” (and click-through rates). Here is an example of a social ad:

The ad is part of an awareness campaign for a targeted cross section of the US demographic. The ad drives traffic to the Modea Facebook page (previously plugged here). As you should know, Facebook pages are a new capability for bands, companies and products to ‘live’ in the Facebook universe. These pages have the ability for users to “Fan” them. The social aspect of the ad kicks in when someone you know has fanned the page. In the above example, Seth is one of my friends and has previously fanned Modea. By seeing your friends attached to the ad, the relevance and likelihood of you clicking on the ad will increase. Or so it is presumed.

I have been holding off on posting about this because I wanted to determine a way to quantify the increased effectiveness of these ads. Given the level of effort I’m willing to put in, it just isn’t going to happen. I would certainly be interested to know any stats that can help prove the effectiveness. Unless you are friending people you don’t really care for, social ads can’t possibly hurt—unless they creep you out!

Here is an FAQ on Social Ads (may require Facebook login)

@facebook request: I would like to see a break out of impressions and click-through performance when a social ad version is displayed from the non-socially enhanced version.