Facebook is rolling out two new updates that will improve a user’s experience when clicking on an ad on the platform. The changes are aimed at decreasing load times for websites, and the social media giant is urging advertisers to optimise their content for mobile or risk lessening their brand reach.
Facebook started preloading ads on Wednesday as part of its first major update. This means that ads will now load in the background before they have been clicked as means to reducing the overall loading times for websites on smartphones and tablets. Facebook believes that too many people are abandoning sites after they click through due to poor experiences.
The drive to increase value on the platform in this manner is not a surprise as Facebook recently stated that 40 per cent of users leave a website if it hasn’t loaded within three seconds. It also stated that some of these sites can take between eight to 14 seconds to load on slower Internet connections. A further study by Adobe also shows that websites not built for mobile have suffered a notable dip in traffic.
Need for speed
The second update, which will arrive in the coming months, will start using factors such as a user’s network connection and the landing page speed for a mobile site to determine how it displays ads, so it’s in the best interests of advertisers to make the necessary changes in the meantime to make their site mobile-literate.
In order to cater towards a mobile-first world, Facebook outlined several steps that brands and publishers can take to improve load times in an official blog post. It has recommended the use of compressed files and multi-region hosting and the removal of render-blocking JavaScript in addition to the shortening of links and the optimisation of plug-ins and landing page redirects.
“People use Facebook to connect with businesses, find content and research and purchase products,” Matt Idema, Facebook’s VP of monetisation product marketing, said. “A lot of the time, those experiences depend on the mobile websites of our advertisers. What we’re seeing is businesses have yet to invest across the board in their mobile experiences as much as in their legacy desktop experiences.”
