Google Core Web Vitals: How contextual advertising can help in turbo-charging ad rendering on websites

Great content ✔ Compelling visuals ✔ Content speed? Can you ✔ this off your list? Well, let us find out from Google Core Web Vitals, a set of factors that helps Google understand a website’s overall end-user experience. These factors must be measured by Google Search Central (formerly Google Webmasters) to ensure faster loading, better interactivity, and visual stability.

There are 3 key components that come together to ensure a complete score: 

• Largest contentful paint (LCP) – Measures the time it takes to load a page’s content. As per good user experience standards, LCP should have a score of less than 2.5 seconds.  
• First input delay (FID) – Measures the website responsiveness and delays in completing user actions. A response time of 100 milliseconds or lesser would help provide a seamless user experience.
• Cumulative layout form (CLF) – Measures the visual stability of a page in terms of the placement of different elements. A score of 0.1 or less is considered to be a good score and is an indication of a good user experience.

Slow websites and bad component scores – How do they impact advertisers and publishers?

Users have a shorter attention span, 8 seconds on average, and hate waiting. Businesses can lose 75% of customers owing to longer waiting times. Today’s customers want quick service and good content. A slow-loading site could mean that your customers might be ready to switch to your competitors. A 2019 survey by Search Engine Journey and Unbounce had 70% of respondents highlight site speed as a major negative influence in purchasing decisions.

Now, imagine placing your ad on a website. A low LCP score would mean high content load time leading to a loss in ad impressions as well. 

Sometimes, a bad CLS score might mean that users end up getting confused about where specific elements are located. This infers that users find it difficult to interact with the website and end up unintentionally clicking on links. Imagine the drastic impact this could have on ad budgets?

Advertisers whose ads are not placed in the right location could lose thousands of dollars if users clicked on ads by mistake and then closed them or left the site.

Let’s consider a user who comes to a website with the right intentions and is the right audience for an ad, a bad FID score could still play havoc with the user’s experience. The time it takes for a click to materialize into something fruitful might be too long, leading to user churn and bounces, ultimately leading to a poor brand experience. 

How contextual advertising can help in turbo-charging ad rendering on websites 

Contextual advertising helps set a lot of the above-said things right. The major goal of ensuring that ads get shown next to relevant articles is one part of the game. But a good tool should help publishers optimize their page performance by helping optimize the scores.

A couple of initiatives taken by Seedtag include:

• Using an upgraded version of Certificate Management Protocol (CMP).
• Identifying the browser or device of the end-user to render ads optimally.
• Loading some key features only when the end-user is a Seedtag developer (thereby reducing the overall load)
• Implementing aggressive asynchronous code-splitting at modules leading to better FID scores.
• Optimizing ad elements and placements to ensure a consistent, seamless user experience through improved CLS scores.

How some of these factors have been overlooked up until now and why they really matter today

Though faster websites have always been a priority, these factors come into play in the current times when competition is intense, budgets are seeing major cuts, and businesses focus on creative ideas.

Google announced in May 2020 that its Core Web Vitals (with a major upgrade in its algorithm) will focus on measuring user experience through the above components. This provides an increased emphasis on the metrics and can also drastically impact a website’s SEO score, thereby ultimately impacting all the major stakeholders like advertisers and publishers. 

While creating ads is important, ensuring the rendering of the ads to the right audience, at the right time, and at the right places is equally important. This is made possible through a good contextual advertising tool that understands all aspects and can help the advertisers and publishers optimize them.