Facebook Inc. is pushing online retailers and other advertisers to speed up their mobile websites by factoring how long it takes an advertiser’s linked-to mobile web page to load into its ad auction calculation as to which ad it presents to users.
How fast a mobile website loads is important, Facebook argues, citing a recent Aberdeen Group report that found up to 40% of website visitors abandon a site if it takes 3 seconds to load.
“Nobody wants to wait ages for a website to load,” Facebook writes in a blog post. “A better mobile experience helps businesses form a stronger connection with the people interested in them. Plus, site abandonment hurts business objectives, like completing a purchase or filling out a form. It can also bring challenges to measurement—people often abandon sites before third-party site analytics have time to register a page visit. This can make it harder to track and optimize ad performance.”
Facebook yesterday began prefetching, or preloading, mobile ad content in the Facebook in-app browser even before a consumer taps a link. The technology could speed up a mobile site’s load time by 29%, Facebook says, which decreases the risk of a consumer abandoning a site.
Facebook’s move is in line with Google’s recently including mobile page load times into its search algorithm that determines search result rankings.
Courtesy of InternetRetailer
