Why carrying adverts can damage your brand

I have recently noticed a slow down in the performance of some important sites that I visit. This is characterised simply by the pages not loading. The reason is that the site is pulling content from a third-party server located somewhere else in the world, and there seems to be a problem retrieving that data. The picture above shows the “loading …” message I had for a few minutes when I visited accuweather.com recently to check the forecast.

I have had similar experiences with Wired news which carries adverts using the doubleclick network (Transferring data from ad.uk.doubleclick.net …), and even had problems with Amazon when the page on amazon.co.uk I was visiting was trying to pull content from amazon.com but was failing to retrieve the data.

On news and information sites, I may simply go back later, or, since there are so many alternative sites providing similar content I may switch to another content source. If the problem persists and I regularly have the “loading …” problem with a site, I will switch to another brand to provide that content. When it comes to ecommerce (in the case of Amazon), this can hit your bottom line quite seriously.

In an article “Warnings of Internet Overload” a possible cause may have been highlighted. The article talks in very broad terms about the whole Internet grinding to a halt initially, but goes on to suggest that the real bottleneck is in the “last mile” or the actual connection to homes and businesses because these connections are old and often of copper wire, and so can handle less volume of data efficiently. Consequently, as more people come on-line on these “last mile” connections, more issues are going to appear. ISPs are already limiting bandwidth use of people on such lines in an effort to prevent us noticing the bottleneck issue.

The question you have to ask when deciding to carry advertising or pull third-party content from alternative sources is simply “what is the benefit, and how does the risk of not being able to retrieve this content affect my site?” Even if the retrieval is not a product of your infrastructure, but due to the “last mile” problem mentioned above. As your site traffic scales upwards, unhappy visitors equals lost visitors. And those visitors equate to eyeballs who you want to see the third-party content. The nett result is that carrying the third-party content reflects directly on your brand because most visitors don’t know that it is either the third-party site that has a problem, or it’s the “last mile” effect. They simply blame you and tell their friends.

Is there a solution?

Aside from investing in the infrastructure of the third-party servers and their networks, and the “last mile”, there are coding methodologies which allow third-party content to be pulled after the page loads. This means that you ensure you deliver your content to the customer and any third-party content is delivered if it can be. After all, it should be less important to deliver third-party content than your own.

Web 2.0 technologies (it’s essentially JavaScript we’re talking about here) enable the site developer to introduce components into the page which are populated after the page loads by executing JavaScript on the client to activate the third-party controls and pull in the relevant data, or substitute with alternative content where necessary. Such components have been used for some time to serve advertising based on page keywords (for example on experts-exchange.com using vibrantmedia.com) which parses the page content post-load and tags keywords with relevant advertising.

This is a more sophisticated application of the technology as it uses additional pattern matching to intelligently serve ads, but a simple “search and replace” algorithm could easily prevent the “loading from third party …” damaging your brand because you’re not serving anything to your visitors.

One Response to “Why carrying adverts can damage your brand”

1. Zero Point? » A two-tier internet? says:

   September 10, 2007 at 12:12

   [...] place finite limits on the amount of bandwidth they can supply to every home and business. From a piece on the Emissary Consulting blog: In an article “Warnings of Internet Overload” a possible cause may have been highlighted. The [...]