Adapting to the New Cookieless reality: An Expert Update for Publishers
Welcome to a new piece in Yieldbird’s series, drawing from our own research into the significant shifts in the programmatic…
Originally posted Feb 24th, 2021.
Search engines in 2021 will continue to be one of the most important traffic sources for website owners. Since Google announced that so-called Core Web Vitals will become ranking signals in mid-June*, which means they will affect how your domain ranks in the search engines, you should definitely be considering looking for ways to optimize your performance.
So I agree with Amanda Hicks, who has written that the ad industry should pay attention to Core Web Vitals. But not only for the reasons which she mentions.
*Updated schedule!
In a hurry to get ready for Core Web Vitals by May? On April, 19th Google announced in an official statement that we have more time to prepare for the changes. “We’ll begin using page experience as part of our ranking systems beginning in mid-June 2021. However, page experience won’t play its full role as part of those systems until the end of August“.
What are the Core Web Vitals? Loading, stability, interactivity.
Core Web Vitals is a set of three parameters that are a way of tackling loading, stability, and interactivity:
- LCP, or Largest Contentful Paint, measures loading performance in seconds, and shows when the user is expected to get the most important parts of the page loaded,
- FID, First Input Delay, measures interactivity in milliseconds, or the time from the input generated by the user to the time when the browser is actually able to begin processing it,
- CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift, is a dimensionless metric that measures how the page shifts or moves when additional resources are loaded.
All of the Core Web Vitals are a way of understanding the user’s experience. If your website loads very slowly, is unresponsive, or has sections shifting after it’s loaded something (like a huge banner on the top of the page), from mid-June 2021 you should expect your ranking in the Google search engine to decline.
But that’s not the only reason as to why you should check your Core Web Vitals and take steps to improve them.
How to align Programmatic Ads setup with Core Web Vitals
Amanda Hicks mentions that Publishers should care about Core Web Vitals, especially about the Cumulative Layout Shift, as it’s one of the most difficult metrics to tackle. To some extent, I agree with this perspective. The Cumulative Layout Shift is associated with the way your site loads all the resources, like images or display banners (creatives). It will definitely be affected by the way your Programmatic Ads setup has been built. If it is not able to process the Programmatic auction fast and deliver the creative instantaneously, you will need to make some adjustments.
If that is the case, you might try reviewing the available creative sizes and limiting them upfront; so that waiting for the creative to be delivered will not affect how the specific sections of the page end up being positioned on the screen. Of course in general more available ad formats mean more competition and higher CPMs, so you might be reluctant that limiting them will affect the results – therefore before you do it, review the performance of each size and leave only the best ones.
The other parameters of Core Web Vitals are also associated with how your tech setup works, e.g. how many scripts are put in the <head> section of the page. But you should try to optimize the user experience not only because Google told us to do so. This is something you should already be doing. For example it might be the case that the way your header bidding setup is built makes your page load very long, and switching to Server-to-Server Header Bidding would be a good idea. Did I mention we’re able to provide you with such a solution?
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Why every Digital Publisher should care about Core Web Vitals… or just User Experience?
Even if Google didn’t take Core Web Vitals into account when ranking sites in the search results, you should make your site as easy, as fast, and as pleasant to use as possible.
If the site takes way too long to load, you shouldn’t expect the user to wait around. They will simply close the browser tab, get back to their search results, and open another link. People nowadays have short attention spans, are busy, and cannot be expected to wait. They demand to get answers instantly, and you need to provide them with these answers as soon as possible.
So a slow loading page will not be as successful as a faster one, because a significant part of the users won’t stay long enough to actually read it. And this means that they won’t see the ads you’re trying to sell. No ad impressions mean no revenue, right?
On top of that, if people don’t stay long enough to read something, they won’t like it and share it with their friends on social media. So you will lose that portion of traffic also.
And even if your business model is based on arbitrage (buying cheap traffic and monetizing it), you probably pay for clicks, but not for those visits that result in the full page load. So you should make your site work fast; and keep the users happy.
We believe that delivering the best possible User Experience is a must if you want to run a successful online business of any kind. So especially if you get most of your traffic from search engines, you definitely need to check the Core Web Vitals in order to make sure your site is user friendly.
