The push to improve mobile speeds continues, this time with Facebook. The social network has issued a warning to all of their advertisers that if their sites don’t load quickly on mobile devices, their ads aren’t going to reach nearly as many people.
This is a new factor that Facebook will be including into their algorithm for displaying ads.
Ads that lead to slow mobile websites are going to get punished, and therefore won’t be seen as often. In addition to just helping to improve the speed of mobile websites, this is also giving Facebook users a better overall experience. Even when leaving Facebook itself, the social network wants to ensure people are having a good experience.
Facebook certainly recognizes that overall user experience is very important. If a user has trouble when they click on an advertisement, they are less likely to click on ads in the future, or may even install some type of ad blocker to avoid the frustration. Taking this type of step will help to minimize this type of issue so that users are more likely to consider interacting with advertisements on the page, which is critical to Facebook.
The social network isn’t putting all the responsibility on the website owners, however. They also announced that they added new technologies to their site that would help to predict when a user is going to click on an ad. When they think this will happen, they will begin pre-loading the page in the background, which will further reduce the time it takes for a user to reach that page. Facebook calls this ‘pre-fetching’ and according to their findings, it can load a mobile page an average of 29% faster than without this technology.
