Facebook pressures advertisers to cut mobile page load speeds or it’ll cut their reach

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Facebook has sent out a warning to advertisers: Cut down the time it takes to load your webpages, or we’ll cut the reach of your ads.

Facebook plans to start deciding whether to show an ad to someone by considering how long it takes a link which brands include in their ads to load, the company announced on Wednesday.

The move is the company’s latest effort to make Facebook a less frustrating place for people to peruse while on a phone, as were the introductions of Instant Articles and Canvas formats. And it could have the perhaps-not-unintentional effect of pushing brands — as it’s pushed publishers — to make more content that’s native to Facebook and coincidentally quicker to load, like Instant Articles and Canvas posts/ads.

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook’s consideration of mobile page-load speeds is commendable. As the growing popularity of ad blockers shows, people are sick of waiting too long for webpages to load. And it’s a shrewd business decision. Facebook doesn’t want people to be so discouraged by slow-loading links that they stop clicking on links in ads altogether (and stop making Facebook money).

That’s why Facebook also announced on Wednesday that it would start pre-loading pages that a mobile ad links to when it predicts someone is likely to click on the ad, which is something Facebook already does for links in organic posts. That way, if and when someone clicks on it, the page will appear almost instantly. However, images and interactive elements won’t begin to load until after the page appears, which is similar to how Facebook loads Instant Articles. Facebook claimed this process, which it calls “pre-fetching,” can make the average mobile site load 29 percent faster. That’s fast, but not quite as fast as if that pre-fetched landing page were instead a Facebook-native Canvas ad, which Facebook said can load up to 10 times faster than the average mobile site.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.