✨Introducing ad user experience metrics✨

Digital ads are notorious for delivering poor user experiences. Whether it’s slow load times, heavy creatives, too many requests, non-secure calls, or incorrect trafficking, ad issues seem to show up all the time. Ad Operations teams have all sorts of ways to manually test problematic ads (browser dev tools, Charles, Firebug, etc.), but testing them in bulk or isolating an ad from the rest of the page’s metrics can be a challenge. With all of the third parties involved in the ad delivery process, from design all the way to trafficking, it’s not surprising that we see bad ads every day.

As a first step in tackling these issues, we’re excited to announce the release of ad UX metrics. When you import ads into our platform you’ll get ad UX automatically:

Here are some of the metrics we’re starting with:

• Number of requests
• Number of domains
• Total content size
• DOM load time
• First paint time
• Total load time

We’ve also included some graphs to break down file size and requests by domain and content type.

We also present an interactive network timeline if you need to get a bit more granular:

We’ve also included a visual preview for those that want to preview the ad in isolation:

We’re just getting started, so look for more improvements to what data we gather, how we present it, how you can share it with third parties, and what you can set thresholds/alerts around. If you’re interested, sign up for a free trial on our site. We’d love to hear your feedback and ideas.