Monday, March 19, 2007

Using IFRAMES For Ad Blocks

Over the years I've noticed the more ad blocks I run on my sites, the slower they seem to load. Particularly I've noticed the banner ads from my CPM partner (Tribalfusion) seemed to occasionally halt the loading of my page while it found/loaded its next banner.

Unacceptable if you ask me. I tried emailing them to inquire about the problem, but only received the standard canned reply that everything was working fine on their end.

So I came up with an alternative solution that allowed me to isolate the load times of these banners. I put each ad in its own IFRAME. It appears that in both IE and Firefox (I have not tested this in Safari or Opera), the IFRAMEs will load independently from the main page. This allows my page/content to load quickly, and then the IFRAMEs can take their pretty old time loading, because it is no longer my problem.

Heck, in some cases I'll move on to the next page before the banner ads load. Could you imagine if end users had to put up with this kind of wait? I'm paying big bucks for a fast server with 2 processors and tons of RAM... yet none of that would matter if the users had to wait for a banner to load from a 3rd party site.

Bottom line, experiment and give IFRAMEs a try if you are seeing problems with your banner ads loading. In most cases CPM banner campaigns are not the big earner on any site, so don't allow it to be the biggest bottleneck on performance.

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