Continuously optimizing your website is just what the doctor ordered to maintain a healthy ad strategy and one way to do it is by keeping in check your Core Web Vitals. These famous metrics will describe your website’s performance, providing you with insights of improvements to elevate your user experience, search engine positioning, and most importantly your ad revenue!
What are Core Web Vitals?
Core Web Vitals are Google’s user-centric metrics used to track user experience on a website based on its loading time, responsiveness, and layout stability. There are three key Core Web Vitals that great Publishers like you can’t miss:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
The Largest Contentful Paint, also known as LCP, tracks your webpages’ loading performance describing how fast the contents of a page take to render. It measures how long it takes from when a webpage starts loading until the largest text block, video, or image is rendered within the visitor’s viewport. To pass the check with flying colors you should strive to have an LCP score of 2.5 seconds or less.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)
The Interaction to Next Paint aka INP describes the interactivity of your webpages. It keeps track of how fast your website can provide feedback to users’ interactions. For instance, when you add a new shirt to your shopping cart, the cart icon on the website updates to show that a new item has been added.
The ideal score for you is an INP of 200 milliseconds or less. Scoring a low INP means that your website has good responsiveness and can give the user quick visual feedback on their interactions. If you have this already then,100 points to your house!
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
Has it ever happened to you that you are minding your business reading an article on a website and suddenly an image or ad finishes loading and the entire page drives you away from what you were reading? That just makes you want to punch a wall. The Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS for short, is the Core Web Vital that describes how’s your website’s stability. It tracks the unexpected shifts in your website’s layout. These shifts are really frustrating for any cybernaut! So always try to keep your CLS below 0.1!
These shifts often happen because uploaded images or ad spaces lack dimensions and the browser doesn’t ‘reserve’ space, so the layout shifts when an image finally renders and reveals its size. You can avoid this by making sure the appropriate space for the slots has been previously reserved by you, so units get inserted into that space without the need to push content up or down.
Why are core web vitals important for publishers?
Although Core Web Vitals are not the only factor that determines your website’s search engine position ranking, they impact your website’s ad performance. Little details can still make difference! Here are a few key reasons why Core Web Vitals checkups shouldn’t be missing from your routine:
You only have one chance for a first impression
Core Web Vitals determine users’ initial perception of your site’s responsiveness. Based on this first impresión, the visitor decides whether they want to keep engaging with your content (including your ads!) or navigate to the site next door, in the wort case scenario.
Keep up a good user experience
Frustrated users kill your site’s engagement, which you need to generate more impressions and interactions with your ads. A significant delay or content shift makes users feel like interactions are lagging and the page is slow, which leads to a high bounce rate. You can explore more of the effects of user experience in your website and how to improve it on this article by Itziar, our in-house UX lead!
Step up your SEO game
Core Web Vitals impact your website’s position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Google tends to reward responsive sites that don’t take ages to load, deliver quick feedback to users’ interactions and don’t shift once the content renders to ensure a better user experiences. The better your site performs, the better it is going to rank on the SERPs. Follow this SEO guide for Publishers we made to learn how to optimize your strategy.
Optimize your ad monetization
Ads are elements of a website that when not taken care of properly, can impact user experience in a negative way. And in order to fill your pockets with ad revenue, you need functional ads as part of your ad monetization strategy! Find the right balance between providing a great user experience to your visitors while optimizing your ad performance.
One way to optimize your ad performance is by using methods to sell the ad space that improve the loading speed of your ad slots such as Header Bidding. Check out these recommendations by Chrome’s Web. dev to have efficiently loading ads without affecting loading speed.
Another great tip is to place the ad slots mindfully on the webpage, so they don’t move positions or overwhelm your users. Learn how you can maximize your ad revenue with these ad placement strategies from our AdOps expert, Germán Tinaut!
How to track Core Web Vitals?
One of the greatest inventions since fire, are online tools to help us on our day to day. Okay that might be a bit dramatic, but it’s true that there are plenty of nifty tools out there that make tracking metrics a breeze. Some of the best ones for tracking your core web vitals are:
Google Search Console
The good ol’ Google Search Console has a special section just for Core Web Vitals, which offers a site-wide overview. It also pinpoints for you the pages that are in need of an improvement, so you can tackle them ASAP.
Google Page Speed Insights
Google Page Speed Insights is a fan-favorite tool that can’t be missing from your kit. It provides a performance analysis for mobile and desktop. It provides an assessment of your site’s Core Web Vitals and, as if that’s not enough, it also offers recommendations on how you can optimize them!
WebPageTest
WebPageTest allows for testing from multiple locations. It offers a visual comparison, advanced performance details, and a breakdown of Core Web Vitals.
Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a tool integrated within the Chrome DevTools, It provides various audits for performance, such as accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.
How to improve Core Web Vitals?
Reserve space for ad units
Avoid layout shifts from happening by reserving the space of the height of the ad. Learn more about this and other strategies for optimizing your ad placement and avoid a bad user experience from our AdOps expert, Germán Tinaut, in this article.
Improve server response
Improve backend speed so that the content your user wants to see or access to appears quickly after the initial request is made.
Optimize and compress your website’s images
Make sure to use modern image formats, resize elements, and implement responsive web design for fast loading.
Optimize the JavaScript
Minimize and defer the loading of non-critical JavaScript to avoid blocking the main thread. Consider code-splitting techniques or breaking scripts into smaller parts.
Leverage Lazy Loading
Delay the loading of off-screen images to prioritize the initially visible content by implementing Lazy Loading. Lazy loading is a technique that defers the loading of non-critical resources at page load time. Instead of loading all assets at the same time, it waits until the user’s browser viewport is about to display an element before loading it.
Reduce Third-Party script Impact
Review third-party scripts (like analytics or marketing tags) and optimize their loading for reduced interference.
Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Distribute your web resources via a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a network of geographically distributed servers that helps speed up webpage loading. These servers store cached copies of your website’s content and deliver them from the closest location to the user. This will help with reduce load times based on users’ geographic locations and improve your site’s performance.
Optimize your fonts
Implement font-display values, preload web fonts, or use font sizes that match system fallbacks to reduce text rendering changes.
Specify size dimensions for images and videos
Using width and height attributes on media tags prevents reflows because the browser reserves space for them during loading.
Monetize your web without sacrificing your Core Web Vitals!
Counting on the right ad monetization solution that maximizes your ad revenue while protecting your core web vitals is like hitting the jackpot! Our award-winning Single Tag ad monetization solution not only is packed with the best features to step up your ad strategy, but also it’s specially designed to not disturb your website’s performance. Additionally, you’ll have a team of experts at your back giving you a hand with optimizing ad placement, which will drive improved Core Web Vitals marks. Hit us up to learn more!
