Reliability concerns with online advertising (part 2)
                     Reliability concerns with online advertising (part 2)
John Z
Writes on ad server, involved with Adspeed advertising 
platform & Adspeed Ad serving software.
Serving ads online involves a lot of moving components. Most of the 
time, ads are displayed instantly within milliseconds and viewers 
experience no noticeable delay. However, that is not always the case. 
When one of these components fails or does not run at its optimal 
performance, advertisements might be slow to load or do not load at all. 
These rare outages can happen but they are not a frequent incident. 
Your goal is to make it less frequent and essentially invisible to your 
users.
Plan of action
When an outage or issue happens, you need to have a plan of actions. This 
plan should be prepared ahead of time. You need to know which vendor to 
contact, who to raise the issue and what information to provide to their 
technical support team so that they can quickly identify, troubleshoot and 
provide a suitable solution. It is always more useful to provide as many 
details as possible to minimize back-and-forth clarifications. By providing 
more details, you help them help you because the tech team can jump right 
into action instead of asking and waiting for your clarification.
For example, if an ad does not show like it usually does then you can check 
the same web page using another browser and/or even on another 
computer to verify if you can see that same ad. If the ad does not show on 
multiple browsers, or multiple computers, then it’s more likely that the issue 
is something more serious. In this case, you need to bring it to the tech 
support team’s attention. On the other hand, if the ad shows on one 
browser but not on another browser then you need to double-check your ad 
blockers as your browser might be blocking the ads. If you can view other 
ads but not a particular ad then you can rule out the ad blocking issue. 
Basically, these are just a few simple tests that you can do on your end to 
rule out a number of issues. Let the tech team know what you have already 
tried so that they can exclude those scenarios and focus on the other 
possibilities in order to quickly identify and provide you with a suitable 
solution.
Reliable ad servers go down even less often
While there is always the possibility of an ad server going down, you can 
limit how often that happens by choosing a company that has a proven 
track record of being a reliable solution. One simple fact that you can 
look at is the number of years that they have been in the ad serving 
business. New businesses open all the time but also many businesses 
shut down or disappear after only a year or two, for many different 
reasons. If an adserver company has been in service for ten years, 
twenty years or even more then they must be doing many things right to 
remain in business for such a long period of time. Of course there are 
more to consider than just the number of years but that is a simple yet 
effective factor. You can also ask the vendor to describe what they do to 
maintain uptime, avoid outages and minimize negative effects.
Ads are loading slow
You can see the ad but it’s just slower than usual to show up on the 
screen. This means the ad server is still online but something is not 
performing at its peak. It’s likely there is an issue and things are not 
working at the optimal level. It is not an emergency but at the same 
time, you do not want your viewers to have to wait for ads and have a 
bad feeling about your site. This is where your choice of an ad server 
once again comes into play. You can avoid slow loading ads by using an 
as server with a global reach and a proven record of performance. 
Typically, this might be a networking issue happening to a third-party ad 
server, a creative hosting service, or a vendor along the ad supply chain. 
High latency is often the primary cause for a sudden slow ad loading. 
These issues are often temporary and affect specific routes and so it 
might be slow for you but not for other viewers. You can ask friends to 
check if it's slow for them as well. The delay also depends on the ad 
formats and sizes. It might not be a big difference for text-link adserving 
but the delay might be very noticeable for video adserving because 
video files are bigger and more demanding than text links. In these 
cases, it is a good idea to contact technical support to ensure that they 
are aware of the situation and advise you of the appropriate next steps 
because networking issues do happen from time to time.
About Adspeed
AdSpeed ad server is a reliable & powerful ad serving and ad 
management solution that serves your ads, tracks impressions & clicks 
and reports ad statistics in real-time. Driven by the latest ad serving 
technologies, the goal of Adspeed adserver is to provide a reliable 
platform that can help in executing online advertising strategy more 
efficiently. 
Thank you for spending your precious time in reading this article.