• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 2, 2019

Marfeel has created technology that it estimates loads ads in 2.4 seconds on iOS mobile devices with strong internet connections, reducing the load time by 8 seconds.

The technology aims to reduce publisher viewability obstacles by 66% for display ad-load times.

The obstacle for publishers meant reducing the load ad time for impressions, so it becomes viewable as soon as a user sees the content near the ad, according to Alexian Chiavegato, CMO of Marfeel.

“If the deliverability of all ad impressions -- not just the first -- is not well optimized, the ad is not viewable or clickable, and the inventory is wasted,” he said.

A viewable ad impression requires 50% of the banner or creative ad to display on a screen for more than one second, as defined by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) standard.

Marfeel’s tool, Fast Ads, works in part by removing other content in the browser and by loading code into a web worker, which Wikipedia defines as a JavaScript script executed from an HTML page that runs in the background.

Fast Ads also restricts the use of custom code and relies on API calls to identify where to load the ad on the page. 

Chiavegato declined to give examples of specific code, but said developers changed the order of the core code that prioritizes and loads content.

“This was part of the iterative process after our hypothesis that higher viewability would increase click-through rates and revenue,” he said. “We essentially redefined the way we loaded ads, almost from scratch, separating monetization code from loading in the user's browser."

Achieving this meant Marfeel made many changes to its core technology. The company had to measure every load time and identify the parts of the page that loaded more slowly. Tests found a major disparity between page load times and the time it took ad impressions to load.

Google in 2018 analyzed the state of ad viewability, estimating the rate at 49% for display ads in the United States for display ads. Marfeel estimates its technology has created 70% viewability.