Building a Better Workflow for Smarter Marketing

As a marketer, every second counts. Your success depends on the speed with which you gather and interpret campaign performance data and how fast you respond.

This makes web optimization, or improving the time it takes for pages, scripts and other elements to load, essential for any marketer. When you set up a campaign or execute media, the last thing you want to see is that spinning pinwheel icon on your screen. And this is why we have gone to great lengths to optimize the Turn Console — and why we know there is always more work to be done.

Web optimization was a key concern for us when we launched our fully redesigned platform a few months ago. This more efficient and unified experience helps marketing teams plan and analyze for the future. The redesign was made with one overall goal in mind: to provide users with the control needed to manage every part of the marketing lifecycle with ease and transparency, and speed is a part of that.

A number of issues affect how fast a page is perceived to load:

• The browser and the user’s machine which must do the work to render the application controls and data elements.
• Software structure (code optimization on browser side and server side, e.g. code refactoring to speed up page rendering, server side queries and database queries)
• The infrastructure of one’s software and hardware (how many machines you have, whether you can scale them properly to handle the number of requests coming in)
• Network latency (depending on where the platform resides).
• Time when the user first see contents on the page

One recent enhancement was reducing the amount of time it takes to copy, to edit, and to load campaign objects. The time to copy a single line item was slashed by two thirds, and the amount of time to copy a group of line items was reduced by nearly 80%. The time to edit a line item was also reduced by 57%. We also observed 50% improvement on loading campaign objects. These improvements allows the marketers to quickly create and optimize campaigns in a more efficient manner. Several changes were made for these improvements:

• Network payloads/calls were broken down so user can see the first byte of data faster
• Sequential calls were reduced so many more elements can load and render simultaneously.
• Reduced amount of overhead cost of reloading different parts of the application.

These are just a few improvements, but it’s also just a start—we know there is plenty more optimization to be done.

Optimizing web performance has been a priority as we develop the Turn Console, the gateway to the Turn Platform. One of the most used patterns is the a list and graphs that display campaign performance data. The list page is an entry point into every object and the insights on the list pages also gives a quick summary on the campaign performance. In order render these pages and data quickly, the rendering portion of the code was swapped out and replaced with a custom rendering piece after the behavior of these pages were analyzed. The custom rendering piece reduced the loading time of these widely used pages by 70% and created an experience that would have otherwise not been realized.

We also invest in proactive monitoring where we continuously measure how our console performs.  Our monitoring tools enable us to simulate a user logging into and navigating within the console. If we want to compare the experience of someone logging into the console from Paris in the middle of the day, or late at night in Sydney, we can simulate that and figure out if bottlenecks or network delays are occurring. For example, our monitoring tool alerted us in an instance where there was some brief instability fetching our reporting data. We analyzed and fixed suboptimal queries when they were taking longer than usual (i.e. five seconds, rather than the usual time of less than one second).

These are major steps. But as we said, they are just the beginning. Web optimization is a constant work in progress, whether you’re a huge tech company or a smaller firm seeking to ensure clients are getting the speediest experience possible. Continuous performance optimization is not just valuable — it is critical to helping marketers get the most out of their advertising technology investment.

About Amobee

Founded in 2005, Amobee is an advertising platform that understands how people consume content. Our goal is to optimize outcomes for advertisers and media companies, while providing a better consumer experience. Through our platform, we help customers further their audience development, optimize their cross channel performance across all TV, connected TV, and digital media, and drive new customer growth through detailed analytics and reporting. Amobee is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tremor International, a collection of brands built to unite creativity, data and technology across the open internet.

If you’re curious to learn more, watch the on-demand demo or take a deep dive into our Research & Insights section where you can find recent webinars on-demand, media plan insights & activation templates, and more data-driven content. If you’re ready to take the next step into a sustainable, consumer-first advertising future, contact us today.