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Reliability concerns with online advertising (part 3)

There are different ways to promote a business with online advertising, but in terms of saving time and money, there is perhaps none better than going with an ad server. A lot of the work can basically be automated, as can reporting and data, all of which frees up time for businesses to focus on other things. While this all sounds straightforward enough, there is, like any method of marketing and advertising, potential issues that need to be addressed. Finding an ad server is easy but finding a reliable ad server is another matter entirely. Let's take a look at some of the problems with ad serving, as well as suggestions to help avoid them.

Image or video hosting is down or slow

For online ads, video and images are incredibly important because the old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words very much comes into play. An ad with a missing or broken image or video can be viewed by potential clients as amateurish. Therefore, it is important to ensure that your image and video host is reliable. One of the best ways to avoid this issue is to use a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) for image and video adserving via a separate domain or subdomain. CDN hosting is about as reliable as it gets, with your images and videos stored in the cloud across different servers around the world for safekeeping and faster delivery to viewers. One unique characteristic of creative assets is that they do not change often and therefore can be duplicated and cached on multiple edge servers that are located nearer to your viewers. This means high availability because there are multiple copies of the same image or video. This also means slow image or video loading will be minimized because ad delivery is done via a nearby edge server.

Landing page is not loading

Many advertisers rely on a landing page to deliver more info about a specific product, as well as to capture leads or email subscriptions. Having that landing page down or slow is very problematic and damaging. Imagine an interested viewer clicking on an ad served by a third-party adserver to see a broken error page or wait too long for the landing page to load. That is definitely not a good experience. These interested and potential customers simply will not wait. Time is valuable and they have too many things going on. They will click on something else and entirely forget about this ad and your offer. They do not care or have time to report the error or to find out why or what happened. Therefore, the advertiser or agency is responsible to maintain and optimize a landing page that is quick to load and contains strong arguments to convince potential customers to make a purchase or to contact you for further information. As a solution, choose a web host that is reliable with an excellent uptime record. You can also create a subdomain just for landing pages and host it on a high-availability hosting service. Use CDNs for all static content like images and supporting code libraries to speed up page loading.

Part 1 - Outage frequency and impact management

Part 2 - Action plan, reliable partners and global reach

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