Latency

Latency is the amount of time that passes between the request of an action and when it actually occurs.

Latency is quite a big issue in mobile advertising as mobile speed can have a great impact on user engagement and publisher revenue. As people´s expectations for mobile experiences have grown, simply loading on a mobile device is no longer enough. Instead mobile sites must be fast and relevant.

Slow loading sites frustrate users and negatively impact publishers. A study discovered that

• mobile sites loading in 5 seconds earn up to 2x more mobile ad revenue than sites loading in 19 seconds
• mobile sites loading in 5 seconds also got 25% higher ad viewability and 70% longer average sessions
• 53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load
• one out of two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds
• 46% of people say that waiting for pages to load is what they dislike the most when browsing the web on mobile devices.

The results show that a fast and fluent user experience is of great importance. This applies to native mobile apps as well as mobile web browsers. Considering this, publishers should try to make every step of the user experience work as fast and as fluent as possible. This way they can generate more traffic and increase mobile ad revenues.