What is latency?, and why should you be interested?

Are you interested in metrics in digital marketing? Are you frustrated by the load times in the web pages you visit? Do you want to improve the user experience of visitors to your site? Do you think that the loading speed depends on the speed of your internet connection and increasing its speed will be enough?

Despite being a technical issue, it is important to know it to understand the implications of technology choices on digital marketing strategies and results.

Wait time

You have to know about latency and what causes it.

Latency is the time it takes for a stimulus to receive a response.

Or speaking of digital marketing, the time it takes a page to be completely visible on the screen after we enter to it.

Sometimes we think that the delay in loading a page is due to the bandwidth of the internet we have, its speed. But that can not always be the reason, nor will it be resolved by increasing the speed of the connection necessarily.

Some reasons that cause latency has to do with:

• The number of ads the site has
• The way in which the performance of advertising is monitored
• Where is each of these services

If we have ads from different platforms, several tracking pixels and tags. Although it is small pieces of code that we add to our website, each one adds milli-seconds to the load time of the page.

And that is what makes the load time slower in the end.

Too many ads

Advertising usually takes care of the expenses of many sites, especially if they offer "free" content.

The way to make money from these pages is by offering the number of visitors they have on their properties, plus the type of people who see it. This way you can have the volume of people who can see the ads and have the characteristics desired by advertisers.

Advertising being a very important source of income, sometimes exceed the number of ads on the sites, seeking higher profits but sacrificing the comfort of users.

Tracking results

To measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and to establish a return on investment, it is necessary to know the metrics of the ads, for these we use pixels and tags.

Pixels

A transparent pixel (smallest element of an image) is inserted in the pages that you want to follow up on.

This pixel, together with a series of instructions or tags are sent to the servers where the web statistics are recorded.

The pixels that used are dependent on each monitoring company, which is why several different ones are used, which can slow down the page load time.

Server location

Depending on the number of pixels and companies that place their ads, among other factors, the information has to travel and jump through various sites before reaching the end user.

All these jumps, although they are electronic, take time and are added to the loading time of the site.

It makes requests to the sites, longer. If I request a page, before obtaining the result, it must go to look for the ads, later it must go to call to the tracking pixels and finally return to the computer of the user with the complete site.

That is why there is greater latency and has no relation to the speed of the internet connection.

That degrades the user experience and is an important issue that should be considered to attract and retain visitors to a site.

User experience

The user experience refers to the waiting time to see content, how intrusive are the ads it shows, if the content is relevant, original, new and attractive and if the site meets the needs of the people who visit it or find what they look for in a simple way.

Conclusion

So latency is a technical issue that must be considered to improve the user experience and also the web page ranking on search results.