Background Motor-Fan is a specialist online media brand within the portfolio of Japanese publishing house SAN-EI CORPORATION. (hereinafter, SAN-EI).
AnyMind Group’s acquired publisher trading desk, FourM, has been working with SAN-EI since 2016, but just in terms of supporting the monetization of display advertising.
A spokesperson from SAN-EI said: “In the process of implementing Core Web Vitals standards, the editorial and operations teams were aware that site speed standards were not good enough.” With a high abandonment rate, SAN-EI attributed one of the factors to slow site speed.
As such, measures to improve site speed were made, which resulted in improved user experience and search traffic, ultimately leading to increased advertising revenue.
Measures taken Six issues were found after some initial analysis by our engineering team, and one of the issues was that a recommendation widget at the bottom of each article contributed to slow page load speeds. If the widget is loaded whenever a user visits a page, it will slow down the overall page load and result in a diminished user experience. As such, lazy loading was implemented on the recommendation widget.
Results Using PageSpeed Insights, FourM was able to improve 19 areas before and after the implementation of measures.
The spokesperson said: “The site speed improvement was predicted, because we had a simulation done beforehand, but it has also become faster as a sensory experience, and it has been well received by the editorial department.”
In addition, a comparison of the three months before and after the improvement showed that not only did the site speed improve, but the number of searches and clicks increased 1.32 times.
Moving ahead The spokesperson said: “Although there are conflicting aspects between the display of advertisements (revenue) and usability, we will continue to operate the site with an optimal balance, keeping in mind the business objective of maximizing revenue and profits. Sanei has also implemented AMP, and is working on speeding up the display of the site in addition to changing the implementation of the site.”
