Dive Brief:
- Facebook is launching "prefetching," an initiative that will pre-load mobile content on the Facebook app before a link is tapped, according to a Facebook Business blog post.
- Facebook is also pushing advertisers to optimize their websites for mobile, suggesting that mobile page load times will affect whether ads get served to mobile users with poor network connections.
- Facebook says that prefetching "can shorten mobile site load time by 29% or 8.5 seconds, improving the experience and decreasing the risk of site abandonment.“
Dive Insight:
With this latest move, Facebook wants to optimize the mobile experience for users. While Facebook is helping advertisers that are slow to optimize their own sites by pre-loading their content for mobile, the social network is also warning advertisers to be mobile-friendly or risk not reaching mobile users with slower connections.
For any complaint that marketers might have about Facebook, one thing the company has made clear are its two main goals for advertising on the platform: Deliver value to advertisers and provide a good experience to users. Prefetching falls right in line with both goals.
This isn't the first time that Facebook has done something like this: The platform created Instant Articles for publisher content in part to improve mobile load times. Google has recently been pushing advertisers and publishers in the same direction with its Accelerated Mobile Pages project.
The move makes sense for Facebook: More than 91% of its daily one billion users access the platform via a mobile device. Pushing advertisers to do their part to improve the mobile user experience should help everyone from Facebook to its users and advertisers. In its Q2 earnings report, Facebook stated 85% of its ad revenue now comes from mobile.
