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Ads that consume an inordinate amount of resources and significantly slow down your site speed - otherwise known as “heavy ads” - will now be reported on your cleanAD Dashboard.

What Are Heavy Ads?

Heavy ads are any ad the user has not interacted with, while also meeting any of the following criteria, according to Google Developers:

  • Uses the main thread of your site for more than 60 seconds in total
  • Uses the main thread of your site for more than 15 seconds in any 30-second window
  • Uses more than 4 megabytes of network bandwidth

While not actually harmful to your webpage or end-user, heavy ads often break advertising standards and can damage revenue by driving traffic away from your site.

How To Find Heavy Ads Data in cleanAD

Reports will appear under a Heavy Ads tab along the left-hand side of the Dashboard.

heavy ads tab dashboard in cleanad

The new feature creates reports based on 10% of Heavy Ads blocked by Chrome, Chrome Mobile, and Microsoft Edge browsers per page view, while also providing insights into which DSP/SSP the ads are originating from.

When reviewing your reports, keep in mind that they are based on a 10% sample rate, and for true volumes multiply reports by 10.

Why It Matters

These insights will allow you to lag and report creatives that exceed Google’s industry-standard Heavy Ad threshold, based on file weight and CPU usage.

As with all blocked ads at clean.io, publishers will still earn ad revenue from ad impressions regardless of whether they choose to block heavy ads or not.

If you have any questions about Heavy Ads, or how they are reported in the dashboard, reach out to your cleanAD customer success representative.