Ad-cluttered websites are bad for users. Who among hasn’t waited with mounting frustration for a banner-stuffed article to load or an ad-chocked webpage to struggle into view?
But “we know it when we see it” isn’t a quantifiable metric.
On Tuesday, Chrome added four new metrics to its Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX): ad count, ad density, ad weight by network usage and ad weight by CPU usage.
The idea is to give advertisers and publishers a more data-driven, objective picture of what users actually experience on ad-heavy sites.
Together, the metrics cover how many ads users see on their screen, how much of the screen the ads occupy and how much they tax a device’s bandwidth (measured in bytes) and processing power (measured in milliseconds).
The crux of crUX
Google isn’t collecting any new data to power the new metrics.
CrUX – which has existed for years as Chrome’s dataset for measuring real-world web performance – taps the same methodology that underpins Chrome’s Core Web Vitals, the signals that Chrome uses to measure a site’s speed, responsiveness and visual stability.
It’s the same underlying data, just applied to the ad experience rather than page performance. The ad metrics are their own thing, though. They’re not technically a part of Core Web Vitals.
Also, Chrome isn’t setting benchmarks and there are “no plans” to do so, said Alex Cone, a group product manager at Chrome.
Core Web Vitals, by contrast, do give publishers specific suggested targets and thresholds to categorize user experiences into “good,” “needs improvement” or “poor.” Those thresholds eventually became SEO ranking factors, so it would stand to reason that Google could ultimately use the new crUX metrics in search rankings or to help score auction quality.
For now, however, Google considers all four new Chrome ad metrics to be experimental, and it’s collecting community input through a Google Group.
“We want to better understand if [the metrics] are valuable for making decisions,” Cone said. “We look forward to feedback from the ecosystem.”
‘Good’ questions
Without benchmarks or context, though, how are publishers supposed to know what “good” looks like?
Cone acknowledged that publishers will probably take their cue from how advertisers decide to use the metrics. If buyers factor them into their media purchasing decisions, then sellers will likely adjust their monetization strategies accordingly.
“We understand publishers may look to the buy side of the ad ecosystem to understand how it is using this data to inform ad buying decisions before taking action or optimizing,” he said. “We intend to partner with the ecosystem to develop case studies.”
The crUX ad metrics announcement appears to have support from a broad cross-section of the ecosystem. Chrome’s blog post includes enthusiastic quotes from folks at WPP, The Guardian, Mediavine, Index Exchange and Adelaide.
And, according to the post, Google’s demand-side platform, DV360 also “supports this initiative.” But Cone declined to share whether any DSPs or SSPs have actually committed to incorporating the signals yet.
“We cannot speak for partners,” he said, “but our early conversations with the ecosystem indicate an appetite for ad experience metrics.”
He did say, however, that DV360 and Google Ads won’t have preferential access to the new crUX data.
If it did, that wouldn’t be a good look considering all the antitrust heat Google has faced over both its ad tech stack and search dominance. (It also just so happens that the court is set to unseal Judge Leonie Brinkema’s full remedies decision in the Google ad tech antitrust case on Wednesday.)
But putting aside the legal baggage and the question of whether the metrics gain traction, there’s an irony worth nothing. Chrome is launching tools to help publishers build a better ad-supported experience at the same moment Google’s AI Overviews is diverting search traffic and ad revenue away from the open web.
The publishers being asked to clean up their ad environments are the same ones watching their referral traffic dwindle.
