- Monday: Product Support & Stars
- Tuesday: User Generated Content (UGC) Team
- Wednesday: User Experience Team
- Thursday: Engagement Team
- Friday: Ad Experience Improvements
This year's Community Connect, with the theme "Gears of Progress", was a collaborative event where Fandom Staff, admins, and editors worked together to shape the platform's future. This teamwork led to new initiatives like the first in-person Hackathon and the Virtual Community Connect experience. Today, we conclude "Progress in the Making", a blog series that showcased the real changes made based on community feedback, including new features and tools. You can view all the blogs in this series in the table to your right.
There's something else extra special about this blog! It's the 1000th post on our Staff Blog!! Further proof that as a company we're always working towards building a bigger, better, and more collaborative platform.
Of course, in order to keep iterating and improving, we need to have a revenue stream that allows us to follow the pathway we've laid out throughout this blog post. Advertisements on Fandom, like most online platforms, are the backbone of how we're able to provide this platform to you.
As we talked about at Community Connect, we understand that the ad experience for logged-out users has been a sticking point for a number of communities. So entering 2024, we had a strategy to focus on the quality of the ads we currently have. We believe an ad experience with an appropriate number of thoughtfully-placed and relevant ads is key to the future of the platform to ensure that we better serve editors, readers, advertisers, and the Fandom business.
Here's a look at what we've done so far and what’s on the horizon.
What We've Done[]
Over the past few months, we've taken significant steps to tighten our ad policies, particularly with our indirect ad partners. Since mid-June, we've adopted a stricter approach, ensuring that all ads meet our stringent guidelines. The results have been promising— we've noticed a marked decrease in non-compliant ads, which, in turn, has led to an increase in user engagement across our sites, especially on mobile platforms.
Our efforts don’t stop there. We’ve also begun applying the same rigorous standards to our direct advertisers, particularly those using interstitial ads. To prevent users from feeling overwhelmed, we've implemented stricter frequency caps. This means users will no longer be bombarded with multiple interstitials in a single session, resulting in a smoother browsing experience.
In addition to policy enforcement, we've been experimenting with various ad design changes aimed at making ad placements more predictable and less intrusive. Here are some key initiatives:
- Persistent Unit at the Bottom of the Mobile Viewport: Previously, this ad unit could vary in size, sometimes disrupting the user experience by unexpectedly covering content. We’re now limiting the sizes and fixing this unit to the bottom of the page, ensuring a more consistent and predictable experience.
- Larger Ad Containers: To address the issue of content being pushed down the page when a larger ad loads, we’re introducing larger ad containers. By reserving more space for ads, we can reduce the "jumpiness" that occurs when content shifts, leading to a smoother and more enjoyable user experience.
- Ensured Coordination With Other UX Improvements: As we discussed Wednesday, we're dedicated to improving the overall user experience on Fandom, particularly by decluttering reading and discovering content on mobile. On mobile, with limited screen space, is it important that we ensure Ad & UX changes happen together, so as to maximize impact.
We also had both an internal company Ad Bash and then a user-driven Community Ad Bash, where, between the two, we:
- Ticketed for review Over 140 examples of subpar behavior
- 36 tickets showed a clear and previously unreported bug with the ad display type.
- 35 tickets showed an ad functioning as intended, but with an unintended behavior that needs to be addressed.
- We terminated 13 specific campaigns based on how we saw they impacted the user experience.
What’s Next?[]
Our journey to improve the ad experience is far from over. As we move forward, we’re committed to:
- Full Rollout of Performance Improvements: We’ll be fully implementing the changes mentioned above, ensuring that all users benefit from a more streamlined and user-friendly ad experience.
- Extending Focus to N&R Sites: Our ad experience improvements will also be extended to our News & Review (N&R) sites, enhancing the user experience across all our platforms.
- Exploring 3rd Party Partnerships and Dedicated Resources: To further enhance ad quality, we’re investigating potential partnerships with third parties and considering dedicating internal resources to this effort.
- Improving Internal Reporting and Alerts: We’re working on developing better internal reporting systems and alerts to help us monitor and address bad ads more efficiently.
- Leveraging Data Science: We’re excited to explore how data science can be used to improve the ad experience. By analyzing user data, we aim to gain insights that will help us drive more engagement and refine our ad strategies.
Our commitment to improving the ad experience is ongoing, and we believe that these changes will not only enhance user satisfaction but also lead to better engagement and overall site performance. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to roll out these improvements and explore new ways to make the ad experience better for everyone.
Click here to follow the Fandom staff blog.
Click here to sign up for the From the Desk of Community email newsletter.
Join our Official Discord server for registered editors!