Outhouse › Ad Load › Ad inventory

Ad slots on the page

Rectangles of the page reserved for advertising.

Why it matters

Most sites leave their best frontage empty, filling it with whatever the visitor came for. An ad slot reclaims that space and lets it to the highest bidder for the length of a glance.

Best practice is a slot above the content, a slot beside it, a slot inside it, and a slot that follows the visitor down the page in case they missed the others.

How Outhouse measures it

Outhouse looks for visible elements larger than 2,000 square pixels whose id or class names them as ads (ad, advert, ad-slot, gpt-ad, dfp and similar), and for iframes served by known ad networks. Six or more scores in full.

This audit counts towards Ad Load, with a weight of 2. A category is 75% its two highest-scoring audits and 25% all of its audits, weighted, so a site is judged mostly on what it does most and partly on how many things it does.

How to improve your score

Install In-Content. Available on selected plans. See all products.

Related audits

• Labelled ads: Listings, results and products that appear where they do because someone paid for them to.
• Ad density: The share of the whole page given over to advertising.
• Recommendation widgets: Grids of Around the web and You may like links at the foot of the content.
• Affiliate links: Outbound links that pay the site a commission when the visitor buys something.