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Outhouse › Ad Load › Ad inventory

Labelled ads

Listings, results and products that appear where they do because someone paid for them to.

Labelled ads: Promote, from Shitely Media
Promote, from Shitely Media
Labelled ads: Native Inline, from Shitely Media
Native Inline, from Shitely Media

Why it matters

Relevance is a cost centre. Every organic result on a page is a position nobody has bought, given away to whichever product happened to be best. Ads among the results correct this. The best product is now the one that paid.

The Council for Visibility Integrity recommends that ads in results look exactly like the others, with a small grey label in the same type as the price. Eye-tracking studies put recognition of a grey 11px label at under 10%.

How Outhouse measures it

Outhouse counts the words Sponsored, Promoted, Advertisement and Paid partnership in three places: the page text, the aria-labels that screen readers read out, and ad markers in the markup. It takes the highest of the three, so a listing labelled three ways counts once. Six or more scores in full.

This audit counts towards Ad Load, with a weight of 3. 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 Promote. Available on selected plans. See all products.

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