Single-Request-Architecture (SRA) ENGLISH
Overview
General SRA information
The Single-Request Architecture is a technical development for advertising integration from Google. It shall guarantee a faster loading time for websites as well as the possibility to deliver extraordinary advertising formats.
Google will group advertising slots at the beginning of the page instead of multiple requests throughout when loading the webpage. With SRA, only one request is sent to the server.
By bundling all ad calls on a single page impression, this reduces the amount of requests that get sent to the ad server and by nature reducing the amount of responses the end user needs to utilize less processing power and so gains a better user experience. Also by bundling the ad slots the ad server can deliver more complex formats that require multiple slots on the page.
These so called “exact road blocks” were only possible under certain conditions due to technical conditioned latencies.
Advantages
Instead of calling the server for every ad slot of a HTML site separately, SRA calls the server just once in the beginning once the website starts loading and bundles all requests into one.
This improves the loading time of the website and reduces the workload on the device/browser caused by the multiple requests in a asynchronous environment. The use of SRA should be discussed beforehand to illustrate the possible impact better.
SRA Integration
What does a Publisher have to consider for an optimal SRA integration?
There are not too many changes for a publisher as MetaTag handles the communication between website and the Google ad server. The configuration to utilize SRA for ad slots is set up in the Ströer configuration for each website.
The Syntax for registering and loading ad slots on the publisher site stays identical, but this has to be implemented within the <head> of the HTML document.
Integration
MetaTag needs to know when all ad slots are finished being registered in order to send the single request to the ad server. To do this the method “finalizeSlots” is used as a signal to start the ad request. An easy example follows:
<html>
<head>
<title>SRA-EXAMPLE</title>
<script src="//URL of homepage MetaTag-File"></script>
<script>
SDG.Publisher.setZone('ExampleZone');
SDG.Publisher.registerSlot('banner', 'myBannerContainer').load();
SDG.Publisher.registerSlot('sky', 'mySkyContainer').load();
SDG.Publisher.registerSlot('rectangle', 'myRectangleContainer').load();
SDG.Publisher.finalizeSlots();
</script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="myBannerContainer"></div>
<div id="mySkyContainer"></div>
<div id="myRectangleContainer"></div>
</body>
</html>In this example the slots 'banner', 'sky' and 'rectangle' are registered at the beginning of the HTML document.
Slots that are not foreseeable to be available on a certain page (for example: dynamic pages with endless scrolling) can be registered and loaded at a later point in time while the page is loading.
These ad slots will cause further requests to the ad server and do not profit from the SRA advantages.
You can find further explanations and tips on the following wiki page: https://stroeerdigitalgroup.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SDGPUBLIC/pages/3092283581 .
Summary: SRA activation
The publisher needs to define SRA via the “finalizeSlots” method (see above).
The publisher needs to inform Ströer to activate SRA.
Ströer activates SRA via the website configuration.