It’s impossible to understand the impact of third-party services – positive or negative – without knowing exactly what is running on your domains. In today’s ultra-competitive digital landscape, publishers are quick to test a myriad of third-party tools without fully comprehending what is being introduced to the site in the process. Complicating the matter even further is the fact that many third-party services require fourth- and even fifth-party services to fulfill their purpose and provide value.
A prime example of this is the use of omnichannel personalization platforms. Individualized, contextual online journeys have become the norm. Where good intentions could potentially go wrong is when your third-party personalization platform integrates with additional software. This fourth-party software integrates to provide the third-party service what it needs to deliver a tailored experience but also may collect website user data without consent – raising a plethora of privacy issues.
Equally detrimental to organizational success is the impact these integrations have on page load times. Website admins are under the impression that a single snippet of code pasted into their own code will only make one call to one server when in fact countless unauthorized server calls to various software services are often triggered. With many of these unauthorized calls resulting in redirects, a ping-pong effect is created as each redirected call bounces from server to server, wasting valuable load time. With bounce rates increasing significantly with every additional fraction of a second in page load time, good intentions result in an early user exit.
In order to ensure third-party services are not jeopardizing site performance and security, full visibility into fourth- and fifth-party sources accompanying them is crucial.
