Technical Question Regarding Responsive Themes

[ProductPearson]

Hello. So I am working away on Media queries to have our site load, or not load, certain elements of the page such as sidebars. This is so on a mobile device it is one stream of content, with a little icon to pop out a menu, similar to many sites when viewed on a mobile.

My question is: What happens to these elements that do not show? Do they still load, and are just hidden? The reason I ask is because the sidebars have advertisements in them, and the lower my CTR is, the lower my ad value is worth. If the sidebars are loading but not displaying because of the media queries, then the advert is still getting an impression but clearly its impossible to get a click, thus I am lowering my CTR massively.

So, are they hidden and still loading, or do they not load at all when a user accesses the site from a mobile site.

Thanks

[Chris.Menke]

Ashley, there are a number of ways to view the source code of a web page on mobile devices depends whether you're talking about android or ios.  Once you're able to view the source code, you can determine of your ads are showing up on the mobile page.

[evolvingSEO]

Ashley

Chris has got the right idea - what you want to do is check the source code (HTML) of the page as it's loaded in the mobile device. I believe you could also use the user agent switcher in a desktop browser to see how it would render on a variety of mobile devices. Essentially, if you can find the source code for that ad in the HTML, even when loading on a mobile device, the ad is present but hidden.

This is where my knowledge drops off a little - as I am not 100% of the mechanism that triggers an ad to count as an impression. It must fire off a javascript code - which in theory will happen if it's present but hidden in the HTML.

Hopefully that helps you determine how it's displaying / not displaying. But the other thing is - people are using mobile sites all the time that have ads but are responsive - there must be a standard way for the ad provider to understand this is happening? Maybe talk to them too and see if you'll get a negative mark from it. They may do something to compensate for this.