Microsoft Ads across 128 measured sites

These pages take their time

Median first contact on a site carrying Microsoft Ads was 763 ms, which ranks 26th of the 88 companies in this index, where rank 1 is the longest wait. Twenty-five companies in this index sit on pages that take longer than that to open their first third-party connection; sixty-two sit on pages that are quicker.

The early-contact share points the same way. 115 of the 128 sites had at least one company contacted before a consent choice could have been recorded — 89.8 percent, rank 67 of 88. That is a low placement in a field where most entries sit in the nineties, and it means 13 of these sites had no contact at all inside the window. The median count of companies arriving after the window closed is 2, where most entries in this index record 0.

Two kinds of site, one median

The examples split cleanly, and the median sits in the gap between them.

On one side, pages where everything arrives at once: heylink.me contacted 11 companies with all 11 inside the window, first contact 400 ms, behind a OneTrust banner. msn.com, the highest-ranked example here, reached 12 companies with 11 early at 417 ms. branch.io: 6 and 6, at 807 ms.

On the other, pages that hold most of the stack back. fidelity.com contacted 13 companies but only 2 of them early, first contact 1447 ms, behind a OneTrust banner. rakuten.com: 16 companies, 5 early, at 1242 ms. webex.com: 12 companies, 6 early, at 1185 ms. change.org: 8 companies, 4 early, at 1045 ms. stackadapt.com: 9 companies, 5 early, at 1351 ms.

A financial services site and a link shortener both run advertising measurement. What differs is when in the page's life it is allowed to run.

The pages are still busy

The median site here contacted 12 separate companies across 57 requests, 4 of them classified as tracking. That is rank 27 on companies, rank 21 on requests and rank 10 on trackers among the 88 companies indexed. The median count of companies arriving before a consent choice could have been recorded is 7, rank 30 of 88, level with six others.

So the slower start is not a quieter page. It is the same weight of third-party contact, spread differently across the load.

Just under half showed a banner

61 of the 128 sites carried a consent tool the crawl could detect. OneTrust was seen alongside on 33 of them, an IAB TCF consent tool on 19, and Usercentrics, Cookiebot, Iubenda and CookieYes on 2 each. A site can run more than one banner and each recognised product is counted, so those counts are not shares of the 61.

OneTrust's lead here fits the rest of the picture: this is a corporate and enterprise population, and OneTrust is the banner that population buys.

The company it keeps

Google was present on 116 of the 128 sites, 90.6 percent. After that the list is a business-marketing stack rather than an advertising exchange stack: OneTrust on 30 sites and LinkedIn on 30, both 23.4 percent; Meta on 27 and Meta Pixel on 27, both 21.1 percent; Amazon CloudFront on 20; jsDelivr on 19; Sentry on 16 and Cloudflare Analytics on 16; adobedtm.com on 13.

LinkedIn on nearly a quarter of them is the marker of business-to-business advertising. Sentry on an eighth says these are applications with error monitoring, not just brochures.

One thing this does not establish: Microsoft Ads was present on 115 sites where contact happened before the banner could be answered, but the crawl counts that per site and never records which company arrived.

Seen on the same pages

Companies most often contacted by the same sites. Co-presence only — the crawl records what arrived, not who called whom.

• GoogleTogether on 116 of these sites
• OneTrustTogether on 30 of these sites
• LinkedInTogether on 30 of these sites
• MetaTogether on 27 of these sites
• Meta PixelTogether on 27 of these sites
• Amazon CloudFrontTogether on 20 of these sites
• jsDelivrTogether on 19 of these sites
• SentryTogether on 16 of these sites