When we started developing Big Bear – 1st party attribution system, we focused on an architecture that would be fast, meeting industry-specific benchmarks, without risking or creating any problems for the merchants’ sites that were going to install the scripts.

In this context, we chose to add the “defer” tag for both the Big Bear click script and the Big Bear sale script.

With the “defer” tag, the script loads in parallel with the page but is not executed until the page has finished loading. The results were positive, as we met both the qualitative industry benchmarks and the internal quantitative benchmark generated by the legacy attribution system.

Even though the script executed at the end of the page load, which slowed it down by a few milliseconds, our understanding was that it provided an extra layer of safety for the merchants’ sites. It has remained that way since.

Internally, we have an ongoing process of analyzing and optimizing our attribution systems. As part of this process, we explore infrastructure and architectural developments behind the attribution systems, seek improvements to the systems delivered to users, and develop new attribution solutions.

Among the many projects we have within this recurring process, we aimed to increase the response speed of the Big Bear click script. We re-evaluated the use of “defer” and considered replacing it with “async”.

With “async,” the script loads along with the page and executes as soon as it is loaded.

This analysis and testing process involved publishing the scripts in internal testing environments. When we saw that everything was working well, we received help from springfarma.ro and esteto.ro, which published the scripts with the new tag on their sites.

We found that switching from “defer” to “async” does not create problems for the merchants’ sites, while simultaneously increasing response speed and setting cookies a few milliseconds faster. Having a mature attribution system, the improvements are mostly incremental. By making more such incremental improvements, we can see long-term benefits.

At this moment, the template for Big Bear scripts contains “async” instead of “defer,” so all those who are going to install Big Bear from now on will use the new tag. In parallel, any merchant with Big Bear already installed can make the change without any risk.