Google Adwords will now use page load time as a quality score
Category: Adwords, Getting Traffic, Google, Online Marketing, PPC, Product Marketing, SEM
In case you missed it, yesturday Google Adwords team announced that they will now use the loading time of your Adwords landing page as one of the measures of the ‘quality score’ they give you in order to determine how much to charge you per click compared to your competitor.
If you are managing Google ads, it is very important you be aware of this or your ad spend is just about to sky rocket if your landing pages are not optimized to load as fast as they possibly can. This especially holds true if your are letting your PPC traffic land on you home page which almost always loads slower then a custom optimized landing page (which converts better anyway).
Why would Google doing this?
- Better conversions with their ads compared to the competition which is what this is really all about
- Better user experience - faster pages loads means better user experience
Why should you be doing this?
- When your pages load faster, your users will be happier and the page will also convert better
- If you don’t do this your quality score will go down and you will start paying more for your clicks and your competition will pay less if their pages load faster.
See the official announcement here at the official adwords blog:
Landing page load time will be incorporated into the Quality Score
If you need advice on this issue, I suggest you call an expert Google PPC management person who I am sure will give you some useful advice free of charge.
WOW! very interesting. How can I make my pages load faster? Make them smaller or write them in a specific script?
Hi Benny, here are a few tips:
1) If you display images, make them as small as possible. The less images the better for fast loading.
2) Do not send traffic to home page if your homepage is slow, use a light loading landing page specifically for that keyphrase. This will increase your conversions also!
3) do not link remote images from other servers as this will slow your page loading (called hot linking).
4) Good page structure and design helps (use divs and css)
5) Keep your landing page very specific to the keyword… Take everything away that is not necessary to the visitor.
6) try not to have the page connect to database….so your landing page should be plain static HTML …. no scripts if possible.
7)Smaller is better for faster loading
There is more you can do but these are good points to check.