Landing Page Load Time Impact on Google AdWords Quality Score

Google announced recently that they Will soon incorporate "landing page load time" as a factor to their Quality Score formula. Load time evaluation will be added to the keyword analysis tips on AdWords interface.

Quality Score has always been treated as black box and there has not been much transparency around it (for the obvious reasons such as protecting trade secrets and preventing advertisers from biting the system). This time it's not any different.

Google defines load time as the amount of time it takes for a visitor to see the landing page after clicking a Google AdWords ad. However, they have not yet crystallized what they consider as a high/low load time.

By incorporating landing page load time into Quality Score Index calculation, Google is trying to improve user experience and as a by product increase the ppc advertisers conversion rate. They are hopping that because visitors do not abandon the pages because of poor web page load speed advertisers will get a higher return on their investments.

This means that website owners should consider optimizing their servers response time and improving landing page rendition to prevent poor quality score which will translate to higher minimum bid. This might negatively impact the accounts of smaller businesses that do not have the resources to update their sites.

The good news is that there are tools such as Web Page Analyzer and YSlow available that can help companies diagnose slow loading pages and increase their landing page load time.

Here are some tips Google offers for improving the load time:

* Using fewer redirects
* Reducing landing page size by using fewer, smaller and more compressed images.
* Avoiding the use of interstitial pages
* Minimizing the use of iframes on landing pages

Related Article: Landing Page Load Time Added to AdWords Interface

By SEM Expert