Starting from today, landing page load time factor will be incorporated into keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores and thus higher minimum bids. On the other hand, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.
Google has done this because it believes “Fast is better than slow” & Google wants to give better user experience to its visitors. When a user clicks an ad, a landing page that loads quickly provides a better user experience than a landing page that loads slowly. In fact, fast load times benefit advertisers as well & advertisers needs to be more focused on page loading factors as users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt advertiser’s conversion rate.
Your Quality Score may change/increase gradually over a number of weeks after you improve your load time.
Factors Contributing to a slow load time:
Below are common causes of a slow load time. If you don’t directly upkeep your site, you might want to pass this information along to your webmaster.
Multi-second Meta refreshes
Redirects that use multi-second meta refreshes are a common culprit. If you have a redirect set to occur after several seconds, change it to zero seconds so that the redirect happens immediately.
Slow redirects
To check the speed of your redirects, copy and paste your destination URL into a web browser to see how long the browser spends on each redirect URL. You can get more precise values using a tool like Fiddler (English only).
Multiple redirects
Each redirect increases your landing page load time. If you have more than one redirect, consider eliminating unnecessary ones.
Interstitial pages
If you employ an interstitial page (where the user waits for a few seconds before being taken to the landing page), you should consider removing it.
Slow server
Your site may be hosted by a slow server. Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to see how long your site takes to fetch. If it’s slow, contact your web hosting provider.
Large page size
If your page’s HTML document is very large, try compressing it with gzip or DEFLATE.
How is my load time graded?
Each of your keywords will receive a load time grade based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, therefore, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades.
Two things to note:
- When determining load time grade, the AdWords system follows destination URLs at both the ad and keyword level and evaluates the final landing page.
- If your ad group contains landing pages with different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time. All the keywords in an ad group will always have the same load time grade.
Google evaluate page load time relative to the average in your server’s geographic region. If your website is hosted on a server in India, for example, your landing page load time will be compared to the average load time in that region of India. This is true even if your website is intended for an audience in the United States.
You can see a keyword’s load time grade on the Keyword Analysis page:
- If your keyword is graded This page loads slowly, your landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected.
- If your keyword is graded No problems found, your landing page quality and Quality Score will not be affected. The one exception is if your keyword is graded No problems found and marked Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region. In this case, your landing page quality and Quality Score may be positively affected.
Original resource of this article is http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93116
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