AdWords Keywords bit by the page load time bug

On Wednesday, Heather Lane with the Inside AdWords crew posted in the Google official AdWords blog that “Landing page load time now affects keywords& 39; Quality Scores.”

There was talk of this back in March when a new element was added to Google’s quality score factor algorithm for AdWords. The feature tracked the amount of time it took for your destination URL to load once a browser clicked on the corresponding ad. Go figure… the new analytic was dubbed “page load time.”

Then in May, Google made the landing page load time information publicly accessible on its Keyword Analysis page.

Well folks, now it’s official - the loading time factor has been implemented in the algorithms and directly affects the Quality Score of your website. The formula behind the feature is pretty straight forward: “Keywords with landing pages that load slowly may get lower Quality Scores” whereas “keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores.”

Lane commented that Google engineers all of its products “with user experience as the number one priority.” Citing Larry and Sergey, the company’s founders, she reiterated the tried and true philosophy that "Fast is better than slow,” particularly when taking page load time into consideration.

She then broke down the company’s purpose for incorporating page load time to quality score into a two-fold motivation:

1) Users have “the best experience when they don& 39;t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load.”

2) Users are “more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.”

So there you have it; pretty straight forward once again. Google wants to deliver efficient searching and browsing to one and all; rewarding sites with fast page load times and devaluing the score of those with slow load times is one way to achieve that goal.

Looking to improve your page load time? Lane indicated that AdWords regularly re-evaluates and tracks page load time for indexed sites. The AdWords website offers various suggestions on how to make significant improvements to your landing page& 39;s load time in order to boost your Quality Score. I invite you to check them out if this is an element of analytics you’re interested in.