Load Time and Quality Score
Filed Under (AdWords Quality Score) by Jeff Hudson on 10-03-2008
This is an update from March 6th, but an important one, so I’ll link to the post from Adwords.
In the next couple weeks Google will start to measure your landing page load time. I’m actually surprised this wasn’t being done already, so no complaints here.
2 things to keep in mind:
1. Load time ’scores’ will be displayed on your keyword analysis page
2. After the load time scores are displayed, there will be a 1 month review period for you to make adjustments
Yes, it’s another thing to keep an eye on, and Google just keeps raising the bar. For those managing client campaigns this will be a bit more of an issue, as addressing client hosting is a messy proposition. A smart strategy in that case would be to bring it up when you’re in the setup stage of a campaign. Load time is generally ‘visible’. You shouldn’t have to wait for Google to tell you that your page loads slowly.
More information here.
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The question that I am waiting to hear back from Google is what actually constitutes a page load. I have a big spending client who has a lot of JavaScript advertising and this can take several seconds to fully load even though the page appears to load instantly. It’s been a week or so and I still have not heard back from Google. This potentially could have a massive impact on their business.
Have you any news on this Jeff?
Good question Joe -
There is speculation that Google will use the slowest loading elements to measure the load time:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/016457.html
I haven’t seen this declaration firsthand from Google yet, but I don’t doubt this will be their method.