At the beginning of April 2008, Google AdWords unleashed a new quality score metric relating to the load time of your landing pages. Landing page load time is defined as the time it takes for a website page to load, in seconds. According to recent articles throughout the search engine news forums, if the load time of your landing page for your ads is slow, it can affect your quality score.

Google sees pages with a slow load time as bad for the user.  As their ultimate goal is to deliver a good user experience, bad for the user equals bad for Google.  One way to improve load time is to eliminate redirects that take too long to load.  If you improve load time and the content quality of your landing pages the user will be more “satisfied” and thus you can increase your quality score.

According to Google, your load time will receive one of two possible grades; “This page loads slowly.” and “No problems found.”  The ads will be negatively affected if the grade falls into the first category.

Google will also compare the load time of your site with others in your same geographic region. Google is also basing the grade of your websites load time on the destination URL that is being used.

If you choose to assign a destination URL at the keyword level, the load time will be graded based on that URL. Choosing not to assign a destination URL at the keyword level, gives Google the option of grading load time based on the slowest ad in the ad group.

There are many factors to consider if your quality score is affected by slow loading landing pages. Improving or eliminating these issues on your site will help to improve your quality score in Google AdWords.

1. Eliminate redirects that use multi-second refreshes. If a redirect takes several seconds, consider setting it to zero so it loads immediately.
2. Check the speed of your redirects. You can use tools such as Fiddler or IWebTool to find out how long it takes your page to complete a redirect.
3. Avoid using multiple redirects. Each time your page redirects, it increases the load time of the page.
4. If you use an interstitial page; requires the user to wait before being taken to the landing page, consider removing it. An example of this for a lodging property would be a page that has an introduction and link inviting the user to enter the site.
5. Compress the size of your page if the HTML document is too large. Google suggests using GZIP or DEFLATE.
6. Eliminate the use of IFrames on your landing pages.
7. Discuss other ways to reduce the load time of your pages with your webmaster or hosting provider.
8. Avoid using large graphics and image files to decrease the load time for your landing pages.
9. Place any JavaScript for analytics code as far down on the landing pages as possible.

While this change is not factored into the Google AdWords quality score yet, it is a good idea to address these issues before the new metric goes live. Once this quality score metric is in effect, you will be able to see the results in the Keyword Analysis section of your AdWords account.

If Blizzard is managing your PPC accounts, we have already adjusted and made load-time recommendations in anticipation of this change.

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