Adwords came out and introduced a new factor into rating a landing page’s quality score.
As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.
Why are we doing this?
Two reasons: first, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.When are we making this change?
In the next few weeks, we will add load time evaluations to the Keyword Analysis page (we’ll notify you when they are available). You will then have one month to review your site and make necessary adjustments.After the one month review period, this load time factor will be incorporated into your keywords’ Quality Scores. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.
In my opinion, this won’t make any difference on a good affiliates campaign; in fact I think it will help give them a higher quality score. I’ve said it before that load time is a very important thing, not because it’s now a factor in quality score, but because it plays a big role in conversion rates. Some of the crappiest landing pages have the highest CTR because the image quality is simple and very low sized. This makes the page load lightning fast, we have to remember that some people are still in the stone age and have dial-up connections. You only have so long to capture a visitors attention, and seeing a blank page certainly skyrockets their chances of leaving before they give it a looooong chance to load up.
So upgrade your hosting if need be, make sure your images aren’t 10MB a piece, and start using GIFs or compressed JPEGs. Now will load time not only increase your click through rate and overall profit, it’ll help your quality score as well.
