Google Adds New Factor Into Quality Score
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.
Agreed, I think only benefits will come of this. Good affiliates will now get a better quality score, and I’m thinking it will also get rid of some of the competition.
A simple rule of thumb :
– Illustrations and images of low complexity: use GIFS
– Photos and complex images: Jpegs
For the record I use quite a few PNG-8’s in my designs, but these tend to be a bit heavier to load, so for Adwords optimized pages I’ll usually go for one of the other two options.
do you seriously think its the load time that caused everyone to have bids from .05 goto 5?
You have corporate websites made by high school kids who have no idea about image file sizes, does that mean if I were a corporate company about to implement a PPC campaign for the sole purpose of making my biz more well known, that my bid price will be $5???
I highly doubt it.
I read the landing page thing from the adwords blog, but, I would think there has to be another reason why the bids went a skew.
That’s probably why they slapped every ones quality score because there releasing that new feature, so therefore they figured they would reset every one QS
Very interesting indeed. Did not spot this so thanks for letting me know!
I kind of don’t see the point in the reason why Google is doing this. It kind of seems unnecessary to do, but nonetheless, I can understand why they are doing it.
Good news, good campaigns will now get more fly!
This brings up a Q I’ve been meaning to ask for some time in regards to load time.. What hosting do you use and what type of plan do you have? Also, are your landing pages usually a page from a wordpress website you have up or do you use just a plain HTML page? I’ve used Joomla to create my non-affiliate sites but have want to start creating some affiliate sites and the worry over load time (because I want to use Joomla cause I’m familiar with it) is one huge obstacle thats been in my way…. Thanks for all the great info!
Just wanted to drop a comment.
I personally think this is crap. This ‘loadtime’ bullshit has nothing to do ads being served faster. Its to get rid of direct linkers. 301s, 302s are obviously getting penalized. If you build around this – you don’t have to worry about a QS slap.
Hey, I love your work keep the good vibes coming!.