Landing Page Load Times Effect Google AdWords Quality Score

News from Google that web page load times of landing pages will now be a component of your AdWords Quality Score. This information can be found be viewing your Quality Score on an Ad Group or individual keyword level.

Landing page: Your landing page is the page where users ‘land’ when you they click your ad. This is also called your destination URL.

From Google AdWords:

Your landing page quality is a crucial part of your Quality Score. The quality of a landing page is represented by such things as the usefulness and relevance of information provided on the page, ease of navigation for the user, page loading times, how many links are on the page, how links are used on the page, and more. If our system finds that your landing page isn’t highly relevant or loads slowly, you should optimize your landing page in order to improve your Quality Score and ad performance.

As you can see from the following list of Quality Score Calculations, landing page quality will now be a core component in virtually all quality score calculations.

Google Quality Score Calculation Components:

1) For calculating a keyword’s minimum bid:

* The keyword’s historical clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
* The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
* The quality of your landing page
* Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
* Other relevance factors

2) For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position on a search result page:

* The historical CTR of the ad and of the matched keyword on Google; CTR on the Google Network is not considered
* The relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query
* Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
* Other relevance factors

3) For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s eligibility to appear on a particular content site, as well as the ad’s position on that site:

* The ad’s past performance on this and similar sites
* The relevance of the ads and keywords in the ad group to the site
* The quality of your landing page
* Other relevance factors

4) For determining if a placement-targeted ad will appear on a particular site:

* The quality of your landing page

Google already visits landing pages on a regular basis. The frequency of the visits depends on the level of traffic to ads and the limits of the AdWords system. However, Google states that they plan on visiting landing pages once a month at a minimum, but they may increase that frequency during implementation and testing.

If you are using AdWords, the best course of action would be to immediately review your AdWords Account.

How do I know what my Quality Score is?

To see your keywords’ Quality Scores within your account statistics:

1. Sign in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Select the campaign, then select the ad group for which you’d like to see keyword Quality Scores.
3. Click Customize columns at the top of Keywords tab in the ad group table.
4. Select Show Quality Score from the drop-down menu.
5. Click Done when you’re finished.

You can also evaluate each keyword’s Quality Score by looking at the Keyword Analysis page or at the keyword’s minimum bid.

Next, run a site crawl program that examines all of your website’s pages and their respective page size and load times. Make sure that any high traffic and/or crucial AdWords landing pages have optimized images and code to allow quick page loads. If you find a landing page with slow load times that cannot be modified quickly or easily, simply change the destination URL for any ads pointing to that page to a faster loading page, until such time that offending page can be edited.