Google Adwords Quality Score and Landing Page Speed

Published June 25, 2008 by Garry Przyklenk Google Adwords, Landing Pages, Webmaster Tips

Yes, it’s June, and with July fast approaching, the new Landing Page Speed factor will start (if it hasn’t already) affecting your Google Adwords Quality Score. Last week I discussed single points of failure that could impact your Quality Score, but what about less common problems that will factor into landing page load time?

If you haven’t looked at your Ad Diagnostics tool recently, you will not have noticed the small change Google has made to assist advertisers in determining problems in their Quality Score calculation. In June, Google introduced landing page load time into the equation, meaning if your landing page takes longer to load, you may have to pay more for your ad to show up on Google.

It stands to reason that higher quality landing pages that “enhance the user search experience” through speed and overall content quality should be preferred. And the good news is that Google compares your landing speed ad to other advertisers in your geography. That’s a good thing because advertisers in regions with notoriously problematic network infrastructure will not necessarily be penalized – unless of course your site doesn’t load.

Dealing with Speed Issues

If you’re a search marketer, it can be fun to play “Find the unoptimized image” on client webpages. You know those pages, the ones with 10 megapixel pictures that inexperienced web designers plop into a page, then modify the display dimensions. Oh my word.

Unoptimized images aren’t the only things you should be looking for when optimizing landing page speed issues. Here is a short list of possible bottlenecks:

Hosting environment or infrastructure
Unoptimized images
Poor HTML/CSS compliance
Auto-generated code (think Microsoft Frontpage/Word, sometimes Dreamweaver)
Automatic media loading (Flash, video, music, animations, etc.)
Geotargeted regions
Poorly executed or slow external page calls (such as Google Analytics, Omniture, etc)

The best strategy to employ is remaining vigilant, and ensuring that all your campaigns are maintaining a high quality score, and that your bottleneck isn’t landing page speed. You should only start worrying when pushing a lot of clicks to your landing pages, so check your busiest campaigns (probably bread and butter) first and foremost.

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Alex

In regards to automatic media loading impacting quality score, do you think it matters how large the video file is? Our thinking is that since the video is streaming it is not really slowing down the page load speed. However, its possible that one of Google's tools used to automatically determine page load time might not consider the page fully loaded until the video is done playing. That would be bad. Do you have any insight into this?

Garry Przyklenk

Hi Alex,

In terms of automatic media loading, I have been doing my own tests and they have yet to be conclusive. I tend to favor click to play media, rather than automatic load media for the simple fact that no one knows how Google will treat it aside from their own engineers. That being said, I'm hoping the same crawlers they use for organic indexing are used for load time calculation, thereby removing Java, Flash, and other media types from the equation.

staceygab

I have a client who is insisting on a Flash landing page which makes sense in this case as I can get the file size down to less than half of the HTML version (thank you Flash compression).

My question is... does anyone out there know how to embed the Yahoo! and MSN conversion tracking codes in Flash? - Unfortunately we need to keep this all in one movie.

Google I have found a solution but the others there seems to be noting written on the subject- I am guessing because of low volumes it is just not worth it. sigh...