Landing Page Load Time is the amount of time taken by keywords with landing pages to load. Now this factor will be displayed in the Keyword Analysis Page of the Google AdWords accounts. According to Google AdWords Blog, this factor will play a crucial part in a Webmaster’s Quality Scores. The slower a landing page loads, lower the Quality Scores will go and faster a page loads, higher the quality scores will go.

Google intends to just display the Landing Page Load Time in the Keywords Analysis Page for the meantime, to give the Webmasters a hang of things to come. However, from mid-June this year, this factor would be taken into account while evaluating the Quality Scores for the Webmasters. Google has also released a help document  and strongly advises the Webmasters to read it, so that they can get a better idea of how the Landing Page Load Time works and how they can improve their landing page load timings.

Steps that would help you see the Landing Page Load Time:

1. Sign in to your Google AdWords account at http://adwords.google.com

2. Click on a Campaign.

3. Click on an Ad Group

4. Click the ‘Keyword’ tab above the Ad Group Details table.

5. Click the magnifying glass icon beside any keyword and then the ‘Details and

recommendations’ link to launch the Keyword Analysis page.

There are some interesting posts on Webmaster World  as well, regarding this latest update:

Except in extreme circumstances is this really warranted? Really?

It’s 2008, large segments of the population have broadband and those that don’t are familiar with the load time of an average page.

If it were 2001 this would make perfect sense…but at this stage of the game does it really make sense for webmasters to worry about the load time of their pages (unless there is a drastic amount of load time that is out of the ordinary).

The last time I paid conscious attention to the load time of a page was probably 4-5 years ago…it feels like a step backwards to worry about getting all those gif images to be 2kb less just to please the adbot.

I feel this is a change that no one really asked for…advertisers with obscene load times will be pushed out anyway as customers bounce instead of waiting for the page to load.

luke175,

I suspect this has nothing to do with broadband speed, but rather the design of the target-page, in most cases a shop system, I assume.

In general, webmasterworld-readers have always paid considerable attention to this very, very important issue loading-speed. But this is definitely not the case for many online-shop-owners, who probably paid a hell of a lot of money for a dubious system with loading times of 10 seconds and more on SERVER side. Often an important reason why they had to use adwords at all;)

I’m relatively new to adwords: Does this mean, that my fast-loading page will be placed higher than a lame competitor’s, who bids an equivalent sum? Does quality outweigh money with respect to placement?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 1:14 am and is filed under Search Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.