Search Engine Roundtable has announced that page load times will now affect Google AdWords quality scores:
* This factor is not yet live yet.
* There is no official date as to when it will go live.
* Google thought they would launch it, so they put it in the FAQs but did pulled back and forgot to remove it from the full dump FAQs.
* Google planned an Inside AdWords blog post to announce this in advance.
* We will probably see a blog post on this within a week at Google’s blog.
* Google confirmed the page load time grade will be displayed on the Keyword Analysis Page.
* “Several weeks” after you see your page load time grade, the page load time metric will be used in the overall AdWords quality score.
This will far-reaching consequences for Google AdWords advertisers. First, new advertisers will have a more difficult time of optimizing their ads. It is increasingly becoming more difficult to be an expert in Google AdWords. The plus side is that makes spam advertising less attractive for those who would engage in it. The down side is it will also cut out some good people who do not have these bad intentions. It will become even more necessary to hire an expert to handle your advertising for you.
Should you do that? It depends.
If you do have plans to advertise, before you hire the expert to handle your pay per click accounts, make sure that you have a well optimized landing page and that your page load times are good. Already, page load times affect Pay Per Click so you should be reducing your load times anyway. But if you have a lot of video files, Flash, Javascript, and other bulky code in your website then you’ll need to reduce your page load times in some way. I’d start doing that now before your Google AdWords ads go live. I’d do that even if planning to manage my own accounts.
