How Fast-Loading Landing Pages Raise Your Quality Score and Lower Your Cost Per Click
By Anna Johnson on August 13th, 2008Good article by Christine Churchill in Web Marketing Today. Ms Churchill points out that one of the factors impacting on Google Quality Scores awarded to Google Adwords pay-per-click advertisers is landing page load time.
All else being equal, the longer the load time… the lower the quality score… and the lower the quality score, the higher your minimum bid price… and the lower your ability to place higher in the paid ad listings.
Without giving Ms Churchill’s article away, the main keys to speed up landing page load times are to:
- Keep the page (file) size as small as possible. Ways to do this are to minimize (or at least optimize) images, media files (such as Flash), excessive scripts (e.g. javascript) and code that can be placed elsewhere (e.g. in a CSS file);
- Use a static (e.g. standard HTML) rather than dynamic (e.g. PHP or ASP) page; and
- Make sure your server is sufficiently fast.
August 13th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
I can’t stress the importance of a FAST loading page enough…
I can tell you all that PERSONALLY whenever I am navigating the web if a page takes more than
3 seconds to load I hit the back button…
and when I am doing approvals for my 2 biggest directories:
LinkZilla.org and TeenDirectory.net
if it takes more than 3 secons for the submit to load for visual approval
- I purge it from the system…
99& of the slow to load are redirects to malicious – obtrusive – annoying sites…
I don’t have the time or patience to wait for a site to take more than 3 secons of my
time to load up…
~DomainBELL (Patricia)