The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Along with your bid, your Quality Score determines where your ads will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs), and how much you’ll pay every time somebody clicks on them. Unlike your bid, however, the Quality Score is not a value you can set yourself; it’s determined by the search network. As we mentioned in our Best Practices tutorial on the topic, the Quality Score is primarily a measurement of your offer’s relevance to a user’s search. However, certain factors in the Quality Score don’t fit this description exactly, but relate to a user’s experience more generally. Among these is landing page load time.

Last summer, Google added “landing page load time” as a factor in determining a keyword’s Quality Score. As Heather Lane wrote on the Inside AdWords blog at the time, “Fast is better than slow". We've found this rule to be especially applicable to the landing pages of AdWords ads. When a user clicks an ad, a landing page that loads quickly provides a better user experience than a landing page that loads slowly. There are a number of things that could make your landing page load more slowly, some of which (like replacing large images) would require major redesigns to fix. However, there are some things you can do to significantly reduce your page’s load time without much effort. Here are a few:

1) Avoid Using Redirect Pages as Destination URLs
If a user is redirected when they click on one of your ads, it will take them a few seconds longer to reach the actual landing page. While you may not have intended for any of your destination URLs to be redirect pages, a site update or redesign may have resulted in an old destination URL redirecting to a new page. If this is the case for any of your ads, be sure to update their destination URLs to point directly to the new page. (Shameless plug: you can do this all at once using Clickable’s new “Keyword Filter and Bulk Edit” tool).

2) Avoid Using iFrames in Landing Pages
As Web sites start to include more and more elements on a single page, developers often resort to iFrames in order to reduce code complexity. However, reducing complexity comes at the expense of quick load time. (For those interested in the technical reason: each iFrame represents an additional HTTP request.) Wherever possible, replace landing pages that use iFrames with pages that include all of their code in one place. The page will load much faster, and the boost should be reflected in your Quality Score.

3) Avoid “Interstitial Pages”
“Interstitials” are most often used to display ads before loading the desired page. (If you’ve browsed a newspaper or online magazine site, you’re probably familiar with this type of ad.) You’re not likely to have any of these on your landing pages, but you may include a page with some sort of alert or login requirement before your landing page. To get the user where they want to go more quickly, put any of the information from your interstitial pages directly on your landing pages. The fewer steps between your ad and your offer, the better for the user, and the better for you.

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

As Hanny mentioned a couple of weeks ago, landing page load time is one of the factors AdWords uses to

If I use clickable for conversion tracking, will this result in a redirects through your server?  If so, that would certainly increase load time.

"Quality Score" is one of the most important and one of the least understood components of