Improving Your Google AdWords Quality Score

Reducing Your Page Load Time to Improve Your Quality Score in AdWords

A Note About AdWords Quality Score from Your Guide

Improving what Google refers to as your "Quality Score" in AdWords can help move your paid search ads up the page, improving their visibility and click through rates. Here's how Google summarizes its definition of Quality Score:

The AdWords system calculates a 'Quality Score' for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query. A keyword's Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

This article takes a look at improving the load time for your AdWords landing pages. Since these pages should be specially designed for AdWords, it is not necessary to implement these suggestions on other pages in your site.

From Dan Smith

Google began calculating Quality Scores for AdWords ads for each consumer search in September 2008. Part of the Quality Score calculation is the page load time of the landing page your ad points to. In this article, you'll learn what page load time is, how it affects your Quality Score and what can you do to improve it.

What is page load time?

Page load time is the time it takes for your page to render (fully display in a browser) after it is requested (a link is clicked to the page). The life cycle of a page load is straightforward:

1. The request for the page is made (e.g., a link is clicked).
2. The server performs any server-side processing, like dynamically generating content or accessing a database to get information. When the page is completely constructed, it proceeds to the next step. NOTE: Static HTML pages do not have server-side processing, only PHP, JSP or ASP.NET pages use server-side processing.
3. The server begins transmitting the response over the Internet/
4. The client computer (the one from which the click orginated) receives the response from the server.
5. The client computer's browser begins rendering the server's response (Web page elements) in the browser. Additional requests are made to the server to deliver Flash scripts, graphics and/or Javascript.
6. When the page is completely rendered and all other requests are complete, the page has loaded.

How Google actually determines page load time is not clear. However, what is clear that it is measured and is a component of your page's Google Adwords quality score.

How does this affect your Quality Score?

Google has this to say about why it considers page load time:

Two reasons: First, users have the best experience when they don't have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.

Based on this paragraph it seems Google is trying to crack down on advertisers using server-side redirects and interstitial/ad pages. An interstitial is a web page that appears before the expected content page. Interstitials can be used for advertising or to confirm that that user is permitted to view the expected content page, along with several other purposes.

A server-side redirect occurs when a destination URL is requested and the server-side scripting language redirects that request to another URL. This really performs two requests, and thus increases the page load time. An interstitial page may be achieved with a redirect.

It also seems that Google is saying if your page takes too much to respond, it's likely doing something sneaky.

What can you do to improve your page load time?

There are several actions you, your Web developer or Webmaster can take to help your landing pages load faster, including:

1. Optimize your server-side scripting. If you do use PHP, JSP or ASP.NET, make sure your server-side code is optimized. This is especially true when using a database. You need to optimize both your database and your code for speed.
2. Get dedicated Web hosting. Most cheap Web hosting happens on a shared server. That means that many websites are all on the same server. All of these websites compete for server resources, such as bandwidth and memory. Heavy traffic to some other website on a shared server can slow page load time on your site. A dedicated server is one where only your website(s) resides on it. It's more expensive, but you get dedicated resources.
3. Compress the size of your page. A Web page is really just a file. That file must be transmitted from your server to the client computer (the one requesting the page) over the Internet. If you can decrease the size of the file, the file will transmit faster. You can compress your pages by removing white space; You can remove any unnecessary HTML tags; You can use relative URLs instead of absolute URLs for the links on the page (mylandingpage.html instead of http://mywebsite/mylandingpage.html). Examine the page code to see if there are other things you can do to decrease the size for the file.
4. Lose the Flash Animation. Flash animation is generally rendered on the client side and the entire content doesn't need to load in order for the animation to start. However, you should consider not using Flash on your landing pages. Sure it looks great, but you can you afford to lose sales because visitors got tired of waiting for the animation to load?
5. Strip out unnecessary elements from the page. Again, elements rendering on the client may not affect the page load time. Then again they just might. Remove any unnecessary graphics or images. These take a long time to load. Minimize calls to external Javascript or CSS files as additional requests need to be made for them.
6. Optimize your page. As a final effort, you can optimize the HTML itself. For example, table HTML tags tend to render slower than a CSS/Div layout. If you have tables, you might consider switching to a CSS/Div layout. You can also look for ways to reduce the number of tables that are nested within other tables.