I bore the crap out of people when I talk about Google’s technical changes. As Erin says, “deal with it”.

I was getting all these posts in my feeds about Google implementing a new quality score factor to Adwords. Google says “load time” refers to the amount of time it takes for a user to arrive at your functional landing page after clicking your ad. Starting in March, Google will begin to analyze the loading time of your landing pages and connect its quality to the overall quality score.

The official Inside AdWords blog posted an announcement about it March 6th. If you work on creating landing pages, you should be following this closely over the next few weeks.

Once Google adds “load time evaluations” to the account in the keyword analysis page, we’ll then have one month to review the pages and make necessary adjustments.

The purpose of this change is to provide the best possible user experience for those clicking on the ads. As a campaign element we haven’t considered much in the past, it serves as a reminder for advertisers to keep in touch with the user experience. I think we’ll find that that reducing the bells and whistles will lead to more conversions overall.

We still don’t know the parameters of the load time, what is too long? I guess we’ll find out…