WebProNews

There's an extra factor in the Quality Score for AdWords clients, tied into the speed (or lack thereof) of their landing pages.

Google wants a faster experience for the people who click through an ad to the destination page. A slow landing page stuffed with other ads and third party content may not be what the typical Internet users wants when clicking through what looks like a useful ad.

The Inside AdWords blog announced the arrival of landing page speed as a regular factor in determining ad Quality Scores. Provide a fast page, and a better Quality Score should lead to lower minimum bids for keywords.

Provide a slow, stuffed-up experience, and Google will make those bids a pricier prospect. "Users have the best experience when they don't have to wait a long time for landing pages to load," said Google.

Bad experiences may mean less conversions for advertisers, but worse for Google, they could mean a reluctance by people to click on other ads. Unclicked ads mean no revenue for Google, leading to their attempts in recent months to aggressively root out what it sees as lower quality ad practices.

Landing page load time information for AdWords clients joined the management interface in May. Webmasters with slow pages have their work cut out for them, and will need to do some cost analysis to determine if higher bids charged by Google would be offset by whatever factors contribute to the slow landing page speed.