|
 After much online chat about Google’s addition of page load time to Quality Score metrics, the search engine confirms and explains its moves, while also making another change to their services.
“Slow pages may result in higher minimum bids -- Company will penalize those who do not fix slow servers.”
Google continues to try and crack down on low quality sites, with their latest planned change apparently aimed at pages stuffed with ads and little else. It will be the most recent pushback against sites made for AdSense, even if Google does not phrase it that way directly.
An official announcement by Google confirms the search engine’s addition of page load time to Quality Score metrics, also advising that it will go live in the “next few weeks” and that it will be a while before Quality Scores are impacted.
As part of our continuing efforts to improve the user experience, we will soon incorporate an additional factor into Quality Score: landing page load time. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.
“Landing Page load time will now be considered a factor in Quality Score.”
With this move, Google is saying, “It is a bad idea to force PPC ad respondents to wait too long for the landing page to load.” Great advice for all: PPC advertisers.
Users want faster load times:
A new metric, a grade for landing page load time, will become available in AdWords accounts this month. The grade how long it takes for someone to load a landing page once the ad leading to it has been clicked:
• The load time will receive one of two grades. If it is graded “This page loads slowly,” your landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected. If it is graded “No problems found,” your landing page quality and Quality Score will not be affected.
• You will see the number of redirects the user is taken through after clicking your ad. Typically, the more redirects there are, the slower the load time.
• We will report the site’s average load time.
• We will provide a comparison of the load time for your site versus other sites in the geographic area. Note that your load time grade is determined relative to the average in your geographical area.
Slow loading pages hurt the user experience, and can lead people to abandon those pages, Google noted on the Inside AdWords blog. Google said that it has decided to include load times in its Quality Score because, “users have the best experience when they do not 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.
Once Google drops its load time evaluations onto an account’s Keyword Analysis page, it will give users one month to fix sites before the company penalizes them.
It sounds like Google has a good idea of what it already considers poor load time performers. Their announcement of load time assessment also serves as an early warning to sites that need to make fixes ahead of the implementation of the new metric.
Google previously announced there would be scheduled AdWords maintenance on March 8th. We expect Google to put the system for delivering load time analysis in place across all AdWords accounts during this window.
Google also announced the expansion of their site exclusion tool for advertisers. Now called Site and Category Exclusion, it allows advertisers to block entire categories, instead of just individual websites. Inside Adwords gives a few pointers on how best to implement this new option.
“The change also brought a new name to the feature. Goodbye Site Exclusion tool, hello Site and Category Exclusion tool.”
Category Exclusion: Now Content Network advertisers can exclude huge swaths of sites that should not display their ads. This is yet another powerful way for advertisers to focus their ad efforts on sites that will convert.
The Inside AdWords blog said category exclusion can be used with any type of campaign running on the content network: keyword-targeted or placement-targeted.
Here are the Official Descriptions:
Here is how category exclusion works: when we use our contextual targeting technology to scan a page in the Google content network and determine relevant ads to show, we also check to see if the content on the page matches any of the topics or page types available for exclusion. If there is a match between a category you have excluded and the page’s classification, your ads would not show on that page. We classify pages dynamically, so even as the content of a page changes your ads should be prevented from showing for categories you have excluded.
Before using category exclusion, it is important to consider the following points:
All sites in the content network are already required to comply with Google’s AdSense policies. Several levels of review are in place to detect that pages in the network comply with these guidelines. However, some advertisers have requested the ability to avoid additional types of content that do not meet their advertising goals, and we have released category exclusion in order to provide this control.
Excluding a category could potentially block your ads from appearing on a number of relevant pages and severely impact your campaign performance. We recommend that you refer to the statistics provided in the Site and Category Exclusion tool before making any exclusion’s.
Now that they have the feature available, Google really hopes advertisers would not use it heavily. The blog post cited points where the company feels category exclusion will be overkill.
We do not think too many advertisers will buy these arguments, as category exclusion has been a hotly-requested feature. Advertisers who see category exclusion have too much of an impact on their campaigns will likely back off from it, anyway.
Category exclusion is our latest tool to give you increased control over your content network campaigns. If you are looking for additional insight and flexibility when advertising on the Google content network, we encourage you to check out CPC bidding for placement targeting and Placement Performance reports.
Right now the forums are digesting the information; there is little reaction beyond people asking for deeper clarification. Some people are suggesting finding a host as close to Google’s data center, so that load time is super quick -- but that might be pushing it.
Watch the hosting space, companies may be marketing higher Google AdWords quality scores guarantees with their hosting agreements.
|
