Last night, Google AdWords announced that the quality score now incorporates how fast your pages load. We have been hearing about this since early March and have even offered up advice on how to test your page load times. In early May, Google began displaying the page load time score in your keyword analysis portion of the AdWords console. Here is a screen capture of that.
So we know that Google is tracking Page Load times. But is it live yet? I personally looked through several of my client campaigns and did not notice any poor landing page load time scores. A WebmasterWorld thread has one PPC company manager who said of all his accounts he manages, not one was hit by a poor quality score due to page load time. The news is very early out the gates, so it still may not have kicked in fully. But I have not heard any complaints from any advertiser on the topic of having a poor page load time score - yet. If things change, I will let you know.
To be frank, I believe you need a really slow site to be impacted by the page load time factor. So all this commotion on it, may not be fully warranted.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.
