Interesting announcement on the Google Adwords blog about a forthcoming enhancement to Quality Score: Google will soon take landing page load time into account when assessing the quality of a page.
On the face of it, this is fair enough - slow load time contributes to a pretty poor user experience. And this is not a new discovery - here is Jakob Nielsen talking about 'The Need for Speed' way back in 1997:
"Every Web usability study I have conducted since 1994 has shown the same thing: users beg us to speed up page downloads. In the beginning, my reaction was along the lines of "let's just give them better design and they will be happy to wait for it". I have since become a reformed sinner since even my skull is not thick enough to withstand consistent user pleas year after year."
But - now that over 90% of the UK's internet connections are broadband - isn't Google fighting yesterday's battle here?
Well access speeds are certainly speeding up - but so is our appetite for richer content. For instance, YouTube is now experimenting with higher resolution videos - better for the user, but yet another drain on bandwidth.
And ironically one of the biggest drags on page load time seems to be the ability of adservers to deliver banner ads onto pages. In fact Google singles out interstitial ads as a particular problem in its blog.
So there's a cynical argument that if you choose to cram your landing page with banner advertising, Google will charge you more for traffic to that page.
But I'd turn it the other way round - Google is incentivizing you to create relevant landing pages that load quickly. By all means put richer content like video onto landing pages (and we've had some great results by doing just that) - but make sure the video is user-initiated rather than adding to the initial page load time.
Why have all those banner ads that take too long to load, when you could just have Adwords?