Google penalises advertisers for slow ads

As part of its effort to improve user experience when looking at a site displaying ads, Google will now take loading time into account when calculating the ‘Quality Score’ of an ad on its AdWords program.

Google believes that a user’s experience of a website is adversely affected if a page loads too slowly - to the extent that a user may even leave before the page loads.

In an attempt to reduce loading times Google will now score ads based on how quickly they load, and take this into account in the overall Quality Score.

A slow ad will now earn an advertiser less money than a faster one - an incentive that Google hopes advertisers will take into account when creating their ads.

When the new scheme is introduced, advertisers will have one month’s notice to improve performance before their scores start to drop.

Ads can be affected by a number of reasons, including slow servers, multiple page redirects, and interstitials - an advertisement (often a pop-up) which loads between two content pages.

Hopefully this might mark the end for some of those annoying pop-ups.

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